Noah Pryłucki

Born in Berdichev in the Russian Empire (today Berdychiv in Ukraine) to Tsvi Pryłucki (Prilutski), a successful merchant, Noah Pryłucki (Noyekh Prilutski) had already begun to publish essays in Jewish periodicals in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian by the time he started law school at the University of Warsaw (1902). Expelled for political activity, Pryłucki finished his degree at the University of St. Petersburg. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Pryłucki became an outspoken Yiddishist, arguing—most famously at the 1908 Czernowitz conference for the Yiddish language—that the Jews of Eastern Europe should consider Yiddish their national language. Emerging as one of the first serious and demanding theater critics in Yiddish, he also began to pursue his lifelong passion: researching and popularizing Yiddish philology, folk culture, and Yiddish-language creativity of all sorts. He also became one of the principal ideologues and leaders of Folkism, a political movement that called for recognition of Jews as a diasporic nation and maximal Jewish national rights in Eastern Europe. During and immediately after World War I, Pryłucki and his Folks-Partey emerged as significant voices in the politics of the Jewish minority within the new Polish republic, but the party’s significance declined sharply by the mid-1920s. Thereafter, Pryłucki shifted his focus back to scholarship on the Yiddish language, serving in the philology department of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO) in Poland, helping to pioneer the study of the Yiddish language’s distinct dialects, and serving as editor for the journal Yidish far ale (Yiddish for Everyone). He was murdered by the Nazis in 1941.