Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865–1943)

Chaim Zhitlowsky was born to a Jewish family in a small town of Ushachy, Russia (present-day Belarus) and raised in nearby Vitebsk. He received a traditional religious education and also read Russian literature. At age 13. he became good friends with Shloyme Rappaport, later to become a famous author as S. Ansky. Zhitlowsky went to Tula in Central Russia, where he became involved in revolutionary circles. Back in Vitebsk, he became interested in a blend of Jewish national equality and social and political rights that became known as Diaspora Nationalism. In 1886, he began research in Jewish history at St. Petersburg and in 1887 published his first work, a controversial treatise in Russian entitled Thought of the Historical Fate of the Jewish Peoples. In 1888, he went to Berlin, and after being expelled, he went to Zurich. He received a doctoral degree from the University of Bern in 1892. He became the chief theoretician of the Diaspora Nationalism movement and of Yiddishism. In 1904, Dr. Zhitlowsky arrived in the USA for a lecture tour on behalf of his Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party and stirred Jewish immigrant masses with his oratory. In 1898. he joined the Jewish Socialist Bund and his essay "Zionism or Socialism," laid the groundwork for the party's program of Jewish national and cultural autonomy. In 1908, he moved permanently to New York City to continue his work organizing secular Yiddish education, and founded a publishing house that issued the magazine Dos Naye Lebn, which he edited. His two-volume work, Di Filosofye, Vos Zi Iz un Vi Zi Hot Zikh Antvikelt (The Development of Philosophy, 1910), an outgrowth of his lectures to American and Canadian audiences, was the first serious history of philosophy written in Yiddish. In 1914, Dr. Zhitlowsky visited the British Mandate of Palestine, became interested in Labor Zionism, and wrote about it. Back in New York, he joined the staff of the Yiddish daily Der Tog (The Day) and supported the founding of the American Jewish Congress. He translated Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra into Yiddish in 1919 and wrote scholarly essays on Kant and Einstein. From 1936 until his death, Dr. Zhitlowsky, who had been a bitter enemy of Marxism and Bolshevism, was aligned with pro-Soviet groups active in the Jewish community, shocked by the rising danger of Nazism.