Elhanan Leib Levinsky

Born in Podberez’ye, Russian Empire (today Paberžė, Lithuania) into a religious family, Elhanan Leib Levinsky was attracted to the Haskalah while studying in heder. After yeshiva, he taught Hebrew in various Jewish communities in what is now Belarus. Following the 1881 pogroms, he moved to Palestine for a few months before returning to the Russian Empire as an organizer for Ḥibat Tsiyon. Living in Odessa, he published widely in East European Hebrew and Yiddish journals, sometimes under pseudonyms such as Reb Korev (A Distant Relative) and Darshan Zaken (An Old Preacher); and though he had once criticized the growth of Yiddish literature on Hebraist grounds, he came to be an editor of the Odessa Yiddish daily Gut morgen. His Masa le-erets Yisra’el bi-shnat 5800 (A Trip to the Land of Israel in 2040), published in the Odessa Hebraist journal Pardes, describes a journey through a modern, utopian Jewish state.