Search

[German Version] (Yidisher Visenshaflikher Institut), the most important scholarly institution for the study of Eastern European Judaism and Yiddish culture (Judaism: II; III). The institute, founded in Berlin in August of 1925, established its headquarters in Vilna (then in Poland), with branches in Berlin, Warsaw, New York (headquarters since 1940), and later Buenos Aires. One of the major tasks of the institute has been to provide an academic home for Yiddish as a scholarly language and to cent…

[German Version] (May 2, 1860, Budapest – Jul 3, 1904, Edlach, Lower Austria). The writer, journalist, and founder of modern political Zionism Theodor Herzl was the son of an assimilated Jewish family and grew up in Budapest. He began studying law in Vienna in 1878, became editor of the feature section of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung in 1887, and correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse in Paris in 1891. The anti-Semitic environment in Vienna caused him to doubt his initial ideal of assimilation and to abandon his plan for a mass baptism of Viennese Jews. In his autobiographical drama Das neue…

[German Version] (Judah Leib; 1821, Tomaszów Lubelski, Poland – 1891, Odessa), physician and most important pioneer of political Zionism (II). Pinsker initially joined the Jewish assimilation movement in Russia and worked on the weekly Rassvyet. The anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in 1881 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II reinforced his growing doubts about assimilation. In 1882 he wrote Autoemancipation (ET: Self-emancipation, 1891), which identified anti-Semitism as a “socio-pathological phenomenon” of the peoples among whom Jews lived. Jew…

[German Version] (Südfeld; Jul 28, 1849, Pest, now part of Budapest – Jan 22, 1923, Paris), writer, physician, and Zionist politician (Zionism). Nordau grew up in Pest as the son of a rabbi, but as a young man initially turned away from Jewish culture in favor of German culture. His early change of name, from Süd-feld (southfield) to Nord-au (north meadow), doubtless had programmatic significance. After studying medicine, and working as a journalist in Pest, he moved to Paris in 1876. His literary…

[German Version] (Yom Tov Lippmann Tsunts; Aug 10, 1794, Detmold – Mar 18, 1886, Berlin), father of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. His Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur (1818) was the first attempt to sketch the tasks of a modern science of Judaism. Zunz was a co-founder of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (1819) and editor of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1823). He also served briefly as a preacher at liberal synagogues in Berlin ¶ (1821/1822) and Prague (1835/1836); later he served as director of a Jewish teachers’ seminary in Be…

[German Version] (Nov 27, 1874, Motal, Belarus – Nov 9, 1952, Rehovot, Israel), first president of the state of Israel. After being raised traditionally in Belarus and studying in Darmstadt, Berlin, and Fribourg, Weitzman began his academic career as a chemist at the University of Geneva and after 1905 at Manchester, where he made a name for himself during World War I with inventions that aided the war effort. At the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, he was a co-founder of the Democratic Faction and…

[German Version] (Achad Ha'am, “one of the people”; Aug 18, 1856, Skvira, Ukraine – Jan 2, 1927, Tel Aviv), Zionist philosopher and publicist. After studying philosophy in Berlin, Vienna and Brussels, he returned to Odessa in 1885 and, in the Hovevei Zion movement, began actively to advocate Zionism and the Hebrew language; he founded the magazine Hashiloach in 1896. His “cultural Zionism” aspired to a Jewish homeland in Palestine primarily as a spiritual center for a Jewish people threatened by assimilation. Ginsberg had a critical attitude toward t…

[German Version] (Scientific Investigation of Judaism), an expression denoting research into Jewish history and culture. The expression appears for the first time in the second decade of the 19th century. The publication Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur [“Something about Rabbinic Literature” ] (1818), by L. Zunz is considered its founding document. In 1819 a group of Jewish students at the University of Berlin formed the “Jews’ Cultural and Academic Association” [“Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden”], which in 1823 published the short-lived Zeitschrift für die W…

[German Version] (Jun 21, 1812, Bonn – Apr 6, 1875, Paris), a socialist and Zionist thinker. After a strict religious upbringing, the young Hess turned to the ¶ philosophy of B. Spinoza, G.W.F. Hegel, and L. Feuerbach and studied at the University of Bonn from 1837 to 1839. His philosophical pamphlet Die Heilige Geschichte der Menschheit. Von einem Jünger Spinozas [ET: The Holy History of Mankind, 2004] documents his shift to socialism on the background of a messianically transfigured Judaism. During the 1840s Hess was one of the pioneers of Communism togethe…

[German Version] is a term first used in 1879, in the context of the hostile expression anti-Semitism (VI). In the following year, H. v. Treitschke spoke of the “blind philosemitic zeal of the Progress Party.” The term was used first in anti-Semitic parlance, but later also by social democrats, as a polemical expression against left-wing political liberalism. It describes a particular attitude of non-Jews toward Jews, as a rule in a positive sense, but it can also be interpreted in a negative sens…

[German Version] I. Up to the Founding of the State of Israel Zionism is the political movement which, from the late 19th century onward, aimed to enable the Jews to return to “Zion” (Mount Zion in Jerusalem being the symbol of Palestine or the Land of Israel) with a view to establishing their own state. For many centuries, the Jews dispersed throughout the entire world expressed their longing to return to the Land of Israel in the form of prayers, poems, or philosophical tractates. However, such hopes were…