Chaim Schitlowsky

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Chaim Schitlowsky
Abraham Travel ; Itzhok Lejb Perez ; Shalom Ash ; Chaim Zhitlovsky and Hirsch David Nomberg in 1908 during the Chernivtsi Conference (from left)

Chaim Zhitlowsky ( Yiddish חיים זשיטלאווסקי; Russian Хаим Осипович Житловский / Chaim Ossipowitsch Schitlowski ; also: Chaim Zhitlowsky , Chaim Schitlowski or Chaim Shitlowskij * 19th April 1865 in Uschatschy, Vitebsk , Russian Empire ; † 6. May 1943 in Calgary , Canada ) was a Yiddish writer, a leading figure in Yiddishism and the Jewish labor movement, a Jewish national socialist theorist and agitator and "one of the most important translators into the Yiddish language". ( Heine , Nietzsches Zarathustra , Herwegh ) He was also one of the co-founders of the Social Revolutionary Party of Russia and an independent philosopher in the context of Neo-Kantianism .

Life

The father, Joseph Schitlowsky, an Orthodox Jew , joined Hasidism under the influence of his father-in-law and was at the same time a successful businessman who, as a flax buyer, took advantage of the incipient industrialization and the associated opportunities for Jews. Chaim Schitlowsky first attended the high school in Vitebsk and became there through the influence of a classmate, the later socialist politician Chaim Ratner, a socialist and assimilated into Russian culture. He Russified his name to Jefim Ossipowitsch and began to study philosophical literature, Heinrich Heine , Ludwig Börne and Russian radical literature with his friend Shlomo An-ski . After he was not admitted to the exams for the Quarta, he went to Tula with An-ski at the beginning of 1882 without finishing school . There they lived with a cousin An-skis and Schitlowsky immersed himself in reading revolutionary Russian magazines. He read Pyotr Lavrov , Ferdinand Lassalle and Karl Marx . In the summer of 1883 his mother visited him, with whom he returned to Uschatschy. There, in the traditional Jewish environment, he read the Hebrew newspapers Ha-Melitz and Ha-Zefira and was interested in the Palestinophile movement of the Biluim .

1884 appeared in the January issue of the Russian magazine Otetschestwennye Sapiski (Patriotic Annals) a parable by Mikhail Saltykow-Shchedrin under the title "The old wolf". Schitlowsky related this to Judaism and was badly hit. In the parable, which interpreters generally assume that tsarism is meant, it is shown that it is impossible for the "wolf", who can only eat meat, to change his life, and therefore ultimately his killing by the peasants must agree. Schitlowsky, however, believed that it meant the Jews. In view of the severe pogroms taking place in Russia and Ukraine this year, this led Shitlovsky to permanently turn to a national Jewish stance: We are wolves? All mine around me are wolves? ... We are human beings and we will build our human life, and as long as you Russians live as one people, we also want to live as one people, and especially in this country! Russia belongs to us just like you!

In 1885 Schitlowsky tried to found a Jewish section of the Narodnaja Wolja under the name Teschuath Israel (Salvation of Israel). The Central Committee of Narodnaya Volia rejected this, as Schitlowsky said, because of the influence of the assimilatory Jewish members represented there.

After a stay in Saint Petersburg , where he studied Jewish history in self-study at the imperial library , he published his first book, Thoughts on the Historical Fate of Judaism, in Russian in 1887 . Jewish critics, especially Simon Dubnow , sharply criticized it as "anti-Jewish" because of the negative portrayal of contemporary Jews in Russia . The book was well received by the Russian opposition. Schitlowsky returned to Vitebsk disappointed.

Because of his impending arrest in 1888, Schitlowsky fled from Vitebsk to Berlin , where he married Vera (von) Lochow, his non-Jewish revolutionary colleague from Vitebsk. In the autumn, however, he was expelled from Prussia due to the socialist laws. The couple went to Switzerland, where they studied philosophy and economics with Ludwig Stein in Zurich and Bern . In 1892 he completed his studies with a dissertation on Abraham ibn Daud and the beginning of the Aristotelian phase of the Jewish religious philosophy and the doctorate to Dr. phil. from. His wife Vera, who made a living, ran a lunch menu for Russian students. The couple had six children.

In 1897 Schitlowsky took part in the first Zionist congress in Basel. He was against the establishment of a Zionist party and instead suggested a “league” as a looser connection that supporters of various political currents could join. On the evening after the congress he gave a speech to the student club Tsaitgaist (Zeitgeist), in which he vehemently advocated Yiddish and against Hebrew as the language of the Zionist movement.

In the years 1899 to 1903 he took part in the revisionism controversy in the German social democracy . As early as 1895 he had published a philosophical criticism of Hegelian dialectics and Marxism in the Wiener Deutschen Wortern by the Austrian social democrat Engelbert Pernerstorfer . This work was also published in abridged and pointed form in the Socialist monthly issue. In 1899, in the run-up to the Brno party congress of Austrian social democracy, also by Pernerstorfer, his treatise Socialism and the question of nationalities , in which he fundamentally developed his position on the “national question”. In 1899 he participated in the socialist monthly issue of the polemics between Georgi Walentinowitsch Plechanow and Eduard Bernstein on the question of philosophical materialism.

