Bertold Feiwel

Born in Pohrlitz, Austria-Hungary (today Pohořelice, Czech Republic), Berthold Feiwel was raised in a German-speaking Austrian Jewish family. While studying at universities in Zurich and Vienna (1893–1897), Feiwel, who became a disciple of Theodore Herzl, was an organizer of the First Zionist World Congress and editor of the newly reconstituted Zionist movement’s German-language newspaper Die Welt. At the turn of the century, Feiwel was one of a circle of young intellectuals within the Zionist movement who criticized Herzl’s narrowly political-diplomatic focus and his avoidance of larger cultural questions for fear of angering Orthodox supporters. Instead, Feiwel and others like Martin Buber in this “Democratic Fraction” called for an expansive Zionist program of national cultural revival, meaning both large-scale institutional support for Jewish national creativity in arts and letters and a programmatic effort to instill a Jewish national identity and culture in assimilated Western Jews. With Martin Buber, Feiwel cofounded a publishing house, the Jüdischer Verlag, which focused on furthering these ends by familiarizing assimilated German Jews with modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature and with East European Jewish life and culture more generally. Feiwel focused his own work as a writer and editor on the same goals—perhaps most notably in his German translations of Morris Rosenfeld’s Yiddish poems, Lieder des Ghetto (1902, 1920), illustrated by Ephraim Moses Lilien. After World War I, he worked for Keren Hayesod and the Jewish Colonial Trust, settling in Jerusalem in 1933.