Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil by Rebecca Margolis

In 1894 he began to publish his influential but short-lived Hebrew periodical Mi-Mizraḥ u-mi-Ma’arav (Vienna), which was devoted to the modernization and Europeanization of Hebrew literature. He collaborated with writer Nathan Birnbaum in Zionist activity.

In 1891 Brainin and his family left Russia for Vienna, where he studied at the university and the Jewish theological seminary. At the end of 1888 Brainin moved to St Petersburg for four months to become the literary editor of Ha-Meliẓ. That year he married Masha Amsterdam, the daughter of a Vitsyebsk (Belarus) rabbi. To advance this purpose and popularize the Zionist ideal, he founded the Clear Language Society in 1888.

He was a vigorous spokesman for the revival of Hebrew as the national language of the Jewish people and urged that it be used as a vernacular.

In 1887 he settled in Moscow and joined the influential student society Sons of Zion. Under the impact of the pogroms of 1881, he committed himself to the early Zionist movement Love of Zion. There, he mastered German and French.īrainin debuted as a Hebrew writer in 1880 in Ha-Meliẓ (St Petersburg), the chief Hebrew tribune of the Haskalah in Russia. In 1879 he moved to Smolensk, Russia, outside the Pale of Settlement, and for the first time came in close contact with non-Jewish Russian society. Influenced by a love of nature and productive labour, Brainin left home for Horki (Belarus) later that year to study at its agricultural school but was refused admission owing to antisemitism. In 1878, at age 16, Brainin taught himself Russian and began to read secular literature in that language, which was considered an act of rebellion by those around him. He did so in secret since these subjects were considered a heretical deviation from the traditional Jewish religious curriculum. His inquisitive intellect led him to investigate medieval Jewish philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and Hebrew secular literature of the Jewish Enlightenment, known as Haskalah. Raised in czarist Russia’s Pale of Settlement (the western region in which Jews were permitted to reside), Reuben was a child prodigy who was immersed in traditional biblical and Talmudic studies. Brainin, Reuben (sometimes written as Reuven, Reuben Ben-Mordecai, or Ruvn Braynin), journalist, author, translator, editor, and Zionist thinker and activist b. March 1862, probably on the 15th ( n.s.), in Lyady (Belarus), son of Mordecai Brainin and Kheshe Rakhlin m. 1888 Masha Amsterdam in Moscow, and they had two daughters and four sons, two of whom died in infancy d. 30 Nov.

Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil by Rebecca Margolis