Emmanuil Borisovich Levin

Emmanuil Borisovich Levin was a writer and public intellectual on Jewish political affairs in the tsarist empire. A proponent of secular education, Levin wrote a Russian grammar textbook for Jewish schools in the 1840s and taught in a Talmud Torah in his native Minsk as well as in the state-run rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir. He moved to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, where he became closely associated with the Gintsburg family of Russian Jewish financiers and communal activists. Levin was the first secretary of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia. With the support of Baron Goratsii Gintsburg, Levin published (sometimes anonymously) memoranda and other documents concerning the legal position of the Jews in Russia, their struggle for rights, and their collective plight in the effort to ensure legal emancipation.