The Most Tragic Jewish Writer of Modern Times

This essay is the sixth in a series by Hillel Halkin on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first five dealt with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, and Peretz Smolenskin, the poet Yehudah Leib Gordon, and the essayist and Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am.

A man sits writing in his diary in the German city of Breslau—today, Polish Wrocław—in the summer of 1903. His name is Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. Although he is writing in German, he is one of the best-known, and certainly the most controversial, of the Hebrew authors of his day. It is the end of July and he is summarizing the month’s events in the kind of personal shorthand, fully understandable only to themselves, that diarists use. He writes:

A grave and difficult question: should the baby be made to join the Covenant of Israel? It should never have happened but it did. There are historic forces to which individuals are subject. And still it shouldn’t have happened.