Subscription Notice

Shaul Ginsburg

1903

Page of printed Yiddish text, with one line of Russian text at the bottom of the page.

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

Subscription notice, originally published as advertisement in Der fraynd no. 1 (Jan. 14, 1903): p. 2.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

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Creator Bio

Shaul Ginsburg

1866–1940

Born in Minsk in the Russian Empire (today in Belarus) to an affluent, business-owning family, Shaul Ginsburg associated with maskilic circles and the fledgling Zionist movement and contributed to the journal Ha-Magid during his student years. After receiving a law degree from the University of St. Petersburg in 1892, he turned toward journalism. By 1897, he was editing several regular columns for Voskhod, the key organ of the politically liberal and culturally Russified but Jewishly involved segment of Russian Jewry. In 1903, Ginsburg founded Der fraynd, the first Yiddish-language daily newspaper in the Russian Empire; it circulated widely and significantly influenced Yiddish journalism throughout the region. After leaving the paper in 1908, he dedicated himself to producing scholarship on Russian Jewry, most notably writing about the forced conscription of Jewish children during the nineteenth century. Ginsburg taught at the Institute for Judaic Studies in St. Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution, but in 1930 he emigrated to New York City, where he continued his historical research.

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