KHAYIM-KHAYKL HURVITS

KHAYIM-KHAYKL HURVITS (1749-1822)

            He often signed his name Khaykl Halevi Hurvits.  He was born in Uman, Kiev district, Ukraine.  According to his family pedigree, which he compiled in 1814 for his nephew, R. Binyumin-Volf Halevi Hurvitz, the Hurvits family drew its lineage—on the patrilineal side—from a high-ranking military man, Don Binyumin Hurvitz, from Spain, and later from the Shelah Hakodesh, R. Yeshaya Hurvits; on his matrilineal side, he descended from R. Yosef Karo, the author of Shulḥan aruch (The set table), and later from the legendary R. Shoyel Vol (Saul Wahl), about whom it was recounted that he was king of Poland for one night (Hurvits himself categorically denied this legend).  Hurvits was an extremely rich timber merchant, managed large business concerns with Prussia, learned German on his own, became knowledgeable of German literature and the Berlin Enlightenment, and thus became a follower of the Jewish Enlightenment.  He was, however, not a bitter Enlightenment fighter, but remained a God-fearing Jew all of his days.  He was not beloved of the Jews of Uman, and despite the fact that he was a great philanthropist, people nonetheless were not fond of him, because he had his children—in accord with his views—educated in a secular style with languages, geography, natural science, and the like.  He was dubbed “Khakl the Heretic” in the city.  In 1817 Hurvits published a wide-ranging work with the title Tsofnes paneyekh (Revealer of secrets)—an adaptation of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika (The discovery of America)—which at first was extremely popular and then disappeared and was almost completely forgotten for a lengthy period of time.  Not only ordinary readers but writers, too, did not know that such a book had existed and was widely read.  The first to extract Hurvits’s life work from oblivion was A.-B. Gotlober in his “Zikhroynes iber yudishe shrayber” (Memoirs of a Jewish writer), which was published in Sholem-Aleykhem’s Yudishe folks-biblyotek (Jewish people’s library) in Kiev: 1 (1888), pp. 255-56.  Yet, just as Gotlober, writing entirely from memory, erred in the title of Hurvits’s book—he called it “Kolombus” (Columbus), as “Kolumbus” was the title of the first part of the book—this introduced to subsequent researchers in the field of Yiddish literature an error which gave rise to a considerable confusion.  As Professor Leo Weiner wrote in his book, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1899), p. 134, concerning Mortkhe-Aron Gintsburg’s translation of Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika (Vilna, 1924), it became mixed up with Hurvits’s “Kolumbus” because of Gotlober’s “Zikhroynes.”  This was snapped up in haste from Weiner, and with ever more errors in Dr. M. Pines in his Di geshikhte fun der yudishe literatur, bizn yor 1890 (The history of Yiddish literature, until 1890) (Warsaw, 1912), pp. 86-88.  Amid this confusion, Yisroel Tsinberg in Razsviet (Dawn) 7-9 (1912) and, above all, Nokhum Shtif in Der pinkes (The record), edited by Shmuel Niger (Vilna, 1913), pp. 338-40, demonstrated that Hurvits’s book was not titled “Kolumbus” as Gotlober had written, but Tsofnes paneyekh and as such was it registered in Ben-Yankev’s catalogue, Otsar hasefarim (Treasury of books): Tsofnes paneyekh, R. Khaykl Halevi Hurvits from Uman, a story of the discovery of America, three parts, Berdichev, 1817.  In 1932 YIVO in Vilna received as a gift two copies of Hurvits’s book which had been preserved by private individuals.  The text was then partially analyzed by Zalmen Reyzen, Dr. Yisroel Tsinberg, and other scholars of Yiddish literature and language.  The war interrupted this research work, and they were able to renew their work after which they hoped to find another specimen of this extraordinary rarity.  Meanwhile we have copies of the book as found in Yivo-bleter (Pages from YIVO) and Dr. Yisroel Tsinberg’s history of Yiddish literature.

