MORTKHE-ARON GINTSBURG (MORDECHAI AHARON GINZBURG, GÜENZBURG) (December 3, 1795-November 5, 1846)
He
was born in Salant (Salantai), Kovno region, Lithuania. His father, Yehuda-Asher (1765-1823), was one
of the first followers of the Jewish Enlightenment in Russia, the author of
Hebrew writings on grammar and algebra, all of which came into his son’s possession,
and all of it burned up during the great fire in Palanga, Lithuania, in
1831. He was able to save only ten of
his father’s letters for his collection Devir (Sanctuary), part two. He attended religious primary school, and at
age seven he began to study Gemara, later studying the Mishna and commentators,
but at the same time he was studying Hebrew and Tanakh. By chance at age thirteen he gained access to
a series of historical volumes in Hebrew, such as: Tsemaḥ david (The sprout
of David) by David Gans, Shaarit yisrael (The remnant of Israel [second part of the
Yosippon]), and the like, which aroused in him both
an interest in history and the desire to write.
His first written efforts were in the literary vein of that era: flowery,
inflated, and contrived. His father showed
him the importance of simplicity and naturalness in writing. There were two books which left an impression
of the young Gintsburg: the philosophical Sefer habrit (The book
of the covenant) by Pinḥas-Eliyahu Horovitz; and Moses Mendelssohn’s Phädon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Phädon or the immortality of the Soul) in its Hebrew
translation. He was given in marriage at
age fifteen, and went to live with his in-laws in Shavel (Šiauliai),
Lithuania. This unduly early marriage of
such a weak, immature lad with a physically more developed woman became a
source of pain and suffering for Gintsburg for quite some period of time. In his well-known autobiographical book, Aviezer,
he described with courageous, merciless realism this life drama of his. He gave his own life as an example in
opposition to the ancient Jewish marriage custom of marrying off young
children—fragments of Aviezer in Yiddish translation can be found in Zalmen
Reyzen’s Fun mendelson biz mendele (From Mendelssohn to Mendele), with
translation by E. Y. Goldshmidt, and in an article by Dr. Menakhem Glen
concerning Gintsburg in the collection Lite (Lithuania), vol.
1. After his marriage, Gintsburg
continued studying Gemara. For a certain
period of time, he even devoted himself to Kabbala. He did not, however, give up on the Jewish
Enlightenment. He read the works of the
Mendelssohn school in Hebrew, and this strengthened in him an interest in
literature generally. An influence on
his intellectual growth was exerted in those years by an old doctor he
befriended in Shavel. Through him
Gintsburg acquired a mastery of German, read a great deal, and sought to expand
his education. In 1816 he completed his
time with his in-laws’ support and had to find a means of support for his
family. He moved to Palanga where he
took up teaching elementary school and also worked as a translator of various legal
papers into German. Yet, all of this was
still not enough to feed his family, and he was forced to set out “across the
world” in search of sustenance. He was
in Vienna (Austria), Memel [Klaipėda]
(Lithuania), Libave [Liepāja]
(Courland), and other cities. He tried
his hand at teaching, with giving lesson in German, and even for a time with
running a tavern. Thus, in poverty and
hardship, he was looking mainly in Courland for a position get his life in
order, but without luck. In 1829 for the
first time he settled, “for good,” in Vilna where he initially lived by giving
private lessons in Hebrew and German, and later with the poet Shloyme-Zalmen
Zalkind, he opened a school for children.
In the 1830s, as his literary activities branched out, his name was more
widely known, and his books found a market, his material conditions improved,
and he was able calmly to proceed with his writing and with community
activities.
He began to write in the 1820s. His first major work was an early Hebrew
translation of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Die Entdeckung von Amerika (The discovery of America), under the title
Gelot haarets haḥadasha al yede
kristof kolombus (The discovery of
the new land by Christopher Columbus) (Vilna, 1823), 212 pp.; a second edition,
entitled Maase khristof kolumbus, o gelot haarets haḥadasha (The story of Christopher
Columbus, or the discovery of the new land) (Warsaw, 1894), 144 pp. The publication of his first book involved
such expenses that placed the author back into real poverty. Inasmuch as there were no Jewish publishing
houses at that time in Vilna, he had to buy his own type for the book, and
after printing it had to sell it for a pittance. One year later, in 1824, perhaps so as to right
the sad fate of the Hebrew book, he published the same work in a Yiddish
translation, Di entdekung fun amerike (The discovery of America). Although his name was not directly stated on
the title page, the authenticity of the writer was sufficiently clear from the
subsequent text on the same page: “In three parts from the Hebrew translator in
Vilna, [in Polish:] Missionary Publishers, in the year 1824.” On the back side of the title page, the ban
is noted which R. Abraham Avli decreed on all Jewish publishers not to reissue
this book without the author’s permission.
The book was published in old Yiddish typeface. In the “Foreword” to the book, we read: “I
have rewritten this translation of The Discovery of [America]
from my Hebrew translation into a pure, simple Yiddish, without the hodge-podge
[mish mash] of Hebrew, Aramaic, Polish, Russian, [and] Turkish words
that one finds all mixed together in the Yiddish language. I hope that those who have no facility to use
the lovely Hebrew translation will be sure to purchase this volume and will
find it more useful and more easily accessible than the outrageous, legendary
stories of One Thousand and One Nights.”
