PICK, ḤAYYIM HERMANN

PICK, ḤAYYIM HERMANN (1879–1952), Assyriologist and Mizrachi leader. Born in Schildberg, Poland, Pick was a pupil of F. Delitzsch at the University of Berlin. His doctoral dissertation was entitled Talmudische Glossen zu Delitzschs assyrischen Handwoerterbuch (1903). He was also ordained as rabbi by David Z. Hoffmann at the Rabbinerseminar fuer das Orthodoxe Judentum. Pick joined the Zionist movement in 1898 and the Mizrachi upon its foundation, serving as a delegate to several Zionist congresses. In 1904 he joined the department of Middle Eastern studies at the Prussian State Library, and in 1918 was appointed professor and Bibliotheksrat (library counsellor). He was the first Jew in the Prussian civil service to be permitted not to work on the Sabbath. Concurrently he acted as headmaster of the Lippmann Taus Hebrew College in Berlin.

Pick was very active in Mizrachi affairs in Germany until 1914. In World War i, he acted as chief military censor of the Jewish press in Poland. After the war he was temporarily attached to the German Foreign Office. In 1920 he was elected a member of the Mizrachi World Executive, serving for a time as its chairman. From 1921 to 1927 he was a member of the Jerusalem Zionist Executive and was appointed to its Immigration Department. At the height of the "*Grabskialiyah" he kept up an impassioned fight with the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, over the politically motivated cutbacks in the allotment of immigration certificates. Pick was among the initiators of the Mizrachi Bank. Though unable to pursue his scientific work, he was able to found, together with S.H. Bergman, *Kirjath Sepher, the bibliographical publication of the Jewish National Library.

From 1928 to 1934, upon returning to the Prussian State Library, he was again extremely active on behalf of the Mizrachi in the Berlin Jewish Community Council. The Nazis pensioned but did not dismiss him, on account of his wartime service. After returning to Jerusalem he was again elected to the Mizrachi World Executive (1935), heading its Ereẓ Israel Fund. Later he initiated and headed the Council for Refugee Rabbis that looked after hundreds of people. Pick's last years were darkened by a crippling illness, and by the confiscation by the Germans of his unique Assyriological library, including all the cuneiform texts that were to be the basis of his life's work – an Assyrian-Aramaic-Hebrew dictionary.

bibliography:

Ha-Ẓofeh (Jan. 18, 1939), 3; Deyokena'ot (1962), 230–4.

[Pinhas Artzi]