Chaim Zelig Slonimski

Origins and early life

Chaim Zelig Slonimski was born on 31 March 1810 in Białystok, into a traditional Jewish family, and never left the faith of his birth: a Talmud scholar who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, he spent his life bringing modern science to Jews in the language of their prayers.

Work and career

His Hebrew books on astronomy, on the coming of Halley's comet and on mathematics were the first of their kind, and he invented a calculating machine for which the Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg awarded him the Demidov Prize in 1845 — a Jew from the Pale honored by the empire's highest scientific body. In 1862 he founded in Warsaw Ha-Tsefirah, the Dawn, the first Hebrew periodical devoted to science, which he revived in 1874 and edited for the rest of his life; it became one of the great newspapers of the Hebrew revival, and through it a generation of Eastern European Jews discovered that Hebrew could speak of electricity and geology.

He directed the rabbinical seminary of Zhitomir and served as government censor of Hebrew books. He died in Warsaw on 15 May 1904; his grandsons were the Polish poet Antoni Słonimski and the American musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky.