Mordecai Aaron Günzburg | |
---|---|
Native name | מֹרְדְּכַי אַהֲרֹן גִינְצְבּוּרְג |
Born | Salant, Russian Empire | 3 December 1795
Died | 5 November 1846 Vilna, Russian Empire | (aged 50)
Pen name | Yonah ben Amitai |
Language | Hebrew, Yiddish |
Literary movement | Haskalah |
Notable works | Devir (1844) Aviezer (1863) |
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]
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 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 , and Michel Gordon , [11] among others, published eulogies in his memory. [6]
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 '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 . [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]
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link)This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rosenthal, Herman; Seligsohn, M. (1904). "Günzburg, Mordecai Aaron ben Judah Asher". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. pp. 112–113.
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