Abstract

Hillel Zeitlin was a noted journalist, poet, liturgist, publicist, neo-Hasidic historian and phenomenologist of the Jewish religious experience. This study deals with his early years in his White Russian birthplace, his itinerancy in the Pale of Settlement in the 1890's, his entry into Hebrew belles-lettres at the turn of the century, and his subsequent participation in the Hebrew and Yiddish press. ;We examine not only Zeitlin's intellectual biography, but three specific areas of interest during this developmental period: theodicy, the history of Hasidic doctrine and the phenomenology of Jewish religious experience. Theodicy is the subject of his first published work, a compendium HaTov VehaRa {Good and Evil, 1898}. This work was followed by monographs on Spinoza and Neitzsche in 1900 and 1905, respectively. ;Zeitlin's move to Vilna in 1904, via Homel and Roslavl, provided him with his first journalistic platform in Ben-Zion Katz's Hebrew daily HaZeman. During this period Zeitlin was an advocate of Israel Zangwill's territorialism, a product of a schism within the World Zionist Organization over the Uganda proposal of 1903. These events were played out on the background of antisemitic pogroms in 1903, and in the wake of the aborted Russian Revolution of 1905. Zeitlin emerged as a staunch critic of Jewish participation in revolutionary movements, a characteristic of his thought throughout his journalistic career. In Vilna Zeitlin debuted as a Yiddish writer. ;In 1907 Zeitlin moved to Warsaw, where he participated in the founding of two major Yiddish dailies, the Haynt and Der Moment. He would remain in Warsaw till his murder at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. In Warsaw Zeitlin embarked on his exploration into his life-long interest in Hasidic doctrine. In 1910 he published monographs on Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov, and Rabbi Nahman of Brazlav. In the same year Zeitlin published a lengthy prose poem, Zimaon {Thirst}, that articulated an agenda for religious search that would prompt an unfinished phenomenology of Jewish religious experience, B'hevyon HaNeshama {In the Hiding Place of the Soul, 1913}, and a dream diary depicting his spiritual transformation during the First World War, Al Gvul Shnei Olamot {On the Border of Two Worlds, 1919}. . . . UMI