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Shaul Ginsburg
1903
Der fraynd (The Friend) was the first Yiddish daily in the Russian Empire. Founded by Shaul Ginzburg in St. Petersburg in 1903, Der fraynd was for several years the only Yiddish daily permitted in the Russian Empire. Due to that fact and a rising hunger for news among modernizing Jewish readers, but also because of its serious journalism and essays about many aspects of Russian Jewish life and culture, its daily circulation reached ninety thousand copies. In the same period, it also became one of the most important vehicles for Yiddish literature, publishing works by Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Asch, and Avrom Reyzen. Der fraynd had a significant influence on public opinion and shaped the secular Jewish culture of its time. Generally sympathetic to Zionism but otherwise apolitical, the newspaper turned to overt criticism of the Russian Empire during the 1905 revolution and provided a space for serious confrontation with the terrible anti-Jewish violence unleashed by antirevolutionary forces in 1906; this political turn led to its temporary closure by the authorities in 1906. Although the 1905 revolution was suppressed, one of its few lasting gains was a loosening of regime restrictions on newspaper publishing, and consequently, new Yiddish dailies began to spring up in centers with far larger Jewish populations than St. Petersburg, particularly Warsaw. In this context, Der fraynd too moved to Warsaw but could not compete with the newer dailies Haynt (founded 1908) and Moment (founded 1910); Der fraynd folded in 1912.
Credits
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.
