Hillel Zeitlin

Hillel Zeitlin (Tsaytlin) was a unique philosophical and religious thinker who shaped Eastern Europe’s secular-national Hebraist and Yiddishist world with his writings on Spinoza and Nietzsche. He himself embraced an Orthodox Jewish religiosity informed by mysticism and his own idiosyncratic version of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism. Born in Korma (now in Belarus) and raised as a Lubavitcher Hasid, Zeitlin was drawn early to European literature and thought, and in particular to the German philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Living in Gomel, he befriended and influenced young Hebrew writers like Yosef Haim Brenner and Gershom Shofman, and he wrote in Hebrew about Spinoza, Nietzsche, and ethics. Briefly but seriously active in Zionism, he shifted to territorialism after the sharp 1903 split within organized Zionism over the idea of pursuing mass Jewish settlement in British-dominated Uganda or Kenya instead of Palestine. Moving to Vilna and then Warsaw in 1905 and 1906, Zeitlin wrote for both the Hebrew and Yiddish secular-national press on a wide range of cultural and political questions while continuing to engage in philosophical writing that revealed an urge to discover religious and transcendent meaning. In the years before World War I and throughout the interwar period, he turned much of his energy to kabbalah and Hasidic thought, became personally intensely religious (even keeping a diary of his mystical dreams and visions), and tried to work out a program of Jewish renewal through a fusion of Hasidic, mystical, and Spinozistic and Nietzschean philosophy. Zeitlin was killed by the Nazis. One of his sons, Arn (Aaron), was a Yiddish poet and playwright, and another son was the Yiddish writer and cultural activist Elchonen, who left an essential memoir about Warsaw Jewish literary life.