15 Facts About Nochum Shtif

Nochum Shtif was born on 29 September 1879 to a prosperous family in Rovno, Volhynia.

Nochum Shtif received both a Jewish and a secular education.

The scholar Gennady Estraikh reports that in an early, unpublished article, Nochum Shtif "pioneered an ideological concept later employed by the Zionist Socialist Workers Party: emigration and colonization as a means of creating a Jewish proletariat, which, according to Nochum Shtif, could not exist in the repressive environment of Russia".

Between 1906 and 1910, Nochum Shtif spent time in Kiev, Vilna, Vitebsk, and Saint Petersburg.

Nochum Shtif was a party agitator, an editor for modern Yiddish literature at the Kletskin publishing house in Vilna, and an employee of the Jewish Colonization Association.

Nochum Shtif published several articles on literary criticism, politics and Yiddish philology in Russian and Yiddish periodicals.

Nochum Shtif completed his dissertation and graduated from the Jaroslavl Law School in 1913.

In 1914 Nochum Shtif returned to Vilna, and became the editor of the publication, Di Vokh.

In 1917, after the February Revolution, Nochum Shtif became one of the founders of the revived Folkspartei, whose newspaper, Folksblat, he co-published with Israel Efroikin.

In 1918, Nochum Shtif moved to Kiev, where he was active in YEKOPO and devoted himself to journalism.

Nochum Shtif's writings, including the pamphlet, concerned the Jewish future in the post-war world, which Shtif envisioned as a brotherhood of nations that included Jews as an autonomous national collective with a highly developed Yiddish culture.

In October 1924, Nochum Shtif drafted a memorandum entitled, Vegn a yidishn akademishn institut, in which he outlined a plan for an academic Yiddish institute and library.

Nochum Shtif proposed that the institute contain four scholarly sections: one for Yiddish philology; one for Jewish history; one to deal with social and economic issues; and a pedagogical section, which would include a bibliographic center, for collecting and recording publications in Yiddish.

Nochum Shtif, while involved in organizing the YIVO in Vilna, was lured by the unprecedented scale of state-sponsored Jewish cultural development in the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine.

Nochum Shtif continued to publish articles on the history of Yiddish literature and language, on language planning, on the development of Yiddish spelling, and on issues of stylistics.