Papers of Nokhem Shtif

Nokhem Shtif was born in Rovno, Volhynia (today Rivne, Ukraine) on 29 (old calendar: 17) November 1879 to a prosperous family. Until the age of his bar mitzvah he learned privately with various melamdim (Jewish religious school teachers). He later attended a real-gymnasium (university preparatory secondary school) and the Kiev Polytechnic University, where he was enrolled between 1899 and 1903, while still continuing to study religious and modern Hebrew literature.

Following the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Shtif became an ardent Zionist. In 1902 he helped establish the radical student Zionist organization Molodoy Izrail (Young Israel) in Kiev, and took part in the Minsk Conference of Russian Zionists. In his first article, which he wrote in Russian and presented at meetings in Kiev and Warsaw in 1902 (but did not succeed in publishing), Shtif "pioneered an ideological concept later employed by the Zionist Socialist Party: emigration and colonization as a means of creating a Jewish proletariat, which, according to Shtif, could not exist in the repressive environment of Russia" (Estraikh).

After the Kishinev pogrom in spring 1903, Shtif played a leading role in a Jewish self-defense effort in Kiev. In the fall, he, Ben-Adir, and Vladimir Fabrikant were among the co-founders of the Jewish socialist group Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance). That November Shtif was arrested for his political activities and imprisoned for several months, during which time he was expelled from the Kiev Polytechnic University.

From late 1904 until early 1906, Shtif lived in Switzerland, mostly in Bern, where he organized a local Vozrozhdenie group and agitated against the Bund. In April 1906, with other activists from Vozrozhdenie, he founded the Jewish Socialist Labor Party in Kiev. Its members, also known as Sejmists, sought Jewish national autonomy in Russia. In 1906-1907, he was active in the Sejmist party in Kiev, Vilna, Vitebsk, and Simferopol.

In summer 1907 Shtif married Devoyre (Deborah) Zilberfarb, of Rovno (sister of Moyshe Zilberfarb, another co-founder of Vozrozhdenie). The couple settled initially in Vilna. They had two daughters, Esther, born in fall 1910, and Ida, born in spring 1914.

In fall 1907 Shtif moved to St. Petersburg, where he published articles on literary criticism and politics in Russian and Yiddish periodicals. He participated in the Jewish Literary Society, as well the Hevrah Mefitsei Haskalah (Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia), and became a committed Yiddishist. In 1909 he took a position in the emigration department of the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA). The same year he began studies at the Demidov Law Lyceum in Yaroslavl (Galicia); he completed a dissertation on criminal rights according to the Torah of Moses and the Talmud, and received his diploma in 1914.

In fall 1910, Shtif moved back to Rovno, where he worked at a Jewish bank and contributed to various periodicals, usually under the pseudonym "Bal-Dimyen" (Dreamer). In March 1914 he moved to Vilna, where for approximately six months he was an editor for modern Yiddish literature at the Kletzkin publishing house, until the outbreak of the First World War brought the firm's work to a halt. In 1915 he served as a co-editor, with Shmuel Niger and Zelig Kalmanovitch, of the short-lived Vilna periodical Di vokh (The Week).

From August 1915 through 1918, Shtif lived in St. Petersburg, working for the Jewish aid organization YEKOPO (Evreiskii Komitet Pomoshchi Zhertvam Voiny; Jewish Committee to Aid Victims of the War), and editing its journal. He was again active in Hevrah Mefitsei Haskalah, mainly in the school committee, and helped to institute Yiddish as the language of instruction in Jewish schools. In 1917, after the February Revolution, Shtif, along with Joseph Tshernikhov, Israel Efroykin, and others, was a co-founder of the revived Folkspartey (People's Party).

In 1918, Shtif moved to Kiev, where he was active in YEKOPO and also devoted himself to journalism. His writings at this time, including the pamphlet Yidn un yidish, oder ver zaynen "yidishistn" un vos viln zey? (Jews and Yiddish, or Who Are the "Yiddishists" and What Do They Want?; 1919) "concerned the Jews’ future in the postwar world, which Shtif envisioned as a brotherhood of nations that included Jews as an autonomous national collective with a highly developed Yiddish culture" (Estraikh). Following the wave of pogroms in Ukraine in 1918-1919, Shtif assisted in efforts to aid victims and worked together with Elias Tcherikower and others in the Editorial Committee (redaktyons-kolegye) for the collection and publication of documents on the pogroms.

When the Bolsheviks occupied Kiev in October 1920, Shtif moved to Minsk, where, for some months, he and Zelig Kalmanovitch gave lectures on Yiddish in Jewish teachers' courses. After that, he spent nearly a year in Kovno (Kaunas), a stronghold of the Folkspartey, where, with other Russian Yiddish writers, including Kalmanovitch, Dovid Bergelson, Ben-Adir, and Der Nister, he contributed to the daily Nayes (News), edited by A. Mukdoni.