This “Foreword” also included a discussion of “Geography to help
understand the country, a map which I have placed at the end,” which ends with
the words: “These are the first principles of geography: He who has the desire
can with one globe of the world see and correctly locate it, and this surely
makes it more useful and pleasurable than all the silly stories that one
reads—Vilna, Marḥeshvan, 1824.” The
first part of the Yiddish translation contains 80 pp., the second part 67 pp.,
and the third 48 pp. Ignoring the
translationese in his language and in the sentence structure in numerous
places, the translation is an excellent job.
The manner in which he recounts things is simple and reads even today
with a certain suspense. In 1889 a
Warsaw book dealer by the name of Shmuel-Ayzik Peshes published a booklet
entitled Maase kolombus o gelot haarets haḥadasha al yede kristof kolumbus
(The story of Columbus, or the discovery of the new land by Christopher
Columbus), “this work is published in all languages, and in the south they have
also translated it into archaic Yiddish, so that people who know no other
languages may understand it.” This short
book, as it is, later (1893) was republished by a book dealer in Bialystok,
Moyshe Ari Glik. The later reprinting
was a plagiarism of Gintsburg’s book, which coarsened it with boorish and neglectful
language and style; it can serve as a measure of the decline that the Yiddish
book market went through for sixty-five years from Gintsburg’s edition in
Vilna. For a long period of time in our
literature, people confused Gintsburg’s Di entdekung fun amerike with a
second description of Columbus in Yiddish that Khayim-Khaykl Hurvits published
in 1817 in Berdichev: Tsofnes paneyekh [the name Pharoah gave to
Joseph].
Di entdekung fun amerike was
Gintsburg’s only book in Yiddish. His
other works were all written in Hebrew.
In 1835 he translated from German portions of Karl Heinrich Ludwig
Pölitz’s Handbuch der weltgeschichte (Handbook of world history), and
it was published as Toldot bene ha-adam (History of mankind). In the same year he published Kiryat sefer, mikhtavim melukatim al tohorat
leshon hakodesh (Republic of
letters, letters compiled in the purity of the language of holiness), a
letter-writing manual, together with several articles. In 1837 he brought out Sefer hamalakhut al
kayus kaligula hakesar hashlishi leromim (Delegation to Gaius Caligula,
third emperor of the Romans), a translation from the German of a work by Philo
of Alexandria who sent this to Roman Caesar, Gaius Caligula. In 1839 he wrote Itote rusya (Russian
times), a history of Russia; in 1842, Hatsarfatim berusya (Frenchmen in
Russia), a history Napoleon’s march into Russia in 1812 (the second part of his
book, entitled Pi haḥerut
[Voices of freedom], concerning the history of the Napoleonic Wars of
1813-1815, appeared in 1845); in 1844 his book Devir was published, a
collection of letters and articles, in part translated from German. He wrote much more which was not published
during his lifetime. Years later,
fifteen or twenty years after his death, his brother brought out some of this,
such as: Ḥamat
dameshek (The wrath of Damascus) in 1860, the history of the 1840 blood
libel case in Damascus; Yeme hador (Days of the generation) in 1860, the
latest history of Europe; part two of Devir (1862), a book of immense
biographical and cultural historical interest; Aviezer (1864), the
autobiographical work mentioned above; Tikun lavan haarami (Righting
Lavan the Aramaean) (1864), a description of a play by a troupe of comedians. All of these books were published in Vilna.
His writings had an impact on Jewish
intellectuals in Vilna, more than anything in awakening in them an interest in
history and in worldly knowledge in general.
His special service on behalf of Hebrew literature, though, consisted in
his helping clean up the Hebrew language of exaggerated, tasteless, florid
prose. He fought for simplicity and
naturalness in the literary Hebrew language, and he himself offered an example
of writing fluidly, with logic and clarity, a fine prose without rhetoric and
without randomly repeated verses from the Bible. He belonged to the moderate wing of Enlightenment
intellectuals then, while in his personal life observing the commandments of
religious Judaism, but at the same time he highly valued freedom of thought and
study, even in the field of faith. In
this he was linked to those in the radical Enlightenment wing, as he, just like
them, believed in the need to abolish the distinctive, old-fashioned clothing
of the Jewish masses at that time. When
Max Lilienthal in the early 1940s during his well-known fund-raising tour (to
create Nikolaevsky schools for children) across the Jewish towns in the Pale of
Settlement in Russia, he released in Vilna his appeal, “Magid yeshuo” (Herald
of salvation), Gintsburg—under the pen name “Yona ben Amitai”—issued an
opposing brochure, Magid emet (Herald of truth) (Leipzig, 1943), which
boldly made a great tumult in Enlightenment intellectual circles. He was a central figure in the Jerusalem of
Lithuania [as Vilna was known] at that time.
He was highly respected and had numerous admirers and friend. His death was a great blow for the followers
of the Jewish Enlightenment and provoked a profound sadness even in those
circles which were far from the Enlightenment.
The Vilna city preacher, R. Velvele said, in his eulogy at the funeral,
that the Enlightenment followers became a powerful force of agitation and
embitterment and decided to separate from the general community and found their
own synagogue for themselves, the famed Vilna “Taharat hakodesh” reform
synagogue. Gintsburg’s death summoned
practically an entire literature of eulogies and poems of lamentation. The best known of them were: A. B. Lebensohn,
Kinat soferim (Lamentation for writers) and Kol bokhim (Voice of
the crying) which was included in the eulogy of Wolf Tugendhold (translated
from German), together with poems by Kalmen Shulman, laments from Mikhl
Lebensohn, Zev Kaplan, Mikhl Gordon, and Shloyme-Zalmen Zalkind (Vilna, 1946).
Yitskhok Kharlash
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