Israel Zinberg

Israel Zinberg (also known as Srul, Izrail, Yisroel Tsinberg; born Sergei Lazarevich Tsinberg) (1872 or 1873 – 1938, 1939 or 1943) was a Russian-Jewish chemist and a historian of Jewish literature. His work is significant in the field of Yiddish literature and Jewish literary history.

Biography

Zinberg was born into a Hasidic family in Lanovka, near Kremenets. His father had become an ardent maskil. where he received a chemical engineering degree in 1895, and a doctorate from Basle University the same year.

While abroad he became interested in Marxism, but it lost its attraction for him before his return to Russia in 1897. His work is within the haskalah tradition or the Jewish enlightenment. He was a member of the St. Petersburg school of Jewish scholars along with Simon Dubnow. Zinberg worked within the framework of the Wissenschaft des Judentums even as he took a different approach to his engagement with the subject. Steven T. Katz in a 1977 review of History of Jewish Literature wrote that, "Israel Zinberg's History is the most complete and able treatment of its subject which exists... the work remains the best treatment of its subject."

Originally published in Russia in the Yiddish language as Geshikhte fun der Literaturbei Yidn, the work spans 12 volumes and different locations and historical time periods. You know that the old Petersburg occupied a special place in the history of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia ... The local community served as an important center which influenced ... the whole Russian Jewry. Alas, after the October upheaval, the cultural importance of the "Jewish Petersburg" fell very low. Nearly nothing remained of the old intelligentsia ... Here I am, once one of the "young blood", a radical", now "the last of the Mohicans" ... I now write about nothing but our past, the culture we inherited from our forefathers. Yet the hell of it is, my interest in public affairs hasn't died out completely. I feel sometimes like talking with live people, not just the old dust of generations past.

In 1936 regarding Dubnow to Opatoshu he wrote: Zinberg rejected the charges of anti-Soviet propaganda. He may have been arrested due to his independence, carrying on correspondence with friends abroad and publishing his work out of Vilna. Because he was greatly valued at the chemical plant as an "old specialist," he was kept on for six weeks after the arrest. On June 21, 1938 he was sentenced and sent to the Far East transit camp. believes he died around New Year's Eve or Day 1939 of a heart attack. Mark Wischnitzer believed he didn't die until 1943.

Publications (multiple volumes)