            The work in question, Tsofnes paneyekh (Berdichev, 1817, with 364 bilingual pages in large format), was built around Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika and divided into three parts following Campe’s volumes—“Kolumbus,” “Kortes” (Cortéz), and “Pizaro” (Pizarro)—and fifty-two stories.  Hurvits’s book was not a translation of Campe’s but a reworking of it.  Hurvits first changed Campe’s dialogue format to a storytelling one, and second (and this is most important) he completely rejected the ethical, moralistic tone that took up much space in Campe’s work and thus generally change the style and basic tendency of Campe’s work.  Campe wrote in a dialogue style with children, striving to implant humanistic ideas in them, while Hurvits designed his book for an altogether different audience, aimed at bringing interesting and important information to people who knew nothing of the world around them.  In his introduction to his book, Hurvits wrote, among other things, that Gentile scholars had frequently scolded the author, for “such a fine people as you are, Jews, among whom many of your people can write and read; you should take up such an important subject as the discovery of America which none of you has as yet written about….  And, just as the Lord, blessed be He, has given me this gift, that I am able to read some few German books, I must have done with this disgrace of our people.”  Later in his introduction, Hurvits explains that he stopped with Campe’s three volumes, from which he “extracted the gist and rewrote it into pure Yiddish as a person speaks, so that everyone will understand.  I have given it the title Tsofnes paneyekh, because this bears the meaning of the hidden things that are revealed.”  Hurvits’s language is, in fact, such that anyone can understand it.  Just like the translation of Proverbs by Mendl Lefin (Tarnopol, 1814), Hurvits’s Tsofnes paneyekh may be considered an early masterwork of language and style in modern Yiddish literature.  Forty years later in Lemberg, a new publication entitled Tsofnes paneyekh appeared: “This is the book Kolumbus, the description of how Columbus discovered that great part of the world America and all the wonders that one saw there and all the remarkable things that happened to him” (Lemberg: H. Tsukerer, M. Poremba, 1857).  Aside from the title, this edition had no connection to the work of Hurvits.

            (Kahyim-Khaykl’s son Hirsh-Ber Hurvits, born in 1785 in Uman, died in 1861 in Cambridge, England, played a major role in the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Ukraine.  A man with considerable education, knowledgeable of many languages, and simultaneously the owner of a major banking house, in 1822 he founded in Uman the first Jewish children’s school according to “Mendelssohn’s system,” and translated into Hebrew the same book by Campe that he father had reworked in Yiddish.  He later went bankrupt, ran off to England, where he changed his name to Bernard Herman, devoted himself totally to scholarly work, and translated in 1832 into English a portion of the Rambam’s Yad haḥazaka [Strong hand] which made him a name among British scholars at Cambridge University where until his death he was professor of Oriental languages.)

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1 (with a bibliography); M. Unger, “Khaykl hurvits yikhes-briv” (Khaykl Hurvits’s pedigree), Filologishe shriftn fun yivo (Vilna) 3 (1929), pp. 83-88; Zalmen Reyzen, “Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher haskole-literatur” (On the history of the Jewish Enlightenment literature), Yivo-bleter (Vilna) 1.3 (1931), p. 203; Z. Reyzen, “Naye arbetn tsu der geshikhte fun der haskole-literatur” (New works on the history of the Jewish Enlightenment literature), Yivo-bleter 2. 4-5 (1931), pp. 375, 386; Z. Reyzen, “Kampes antdekung fun amerike in yidish” (Campe’s Entdeckung von Amerika in Yiddish), Yivo-bleter 5.1 (1933), pp. 29-40; N. Shtif, in Afn shprakhfront (Kiev) 2-3 (1932); Dr. Y. Tsinberg, Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn (The history of Jewish literature) (Vilna, 1936), vol. 7, paryt 2, pp. 267-75, 324-27; Ber Shlosberg, in Yivo-bleter 12.4-5 (1937), pp. 546-58; Kh. Liberman, “R. nakhmen brotslaver un di umaner maskilim” (R. Nakhmen of Bratslav and the followers of the Jewish Enlightenment in Uman), Yivo-bleter (New York 29.2 (1947), pp. 201-19.

Yitskhok Kharlash