In 1903 he separated from his family, took part in the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam as a delegate of the Party of Russian Social Revolutionaries in 1904 and went to the USA with Yekaterina Konstantinovna Brezhko-Brezhkovskaya , "the grandmother of the Russian Revolution", to collect donations for to gather the new party. On their journey through the country they were greeted with particular enthusiasm by the Russian-Jewish anarchists, among others. a. by Emma Goldmann , who, however, rejected his national Jewish ideas. Schitlowsky translated the speeches of the Brezhkovskaya to Jewish workers into Yiddish, and he also gave lectures on Judaism, Marxism and ethical socialism. Within a few months he was one of the best-known and most talked about figures on the radical left spectrum of the Jewish labor movement in New York.

Under the impression of the Kishinev pogroms and in protest against the legalistic stance of the Zionist groups in Russia, including the worker Zionists, socialist-minded Zionists around Moshe Silberfarb, Nachman Syrkin and Schmuel Niger founded the Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance) group, which represented positions similar to Schitlowsky. Up to now, Schitlowsky, like the General Jewish Workers' Union, had advocated pure personal autonomy for the Jews, that is, the Jews should enjoy cultural autonomy as persons wherever they lived. Collection in a specific territory was not intended. In the face of the Kishinev pogroms, Schitlowsky changed his mind and became a territorialist , that is, he now advocated the collective settlement of Jews in a certain place - not necessarily Palestine - for reasons of necessary self-defense. The Vozrozhdenie group, which Schitlowsky joined, took the position that the personal autonomy of the Jews could only be a first step towards gathering the strengths to gain a country of their own. For this reason, the Jews in the countries in which they lived should choose their own chamber (“Sejm”). This differentiated Vozrozhdenie from the Zionists, who were not interested in politics in Russia, Romania, etc., but wanted to concentrate all their energy on immigration and construction in Palestine. Vozrozhdenie was involved in the Jewish self-protection against pogroms, called for union strikes and fought against tsarism. The aim was not only to improve the living conditions of the Jews, but also to strengthen Jewish self-confidence and to create the conditions for national renewal and a later territory. Vozrozhdenie called for a "fighting national party" which - unlike the Zionists - should take part in the liberation struggle of the peoples of Russia against tsarism. From this group emerged in April 1906 the Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (SERP also called "Semists"). Schitlowsky himself was in the USA at the time.

After the October Manifesto in 1907, Schitlowsky returned to Russia via Finland and published his ideas of a synthesis of socialism, nationalism, Jewish autonomism and territorialism in various papers (including Dos Folk , the weekly newspaper of the socialist-territorialists he edited) .

In 1908 he was one of the initiators of the Jewish language conference in Chernivtsi . Together with Nathan Birnbaum he invited to this conference. Birnbaum was elected president of the conference, Schitlowsky and the poet Jizchok Leib Perez became vice-presidents. Schitlowsky chaired most of the sessions of the conference and was a dominant influence.

In the same year he emigrated to the USA, where he became a leader of the Jewish labor movement and founded the monthly Dos naje Leben in New York in 1908 , which lasted until 1913. He campaigned for the World Jewish Congress and led his party and the other Jewish socialist groups with the exception of the Social Democratic League into the working-class Zionist party Poalei Zion . Since 1913 he developed an extensive travel activity and traveled to various countries in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Palestine. There young activists blew up his lectures because he propagated the Yiddish instead of the Hebrew language.

In 1910, his two-volume history of philosophy was published in New York under the title The Philosophy, What It Is and How It Has Developed . It has significance beyond its philosophical content, as Schitlowsky developed a Yiddish terminology in it to deal with these topics. As a popular science author he wrote a. a. about Einstein's theory of relativity . He earned his living as a journalist for the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Tog . His collected writings were published in ten volumes in New York between 1912 and 1919.

Chaim Schitlowsky died in 1943 while on a lecture tour in Canada.

Works (selection)

  • Thoughts on the Historical Fate of the Jews , 1887 (in Russian)
  • The dream fun a single goer , London 1891
  • Socialism and struggles for political freedom , 1898
  • The Jewish people and the Jewish language , 1903
  • Socialism and the National Question , 1907 (in Yiddish)
  • Philosophy, what it is and how it has developed , New York 1910, 2 volumes, in Yiddish, 2nd ed. 1920
  • Economic materialism and the national question . In: Archives for the history of resistance and work , Vol. 19 (2011), pp. 61–80 (in German)
  • Nationalism and class politics of the proletariat . In: Archives for the history of resistance and work , Vol. 19 (2011), pp. 81–112 (in German)
  • Gezamelte Schriften ( Collected Writings ), New York 1912–1919, 10 volumes (in Yiddish). In it [title in German translation]:
    • I. 1. Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Karl Marx. 2. About Andreev's Anatema
    • II. 1. Lectures on natural-philosophical materialism. 2. On the future of the peoples of America
    • III. 1. The program and objectives of the monthly “Dos naje Leben”. 2. Historical connections of ideas. 3. The philosophy of history and the ultimate goal. 4. Moses Hess , the socialist, the philosopher, the Jew. 5. Dr. Max Nordau and Political Zionism
    • IV. 1. Nationality and progress. 2. Jewish great minds. 3. Bundism, Zionism, Territorialism, Socialism. 4. The Jewish Language Movement and the Chernivtsi Conference. 5. Yiddish and Hebrew. 6. Religion and Nation. 7. Death and rebirth of gods and religions. 8. The national poetic rebirth of the Jewish religion
    • V. 1. The struggle for people and language. 2. From foreign languages
    • VI. 1. Economic materialism and the national question. 2. Nationalism and the class politics of the proletariat. 3. The Bitter Truth [about anti-Semitism]
    • VII. 1. The moral philosophy and the ultimate goal. 2. Materialism and dialectical logic. 3. The Stuttgart Congress [International Socialist Congress]. 4. Mr. [sic] Dubnow's “spiritual” materialism
    • VIII. In difficult times [article on World War I]
    • IX. and X. 1. Articles of Time. 2. The spiritual struggle of the Jewish people. 3. The rise of Marxism

