Nathan Birnbaum


Nathan Birnbaum was an Austrian writer and journalist, Jewish thinker and nationalist.
His life had three main phases, representing a progression in his thinking: a Zionist phase ; a Jewish cultural autonomy phase which included the promotion of the Yiddish language; and religious phase when he turned to Orthodox Judaism and became staunchly anti-Zionist.

Biography

Nathan Birnbaum was born in Vienna into an Eastern European Jewish family with roots in Austrian Galicia and Hungary. His father, Menachem Mendel Birnbaum, a merchant, hailed from Ropshitz, Galicia, and his mother, Miriam Birnbaum, who was born in northern Hungary, of a family with illustrious rabbinic lineage, had moved as a child to Tarnow, Galicia, where the two met and married.Menachem Mendel Birnbaum died when Nathan was eleven. He attended a public high school and gradually drifted away from religious observance but strongly believed in the idea of Jews as a nation.
From 1882 to 1886, Birnbaum studied law, philosophy and Near Eastern studies at the University of Vienna.
He married Rosa Korngut and they had three sons: Solomon Birnbaum, Menachem Birnbaum, and Uriel Birnbaum.
In 1933, at the time of the Nazi rise to power, Birnbaum and his wife, together with their son Menachem and family, who at that time were all living in Berlin, fled to Scheveningen, Netherlands, with the help of businessman and diplomat Henri B. van Leeuwen. There, Birnbaum, van Leeuwen, and banker Daniel Wolfe published the anti-Zionist newspaper Der Ruf. At the same time, their son Solomon and his family fled from Hamburg to England. Their other son, Uriel, an artist and poet, and his family fled from Vienna to the Netherlands in 1939. Van Leeuwen, also an Orthodox Jew, became a Dutch anti-Zionist leader and Bergen-Belsen survivor.
Birnbaum died in Scheveningen in 1937 after a period of severe illness.

Zionist activism

In 1883, at the age of 19, he founded Kadimah, the first Jewish student association in Vienna, many years before Theodor Herzl became the leading spokesman of the Zionist movement. While still a student, he founded and published the periodical Selbstemanzipation!, often written in large part by Birnbaum himself. In it he coined the terms "Zionistic", "Zionist", "Zionism", and "political Zionism".
Birnbaum played a prominent part in the First Zionist Congress where he was elected Secretary-General of the Zionist Organization. He was associated with and was one of the most important representatives of the cultural, rather than political, side of Zionism. However, he left the Zionist Organization not long after the Congress. He was unhappy with its negative view of Diaspora Jewry and the transformation of the Zionist ideals into a party machine.
His next phase was to advocate Jewish cultural autonomy, or Golus nationalism, concentrating in particular on the Jews of eastern Europe. He advocated for the Jews to be recognized as a people among the other peoples of the empire, with Yiddish as their official language. He ran on behalf of the Jews as candidate for the Austrian parliament. Although he had a majority of the votes, his election was thwarted by corruption of the electoral process by the local Polish faction.
He was chief convener of the Conference for the Yiddish Language held in Czernowitz, August 30 –September 3, 1908. It was the first Yiddish-language conference ever to take place. At the conference, he took the place of his colleague and fellow Yiddish activist Sholem Aleichem who was critically ill.

Religious orthodoxy

From about 1912 onwards, Birnbaum became increasingly interested in Orthodox Judaism, and he became a fully observant Orthodox Jew in about 1916. He continued to act particularly as an advocate for the Jews of eastern Europe and the Yiddish language. From 1919 to 1922, he was General Secretary of the Agudas Yisroel, a widely-spread and influential Orthodox Jewish organization. He founded the society of the "Olim", a society with a specific program of action dedicated to the spiritual ascent of the Jewish people.

Published works