Dr. Itskhok-Nakhmen Steinberg
Dvinsk, Latvia 1888 – New York 1957
Revolutionary, legal scholar, writer, national thinker and leader
All these words describe the exceptional person and Jew, Dr. Itskhok-Nakhmen Steinberg, the second editor of Afn Shvel (1943-1957), when it was still the organ of the Freeland League. Before he came to territorialism and to the Freeland League he had behind him a colorful life as a leader of the left SRs (socialist revolutionaries), a folk commissar of Justice in Lenin’s cabinet (until February 1918), an intellectual schooled in the best universities of Russia and Germany, and an editor and writer of literary and political articles in Yiddish, Russian, and German. He was a wonderful speaker with charisma and deep humanity in whom the often contradictory ideologies of socialist revolutionary and pious Jew dwelt harmoniously. Dr. Steinberg demonstrated that there are select individuals who can, as essayist and educator Avrom Golomb put it, be faithful “to the religious, traditional mode of Jewishness and […] to secular culture.1”
For Dr. Steinberg territorialism and, in particular, the Freeland League were not so much a political movement as a national-cultural one. He emphasized spiritual Jewishness as opposed to state (i.e. political) Jewishness and strove to find for Jews, not necessarily their own state, but a free country in which they could live under a democratic regime. According to him the most important issue was not national existence itself but, rather, the moral-religious mission of the Jewish people without which Jews were not Jews.
