Mordecai Aaron Günzburg (Hebrew: מֹרְדְּכַי אַהֲרֹן גִינְצְבּוּרְג, romanized:Mordekhai Aharon Gintsburg; 3 December 1795 – 5 November 1846), also known by the acronym Remag (רמא״ג) and the pen name Yonah ben Amitai (יוֹנָה בֶּן־אֲמִתַּי), was a Lithuanian Jewish writer, translator, and educator. He was a leading member of the Haskalah in Vilna,[1][2] and is regarded as the "Father of Hebrew Prose."[3][4]
Mordecai Aaron Günzburg
Native name
מֹרְדְּכַי אַהֲרֹן גִינְצְבּוּרְג
Born
(1795-12-03)3 December 1795 Salant, Russian Empire
Died
5 November 1846(1846-11-05) (aged50) Vilna, Russian Empire
Günzburg was born into a prominent Jewish family in Salant (now Salantai, Lithuania) in 1795.[5] His father Yehuda Asher (1765–1823), under whom he studied Hebrew and Talmud, was one of the early members of the Haskalah in Russia,[6] and wrote treatises on mathematics and Hebrew grammar.[7] Günzburg was engaged at the age of twelve, and married two years later, whereupon he went to live with his in-laws at Shavly.[8] He continued his studies under his father-in-law until 1816.[9] From there Günzburg went to Polangen and Mitau, Courland, where he taught Hebrew and translated legal papers into German. He did not stay in Courland long, and after a period of wandering settled in Vilna in 1835.[10]
In 1841, he founded with Shlomo Salkind (d. 1868) the first secular Jewish school in Lithuania, which he headed until his death in 1846 at the age of fifty-one.[7][10]A. B. Lebensohn, Wolf Tugendhold[Wikidata], and Michel Gordon[Wikidata],[11] among others, published eulogies in his memory.[6]
Work
Günzburg was best known for his series of histories of contemporary Europe.[12][13] His first major publication was Sefer gelot ha-aretz (1823), an adaption into Hebrew of Joachim Heinrich Campe's Die Entdeckung von Amerika,[14] a Yiddish translation of which he released the following year as Di entdekung fun Amerike.[6] In 1835, he published the first volume of his universal history Toldot bnei ha-adam, adapted from Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz[de]'s Handbuch der weltgeschichte.[15] (A few chapters of the second volume would later be published in the Leket Amarim, a supplement to Ha-Melitz, in 1889.) In the same genre he wrote Ittote Russiya (1839), a history of Russia, and Ha-Tzarfatim be-Russiya (1842) and Pi ha-ḥerut (1844), accounts of the Napoleonic Wars.[16]
Among his other publications were Malakhut Filon ha-Yehudi (1836), an translation from German of Philo's embassy to Caligula, and the anthology Devir (1844), an eclectic collection of letters, tales, and sketches.[17] Many of Günzburg's works were published posthumously, most notably his autobiography Aviezer (1863, composed between 1828 and 1845),[18][12] as well as Ḥamat Dammeshek (1860), a history of the Damascus affair of 1840, and the satirical poem Tikkun Lavan ha-Arami (1864).[19][7]
Günzburg's outlook was influenced by Moses Mendelssohn's Phaedon and the Sefer ha-Berit of Phinehas Elijah ben Meïr[he].[13] He struggled energetically against Kabbalah and superstition as the sources of the Ḥasidic movement, but he was at the same time opposed to the free thought and proto-Reform movements.[20]
Selected publications
Title page of Aviezer (1863)
Sefer gelot ha-aretz ha-ḥadashah al yede Kristof Kolumbus [Discovery of the New Land by Christopher Columbus] (in Hebrew). Vilna: Missionarrow. 1823. Later published as Masa Kolumbus, o, gelot ha-aretz ha-ḥadashah [Columbus' Voyage; or, Discovery of the New Land].
Di entdekung fun Amerike [The Discovery of America] (in Yiddish). Vilna: Rom. 1824.
Toldot bnei ha-adam [History of Mankind] (in Hebrew). Vol.1. Vilna: Defus Binyamin ben David Ari' Segal. 1832.
Kiryat sefer [Republic of Letters] (in Hebrew). Vilna: Defus Binyamin ben David Ari' Segal. 1835. hdl:2027/nnc1.cu58931899. A letter-writing manual.
Malakhut Filon ha-Yehudi [Delegation of Philo Judaeus] (in Hebrew). Vilna: Defus Avraham Yitsḥak bar Shalom. 1836.
Ittote Russiya [Chronicles of Russia] (in Hebrew). Warsaw: Defus Menaḥem Man ve-Simḥah Zimel. 1839. A history of Russia.
Leil shimmurim [Watch-night] (in Hebrew). Warsaw: Defus Yosef Unterhendler. 1883.
References
This articleincorporates text from a publication now in the public domain:Rosenthal, Herman; Seligsohn, M. (1904). "Günzburg, Mordecai Aaron ben Judah Asher". In Singer, Isidore; etal. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol.6. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. pp.112–113.
Ginsburg, Saul M. (1939). "Max Lilienthal's Activities in Russia; New Documents". Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (35): 44–50. JSTOR43058467.
Rhine, Abraham Benedict (1910). Leon Gordon: An Appreciation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. p.37.
Landman, Isaac, ed. (1969). "Günzberg, Mordecai Aaron". The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol.5. New York: KTAV Publishing House. p.133.
Friedlander, Yehuda (2008). "Gintsburg, Mordekhai Aharon". In Hundert, Gershon (ed.). YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Translated by Hann, Rami. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Galron-Goldschläger, Joseph, ed. (2019). "M. A. Güntzburg". Lexicon of Modern Hebrew Literature (in Hebrew). Ohio State University. Retrieved 5 April 2021.
Landman, Isaac, ed. (1943). "Gordon, Michel". The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol.5. New York: The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Inc. p.65.
Mintz, Alan (1979). "Guenzburg, Lilienblum, and the Shape of Haskalah Autobiography". AJS Review. 4: 71–110. doi:10.1017/S0364009400000428. JSTOR1486300.
Bartal, Israel (1990). "Mordechai Aaron Günzburg: A Lithuanian Maskil Faces Modernity". In Malino, Frances; Sorkin, David (eds.). From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870. Translated by Greenwood, N.; Schramm, L. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. pp.126–147. ISBN9780814327159.
Shavit, Zohar (Spring 1992). "Literary Interference between German and Jewish-Hebrew Children's Literature during the Enlightenment: The Case of Campe". Poetics Today. 13 (1): 41–61. doi:10.2307/1772788. JSTOR1772788.
Greenbaum, Avraham (Spring 1993). "The Beginnings of Jewish Historiography in Russia". Jewish History. 7 (1): 99–105. doi:10.1007/BF01674497. JSTOR20101146. S2CID159491930.
Banbaji, Amir (2012). "Two Paradigms of Aesthetics in Haskalah Literary Criticism: From Satanov to Lebensohn". Hebrew Studies. 53: 170–171. doi:10.1353/hbr.2012.0010. JSTOR23344445. S2CID170772448.
Pelli, Moshe (May 1990). "The Literary Genre of the Autobiography in Hebrew Enlightenment Literature: Mordechai Ginzburg's 'Aviezer'". Modern Judaism. 10 (2): 159–169. doi:10.1093/mj/10.2.159. JSTOR1396259.
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