HaMagid [Hebrew Weekly Newspaper]

An exceptional, long run of the first Hebrew weekly newspaper. HaMagid stood at the vanguard of the Hebrew press throughout the second half of the 19th-century. Published between 1856 and 1903, HaMagid (”The Preacher”) was the first Hebrew weekly newspaper and in many respects its establishment marked the beginning of the modern Hebrew press. For censorship reasons it was published outside the borders of Czarist Russia (first in Lyck, Prussia, and after 1890 successively in Berlin, Cracow and Vienna), but its contents were aimed first and foremost at the Russian-Jewish reading public. Because of its broad content, however, it was distributed to many Jewish communities in Europe and beyond. HaMagid was a pioneer in reporting the news in Hebrew from around the world and especially from the Jewish world, either culled from translations of the general press or from original reporting drawn from its own vast network of bureaus. It initiated and nurtured the modern genre of opinion essays in Hebrew. The founder of HaMagid, Eliezer Lipman Silberman, determined the paper’s character and orientation, stances that over the years remained basically steady. HaMagid represented the viewpoints of moderate religious Jewry that was opposed to religious reforms and that balked at the Haskalah movement’s more radical elements. At the same time, as early as the 1860’s the paper fervently supported the resettling of the Land of Israel, citing a combination of religious and national justifications, and it was one of the earliest harbingers of the Zionist movement, which it continued to support over the years. In 1880 David Gordon, Silberman’s right-hand man, was appointed editor, and after his death in 1886, his son Dov Gordon inherited that position. From 1891, HaMagid was edited by Ya‘akov Shemu’el Fuchs, who published it in Berlin, strengthened its literary section, and completely altered its format with the assistance of new contributors, including some of the generation’s most prominent writers (Berdyczewski, Brainin, Klausner, and others). During its twilight years, the de facto editor was Shimon Menacem Lazar. However, from the time HaMagid moved to Cracow in 1892, it began, more and more, to resemble a domestic Galician newspaper, and its position at the vanguard of the Hebrew press was relinquished to the Hebrew dailies HaMelitz and HaTzefirah. (A. Holtzman, The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe; se also EJ, Vol. VII, col. 1221-22.