Hillel Zeitlin

Hillel Zeitlin (* 1872 in Korme, Mogilev Governorate, Russia, † 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto ) was a Hebrew and Yiddish writer and publicist, and religious thinker.

Life

He came from a very Hasidic family of scholars, received a thorough education in Tanach, Talmud and neuhebräischer literature and studied science subjects. He was for many years in several places children teachers, dealt mainly with philosophy and first with particular Spinoza before the recent British philosopher Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill, as well as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche turned to.

During this phase of life - now he had moved to Homel - he began to loosen his religious ties, and approached the secularism. The political Zionism he thought was a wrong track and was a follower of practical territorialism, for whom he campaigned both writing. From 1902 to 1905 he was resident in Ruslawl in the government of Smolensk and was actively involved in the publication of various Hebrew periodicals.

From 1906 he lived in Vilna and was a member of the Yiddish folk. 1906 to 1907 he edited in Warsaw, the Jewish people sheet, but also worked on Haint and other Jewish magazines and anthologies. Since 1910 he was editor and publisher of the authoritative Yiddish daily newspaper moment, but also committed elsewhere, eg, by participating in one of the first Yiddish encyclopedic dictionaries, which finally appeared in 1917 in Warsaw.

After the First World War, he turned back to the ancestral religion was orthodox and observant, but remained intellectually independent and thoroughly original, unconventional in his thinking.

At the age of 71 years he was killed by Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto, as he held a copy of the Zohar in his hands, wrapped in a tallit and tefillin with scale. Most of his family was also killed, but his son Aaron survived.

His sons, Aaron Zeitlin (1898-1973) and Elchonon Zeitlin (1920-1942) were just as he Yiddish authors.

Works (selection)

• HaTov we- hara ( " Good and Evil" ), 1898 ( about optimism and pessimism )
• Monograph on Spinoza, 1900
• Monograph on Nietzsche, c.1901
• Writings, 1910
• Dus problem fun Gits un Schlecht ba un jiden other peoples, Warsaw 1911
• Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, Warsaw 1911
• The Old Vine, 1912
• About R. Schneur Zalman of Ladi, 1912
• Chassidoth, 1922
• Wu is living un sings in me, nd

Literature (selection )

• Travel, leksikon, Vilnius 1926 ff
• Joseph Lin, articles Hillel Zeitlin, in: Jewish Encyclopedia, Berlin 1927, Vol IV / 2