- Museum of Jewish Montreal
- Alexander Harkavy - Shaar Hashomayim Talmud Torah (1981 McGill College)
Alexander Harkavy - Shaar Hashomayim Talmud Torah (1981 McGill College)
file1887-1888
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Where
- Held by
- Museum of Jewish Montreal via Museum of Jewish Montreal — map of Jewish Montreal
- Creator
- Richard Kreitner
- Dates
- 1887-1888 (indexed as 1887–1888)
- Level
- file (source: Exhibit)
- Scope & content
- Alexander Harkavy (1863–1919), a famous Yiddish linguist and lexicographer, was born near Minsk in present-day Belarus. He had an early affinity for languages, studying for a few years in Vilna before moving to the United States. Along with Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovich), Harkavy is often considered one of the people most responsible for legitimizing Yiddish as a distinct language; he wrote a number of books on the Yiddish language and, from 1891, published several editions of his English-Yiddish dictionary. Prior to Harkavy’s time, Yiddish was viewed as a mongrel of German and Hebrew, unfit for serious literary usage. Harkavy contributed to the affirmation of Yiddish as an important cultural language. The end of the nineteenth century was witness to an explosion of Yiddish cultural material, including thousands of newspapers, journals, poems, plays, books, and even pulp novels. In 1887, Harkavy temporarily moved to Montreal when he took up a post as teacher at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim's Talmud Torah school. During the federal election of that year, Harkavy wrote and printed a campaign pamphlet; its Yiddish was transliterated into Roman letters because Montreal lacked a Hebrew-language printing press. That same year, Harkavy printed a single issue of a handwritten Yiddish newspaper called Di tsayt (The Time), considered the first Yiddish publication in Canada. In 1888, shortly before leaving Montreal to return to the United States, and nearly a decade before Theodor Herzl legitimized and popularized Zionist ideas, Harkavy founded a group called Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), through which he established the Hebrew Library, a forerunner of the Montreal’s world-famous Jewish Public Library. Most likely based on the identically-named groups in Eastern Europe that had been founded five years earlier, Montreal’s Hovevei Zion itself would falter, but it provided a linchpin for a Canadian Zionist movement that would become one of the most active in the world. During his brief time in Montreal, Harkavy witnessed and actively encouraged the beginnings of the Yiddish cultural activity that eventually bloomed into an intellectual milieu rivaling New York and Warsaw in its dynamism. Compiled by Richard Kreitner Sources: Azrieli, David, Joe King, and Gil Troy. Rekindling the Torch: The Story of Canadian Zionism. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008. Katz, Dovid. “Alexander Harkavy and his Trilingual Dictionary.” Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary. Ed. A. Harkavy. New York: Schocken Books and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1988. Margolis, Rebecca E. Yiddish Literary Culture in Montreal, 1905-1940. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2005. *Images courtesy of the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim Museum and Archives and the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives.
- Places
- 1981 McGill College; 1981 rue McGill College
- Location
- 1981 avenue McGill College · address · confidence 90% · address:exact · found as “1981 rue McGill College”
- Subjects
- Literature
- Language
- English
- Harvested
- 2026-10-17T06:33:33Z · source datestamp n/a · mjm