Letter to Zalman Shneour: On Children’s Education

Born in Odessa to a traditional family, Yehoshu‘a Ḥana Ravnitski (Ravnitsky) became a leading figure of cultural Zionism and Hebraism in the Russian Empire and left a substantial impress on modern Hebrew culture and, in the 1890s, Yiddish culture. After studying at heder and yeshiva, Ravnitski became a fixture in Odessa’s Jewish-national cultural milieu from 1888 to 1921; he was very close with the great Zionist-Hebraist figures Ahad Ha-Am and Chaim Nahman Bialik, whose ideals he embraced. As founding editor of the literary journal Pardes, Ravnitski facilitated Bialik’s poetic debut in 1892. Unlike some Zionist Hebraists in that milieu, like the literary critic Joseph Klausner, Ravnitski saw Yiddish not as a hated competitor to Hebrew but as an essential—if perhaps temporary—vehicle of the Jewish national revival Zionism sought. Thus, in the late 1880s and 1890s he played a central role in creating and editing some of the first stable venues for serious Yiddish literature, most notably Der yud (1899–1902), which published some of the most significant works of Y. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem (with the latter of whom he was close). But the revival of Hebrew culture was Ravnitski’s enduring passion, and in addition to his extensive work as an editor, he cofounded and ran a number of the most important Hebraist publishing houses in the Russian Empire and later Berlin and Tel Aviv, including ‘Olam Katan (1894), Moriah (with Bialik, Simḥa Ben-Tsiyon, and Elhanan Leib Levinsky, 1901), Turgeman (1911), and, again with Bialik, Devir (1919). Ravnitski was also coeditor with Bialik of the famous Sefer ha-agadah (The Book of Legends, 1908–1911), which drew Jewish narrative texts and legends out of their context in rabbinic literature to present them as pieces of a classical national literature.