FRAENKEL, FAIWEL

FRAENKEL, FAIWEL (Bar Tuviah ; 1875?–1933), Hebrew author and publicist. He was born in Vasilkov, in the district of Kiev. In 1893 he published his first article on Polish Jewish history in Ha-Meliẓ. He moved to Kiev, and in 1899 published a Hebrew translation of Pinsker's Autoemancipation, and a Hebrew translation and adaptation of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward titled Be-Od Me'ah Shanah ("One Hundred Years Hence"). An active socialist, he was forced to leave Russia in 1901. He went to Switzerland, studied at the University of Berne, and received his doctorate in 1906 for his dissertation Buckle und seine Geschichtsphilosophie (Berner Studien, 1906). He lived in Geneva (1906–12), San Remo (1912–17), and Nice. Bar-Tuviah published many articles in Hebrew literary-scholarly periodicals, including Ha-Dor, Ha-Me'orer, Ha-Olam, He-Atid, Ha-Tekufah, Miklat, and Hadoar. They deal primarily with social science, Jewish studies, and socialist theory. He was the first Hebrew writer to discuss social sciences in depth. In the field of Jewish studies he investigated the economic background of the formation of sects and parties in ancient Israel. His noteworthy contribution to this subject is his unfinished Sefer ha-Nezirim, a two-part history of asceticism among the Jews (1910). His more popular articles took up, in the main, questions of socialism and nationalism, and called for the negation of the Diaspora. His selected writings were published in 1964 by G. Elkoshi, accompanied by an evaluative biographical essay (9–40) and an annotated bibliography (729–808).

bibliography:

Waxman, Literature, 4 (1960), 419ff.

[Gedalyah Elkoshi]