BENYOMEN-VOLF
ZEGEL (BINJAMIN W. SEGEL) (1866-March 31, 1931)
He was born in the village of
Lopushnia, near Rohatyn, eastern Galicia, into a family of Jewish land
owners. He studied in the Berzhaner
Synagogue and with the rabbinical judge in Stryj. In 1892 he moved to Lemberg, and he went on
to study philosophy, natural science, literature, and art history at the
Universities of Lemberg and Berlin. From
his early years he was consumed with collecting Jewish folksongs, sayings, and
folktales. He began his writing activities
with stories that he published in Folks-fraynd
(Friend of the people) in Kolomaye (1890), and thereafter, in addition to
stories, he published bibliographic notes and articles on the Jewish folksong,
biographies of famed writers, and the like in: Literarishe togblat (Literary daily newspaper), Drohobitsher tsaytung (Drohobycz
newspaper) (1906), and Der tog (The
day)—in Cracow; A. Kleynman’s Kalendarn
(Calendars) in Lemberg; and Avrom Reyzen’s Eyropeishe
literatur (European literature); as well as in Hatsofe (The spectator) in Warsaw and other Hebrew
periodicals. He later wrote primarily in
German and Polish, publishing a great deal on ethnography and folklore in the
journals: Am Urquell (At the source)
(1889-1891), Globus (1891-1892), Wisła, miesięcznik
geograficzno-etnograficzny (Vistula, geographic-ethnographic monthly)
(1894), Archives Israélites, and
others. Among other materials, he also
published numerous Jewish tales, collected from the mouths of the people, tales
about the blood accusation (the last of these was included in a book by
Professor Hermann Strack, Der
Blutaberglaube bei Christen und Juden [The blood superstition among
Christians and Jews], 1891). Of his more
important works, we should note a Polish study on “The materials for
ethnography of eastern Galician Jewry” which includes a large collection of
sixty Jewish folktales, songs, remedies and cures, sayings, and the like. He participated closely with Ignatz Berstein
work, Yudishe shprikhverter un redensarten (Jewish sayings and
proverbs) (Warsaw, 1908), for which he assembled and revised the portion
dealing with Galicia. He also contributed
to Noyekh Prilucki’s folkloric publications in Warsaw. He was for many years (1895-1907) a
contributor to: Israelita in Warsaw,
in which he published treatises on general Jewish and specifically Talmudic
sayings with notes appended to the texts; to Ost und West (East and West) in Berlin; and to Wiener Morgenzeitung (Vienna morning newspaper), in which he
published series of Jewish folktales with historical and philological notes,
editorials, as well as monographs and obituaries for Yiddish and Hebrew writers
and scholars. He was the author of a
number of books in German: Der Wald:
Schauspiel in vier Aufzügen (The woods, a drama in four acts) (Berlin,
1914), 112 pp.; Morija und Golgotha
(Moriya and Golgotha), a polemical pamphlet (Berlin, 1915), 24 pp.; Der Weltkrieg und das Schicksal des
jüdischen Volkes (The world war and the fate of the Jewish people)
(Berlin, 1915), 144 pp.; Die polnische
Judenfrage (The Polish Jewish question) (Berlin, 1916), 160 pp.; Rumänien und seine Juden (Romania and
its Jews) (Berlin, 1918), 2 vols.; a novel about “Judgment Day” (1920); Philosophie des Pogroms (Philosophy of
the pogrom) (Berlin, 1923), 55 pp.; Bolschewismus
und Judentum (Bolshevism and Judaism) (Berlin, 1923), 84 pp. Segel was considered the person responsible
for uncovering the forgery of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. He discovered
that the author of the Protocols was
a Russian anti-Semite named Sergei Nilus and that the Protocols appeared first in Russian (Paris, 1903-1905) and were
later translated into other languages.
He clarified all this in his book: Die
Protokolle der weisen von Zion kritisch beleuchtet (Critique of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion) (Berlin, 1924), 233 pp.
He also contributed to the liberal German press with articles opposing
anti-Semitism. He translated into German
a number of works from Hebrew and Yiddish literature. He wrote under such pen names as: Bar-Ami, B.
Sifra, Lektor, B. Mirsh, A. Ben-Ezra, B. Volf, Dr. S. Shiffer, B. Rohatyn, and
others. Until 1930 he lived in Berlin,
thereafter settling in Częstochowa. He died
in Bad Piestany.
Sources:
Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1; S.
Wininger, Grosse Jüdische National
Biographie (Great Jewish national biography), vol. 5, p. 491; Gershon
Bader, Medina veḥakhameha (The state and its sages)
(New York, 1934), p. 95; Z. Shazar, Or
ishim (Light of personalities)
(Tel Aviv, 1955), pp. 172-80.
Khayim Leyb Fuks
No comments:
Post a Comment