In March 1922, Shtif settled in Berlin, where he immersed himself in researching Yiddish language and literature, especially Old Yiddish literature, a research interest he had first pursued in the collections of the Asiatic Museum in St. Petersburg in 1908, and later in archives in Kiev, in 1919-1920. His pamphlet Humanizm in der elterer yidisher literatur (Humanism in Old Yiddish Literature) was published in Kiev in 1920 and reprinted in Berlin in 1922. His book on the pogroms in Ukraine was also published in Berlin, both in Russian (Pogromy na Ukraine), in 1922, and in Yiddish (Pogromen in Ukraine), in 1923.

Shtif played a key role in the founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or YIVO), in 1925. In October 1924, he wrote and circulated a memorandum entitled, "Vegn a yidishn akademishn institut" (About a Yiddish Academic Institute), in which he argued that the creation of an academic institute was the next logical step in the growth of Yiddish culture, and outlined a general structure similar to that eventually adopted by YIVO, with four scholarly sections (for philology, Jewish history, social and economic issues, and pedagogy), a library, and a bibliographic center, for collecting and documenting Yiddish publications. The strongest support for Shtif's plan came from Yiddish cultural leaders in Vilna, including Max Weinreich and Zalman Reisen. On 24 March 1925, a meeting held jointly by the Central Education Committee (Tsentrale Bildungs Komitet, or TSBK), the Vilna branch of the Central Yiddish School Organization (Yidishe Shul Organizatsye, or TSYSHO) and the Vilna Education Society (Vilner Bildungs Gezelshaft, or VILBIG) endorsed Shtif's plan and appointed a committee to consider it in detail; subsequently, the two organizations published Shtif's memorandum, along with a response written by Weinreich, in the pamphlet Di organizatsye fun der yidisher visnshaft (The Organization of Yiddish Scholarship; Vilna, April 1925). In the following months Shtif was active as a member of YIVO's Organizing Committee, which held a preliminary conference in Berlin in August 1925; the headquarters of the new institute was eventually established in Vilna.

In spring 1926, drawn by the prospect of state-sponsored Jewish cultural development in the Soviet Union, Shtif accepted an invitation to oversee the Chair or Division for Jewish Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, which by late 1929 became known as the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture. For a short time, he directed the Kiev Institute, but later headed only its philological section, while his colleague Yoysef Liberberg, head of the history section, and a Communist Party member, became the director.

At the Division for Jewish Culture, Shtif launched and edited a professional Yiddish-language philological journal, Di yidishe shprakh (The Yiddish Language; 1926-1930); in 1931 the journal was reestablished as Afn shprakhfront (On the Language Front), which Shtif also edited, until his death.

Shtif continued to publish articles on the history of Yiddish literature and language, on language planning, on the development of Yiddish spelling, and on issues of stylistics. His views in the area of language planning were sometimes criticized for tendencies of bourgeois Yiddishism. On the other hand, his 1929 article "Di sotsyale diferentsiatsye in yidish: di hebreyishe elementn in der shprakh” (Social Differentiation in Yiddish: The Hebrew Elements in the Language) – in which he argued that Yiddish words and forms derived from Hebrew and Aramaic were a function of class and increasingly redundant in the context of Soviet society – prompted a strong rebuttal from Max Weinreich, head of YIVO's philological section, who viewed the analysis as distorted by an ideological preconception.

Shtif died in Kiev on 7 April 1933.

References

Estraikh, Gennady. "Shtif, Nokhem." YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. New York: Yale University Press, 2008; online edition, 2010.

Estraikh, Gennady. Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Flinker, David, et al., ed. Di yidishe prese vos iz geven (The Yiddish Press that Was). Tel-Aviv: Veltfarband fun di Yidishe Zhurnalistn (World Union of Yiddish Journalists), 1975. pp. 449, 464, 473.

Gottesman, Itzik Nakhmen. Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

Kuznitz, Cecile. YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Schaechter, Mordkhe, and Gennady Estraikh. "Shtif, Nokhem." Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007.

"Shtif, Nokhem." Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (Biographical Dictionary of Modern Yiddish Literature). Vol. 8. New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1981.

Shtif, Nokhem. "Oytobyografye fun Nokhem Shtif" (The Autobiography of Nokhem Shtif). YIVO bleter, vol. 5 (1933), pp. 195-225.

Wolfthal, Maurice. Introduction. The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19: Prelude to the Holocaust, by Nokhem Shtif, trans. by Wolfthal (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020), pp. 1-10.