Arabic-Yiddish Teacher: A Guide for the Jewish Legionnaires in the Land of Zion

Born in Riteve in the Russian Empire (today Rietavas, Lithuania) to a traditional family, Getsl (George) Zelikovitch (Selikovitch) became known as a Talmud prodigy in his town; but he also learned German and Russian from his mother, who ran a leather shop. He abandoned his rabbinic path in 1875 and traveled to North Africa, where he learned Arabic and Sephardic Hebrew before moving to Paris in 1879. While working as a Hebrew tutor, Zelikovitch began studying ancient languages at the Sorbonne, eventually earning his doctorate in philology with a focus on Egyptian. In Paris, Zelikovitch contributed essays and feuilletons to the Hebrew Ha-Magid and Ha-Melits, the Yiddish and French Univers Israélite, and the Arabic daily al-Ahram. In 1884 he worked as a translator for a British military expedition to Sudan, from which he sent Hebrew articles to Jewish newspapers in Europe. Zelikovitch immigrated to the United States in 1887, settling at first in Philadelphia and then New York. In addition to his Egyptology research, he was a founder of the Yiddish press in America; he was a regular contributor to several newspapers—notably the daily Yidishes togblat, which he coedited (1901–1915)—and a host of Hebrew journals, sometimes under pen names. He edited a number of Hebrew and Yiddish literary collections, contributed to the English Jewish Encyclopedia and Julius (Judah David) Eisenstein’s Hebrew Otsar Yisra’el, and translated many texts, such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Sanskrit Tripitaka, and the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh. The book featured here was a primer on Arabic for Yiddish speakers; intended, it would seem from the subtitle, primarily for Jews serving in the Zionist Jewish Legion established within the British expeditionary army by Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky among others, it also announces its use for Jewish colonists, merchants, and tourists in Palestine.