Literature (selection)

  • Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky (18965-1943) and his confrontations with Marxism , in: “ Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement ”, Issue I / 2015.
  • Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky: philosopher, social revolutionary and theorist of a secular national Jewish identity , Wehrhahn Verlag, Hanover 2012
  • Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Between personal autonomy and Zion. The 'national question' in the Jewish-Russian labor movement at the beginning of the 20th century . In: Archive for the history of resistance and work , Vol. 19 (2011), pp. 13–60
  • Yelizaveta Ivanova Zhirkova, article Zhitlowsky, Chaim . In: The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia , 2009 (Vol. 10, p. 641)
  • Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Jewish nationality from refused assimilation. Biographical parallels with Moses Hess and Chajm Zhitlowsky and their ideological processing . In: Trumah . Journal of the University for Jewish Studies Heidelberg , Volume 17, 2007, pp. 91–116
  • Article Schitlowski, Chaim . In: Salomon Wininger : Große Jüdische National-Biographie , Vol. V, Czernowitz 1931, pp. 426–427
  • Moses Waldmann: Schitlowsky, Chaim . In: Jüdisches Lexikon , Berlin 1927, Vol. IV / 2, Col. 216–217

Individual evidence

  1. Miriam Weinstein: Yiddish - A language travels around the world , Kindler, Berlin, 2003, p. 192
  2. Moses Waldmann: Schitlowsky, Chaim , article in: Jüdisches Lexikon , Berlin 1927, Vol. IV / 2, Col. 216-217
  3. Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky: philosopher, social revolutionary and theorist of a secular national Jewish identity Wehrhahn, Hannover 2012, p. 162ff.
  4. Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky: philosopher, social revolutionary and theorist of a secular national Jewish identity Wehrhahn, Hannover 2012, p. 245ff.
  5. name = "Schweigmann-Greve Chaim Zhitlowsky, p. 58 ff."
  6. ^ Name = Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky, p. 61
  7. name = Chaim Zhitlowsky: Memories Vol. 3, p. 50 (Yiddish), quoted from Schweigmann-Greve: Zhitlowsky, p. 69.
  8. Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky, p. 89ff
  9. Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky, p. 88
  10. See Zhitlowsky as a Marxist: Kay Schweigmann-Greve: Chaim Zhitlowsky (18965-1943) and his confrontations with Marxism , in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue I / 2015.
  11. Chaim Zhitlowsky: Contributions to the History of Marxism Part I (On the Scientific Quality of Scientific Socialism) . In: German words, 1895, pp. 193-211 and contributions to the history of Marxism Part II (The logic of contradiction in Hegel and Marx) . In: German Words, 1896, pp. 337–372
  12. Chaim Zhitlowsky: The so-called crisis within Marxism , Socialist monthly books, Berlin, 1900, pp. 465-470 and Chaim Zhitlowsky: Die historiosophische Endzeitphilosophie , Socialist monthly books , Berlin, 1901, pp. 19-26 and 191-196
  13. Chaim Zhitlowsky: Socialism and the question of nationalities , German words, Vienna, 1899, pp. 305–343
  14. Chaim Zhitlowsky: The polemic Plechanow versus Stern and Conrad Schmidt . In: “Sozialistische Monatshefte”, Berlin, 1899, pp. 277–283 and 322–330
  15. Tony Michels: A Fire in Their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York , Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 136 ff
  16. Jonathan Frankel: Prophecy and Politics. Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1862-1917 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 279 ff
  17. Emanuel Goldsmith: Modern Yiddish Culture. The Story of the Yiddish Language Movement , pp. 183-221
  18. Roland Gruschka: Tuvia Schalit's 'Di spetsyele relativitets-teorye' of 1927 and other introductions to the Theory of Relativity in Yiddish , Science in Context, 20 (2007), pp. 317-338, doi : 10.1017 / S0269889707001287 ; here p. 323f, 328, 333ff.
  19. A first formulation of the program of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, published under the pseudonym Grigorowitsch
  20. Series of articles in Fraind , under the pseudonym G. Gaidarow

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