Simḥa Ben-Tsiyon

Born Simḥa Alter Gutman in Teleneshty, Bessarabia (today Telensti, Moldova), Simḥa Ben-Tsiyon received a traditional heder education supplemented with some maskilic texts. In the late 1890s, embracing the Zionist and Hebraist ideas of Jewish cultural revival associated with Ahad Ha-am, he became an innovative teacher of Hebrew and began a literary career. Moving to Odessa in 1899 to teach in one of the first modern Zionist-Hebraist schools, he became a pioneer of the ‘Ivrit be-‘ivrit (Hebrew in Hebrew) teaching pedagogy, which he disseminated in his Ben-ami textbooks. With Elhanan Leib Levinsky, Chaim Nahman Bialik, and Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski, he also cofounded the Moriah publishing house, which became the flagship publishing house for modern Hebraist educational materials and essential works of the new Hebrew culture in the years that followed. In 1905, he moved with his family to Palestine with the intention of guiding the development of the new Hebrew culture there toward Ahad Ha-am’s vision of the Yishuv as a “spiritual center” for Jewish-Hebraic national revival. Working as a teacher and writer, he also founded the Hebrew journal Ha-omer and the monthly for young people Moledet (Motherland) in 1911. His son, Naḥum Gutman, was a renowned Tel Aviv artist and writer.