A Tale of Love and Darkness

AS A CHILD the thing I most admired Uncle Joseph for was that, as I had been told, he had invented and given us several simple, everyday Hebrew words, words that seemed to have been known and used forever, including "pencil," "iceberg," "shirt," "greenhouse," "toast," "cargo," "monotonous," "multicolored," "sensual," "crane," and "rhinoceros. " (Come to think of it, what would I have put on each morning if Uncle Joseph had not given us the word "shirt"? A "coat of many colors"? And what would I have written with without his pencil? A "lead stylus"? Not to mention "sensual," a rather surprising gift from this puritanical uncle.)

Joseph Klausner was born in 1874 in Olkieniki, Lithuania, and died in Jerusalem in 1958. When he was ten, the Klausners moved from Lithuania to Odessa, where he progressed through the traditional Jewish educational system from the cheder to the modern-style yeshiva, and thence to the Hibbat Zion movement and the circles of Ahad Ha'am. At the age of nineteen he published his first article, titled "New Words and Fine Writing," in which he argued for the bounds of the Hebrew language to be extended, even by the incorporation of foreign words, so as to enable it to function as a living language. In the summer of 1897 he went to study in Heidelberg in south Germany, because in Tsarist Russia the universities were closed to Jews. During his five years in Heidelberg he studied philosophy with Professor Kuno Fischer, became deeply attracted to Eastern history a la Renan, and was profoundly influenced by Carlyle.