Nochum Shtif

Nohum Shtif (Yiddish: נחום שטיף‎‎; 1879, Rovno – 1933, Kiev), was a Jewish linguist, literary historian, publisher, translator, and philologist of the Yiddish language and social activist. In his early years he wrote under the pen name Baal Dimion (or Bal-Dimyen, "Master of Imagination").

Early years

Shtif was born on 29 September 1879 (6 October 1879 by Gregorian calendar) to a prosperous family in Rovno, Volhynia (Rivne, Ukraine). He received both a Jewish and a secular education. Even as a student at a Russian secondary school and, later, at Kiev Polytechnic University (where he was enrolled between 1899 and 1903), he continued studying religious and modern Hebrew literature.

Activities

Following the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, he became an ardent Zionist and helped establish the radical student Zionist organization, Molodoy Izrail (Young Israel), and also participated in the 1902 Minsk Zionist Conference.

In his first, unpublished, article Shtif pioneered an ideological concept later employed by the Zionist Socialist Workers Party: emigration and colonization as a means of creating a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. In autumn 1903, he cofounded the Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance) Jewish socialist group in Kiev with A. Ben-Adir and W. Fabrikant. Shortly thereafter, Shtif was arrested for his political activities and was expelled from the Kiev Polytechnic University. From late 1904 until early 1906, he lived in Bern, Switzerland, where he organized a local Vozrozhdenie group and agitated against the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. 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 and became committed Yiddishists.