Hillel Zeitlin’s “On Select Redeemers”
For close to two decades, the Polish-Jewish journalist and religious intellectual Hillel Zeitlin (1871-1942) sought in vain to establish fraternal societies for the spiritual and ethical revival of the Jewish people. “On Select Redeemers,” his final manifesto before his death in Treblinka, is a stirring testimony to his resolute faith in the power of individual prayer to affect history. The document, presented in “From the Pages of TRADITION.” is open access an annotated translation by Jonatan Meir and Samuel Glauber-Zimra.
Read “Hillel Zeitlin’s ‘On Select Redeemers’” from the most recent issue of TRADITION.
Hillel Zeitlin הי”ד
The interwar period was a time of great political and social foment for the Jews of Eastern Europe, but also the so-called “Golden Age of Jewish Politics” in which numerous ideologies, each with their own party apparatus and vision for the Jewish future, vied for the hearts and minds of the younger generation. These new organizational forms were seized upon by religious leaders, as well. One such figure was Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), a leading Polish-Jewish journalist and religious intellectual who for close to two decades sought in vain to establish fraternal societies for the spiritual and ethical revival of the Jewish people. Driven by a messianic zeal, Zeitlin identified his period as leading up to the end of days, a determination that demanded immediate action.
Born in 1871 into a hasidic family in Korma, in contemporary Belarus, Zeitlin came of age amid the first wave of pogroms that sowed the seeds of Jewish political activity in the Russian empire. Settling in Warsaw in 1907, he achieved public prominence as a journalist and polemicist—he published thousands of articles in the Hebrew and Yiddish press—until his death in Treblinka in 1942. Best-known today as an impassioned writer who bridged the traditional worlds of Hasidism and Kabbalah with that of secular Jewish modernity, Zeitlin’s religious vision had considerable socio-political dimensions. Over the duration of the interwar period, Zeitlin issued repeated calls in the Yiddish press and independently published booklets for the formation of fraternal societies of “select individuals” tasked with bringing about a religious revival in tune with the socio-political concerns of the day. Zeitlin presented his envisioned spiritual fraternities as a necessary alternative to political parties, yet he utilized the very modes of social and political organization that the latter had introduced.
“On Select Redeemers” (“Al Go’alim-Yehidim”), the text presented here, is Zeitlin’s final manifesto. Published in Warsaw in June 1939 in the Hebrew supplement to Der nayer ruf (“The New Call”), the essay signals a retreat from his earlier plans in favor of an elite group of spiritual adepts tasked with ensuring Jewish survival through targeted prayer. This group, styled “Ha-Mekhavnim” (“The Intenders”), was modeled on the early-twentieth-century kabbalists of Jerusalem, who spent their days in contemplative prayer. If those “intenders” directed their minds, i.e., maintaining kavvana, toward esoteric permutations of Divine names, Zeitlin’s prayer corps derived their spiritual potency specifically from their continued engagement with world affairs. “Armed with knowledge of the world,” Zeitlin’s “Mekhavnim” were to meditate at length on impending threats to the Jewish people, specifically those posed by the Third Reich, and thus, it was hoped, abrogate the evil decree.
In an age of global politics and historical materialism, Zeitlin’s faith in the power of the individual to affect history remained resolute. As a vise closed around Polish Jewry, he continued to preach a religious vision irrevocably bound to individual action, albeit on a spiritual plane. The text presented here, his last publication in Hebrew before his death in the Holocaust, is a final testament to this vision.
Zeitlin has been the subject of a number of earlier articles in TRADITION, including:
- Pesach Schindler, “The Holocaust and Kiddush Hashem in Hassidic Thought” (Spring-Summer 1973).
- Norman Frimer, “A Vignette of Rabbi Hillel Zeitlin and the Holocaust (30 years After the Storm)” (Spring-Summer 1975).
- Hillel Goldberg, “Ideas and Eternity” (Summer 2008).
Read “Hillel Zeitlin’s ‘On Select Redeemers’” from the most recent issue of TRADITION.
Jonatan Meir, a Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Samuel Glauber-Zimra, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is the co-editor of Hillel Zeitlin’s “Be-Hevyon Ha-Neshama.”