Nochum Shtif

Nohum Shtif (‎; 1879, Rovno – 1933, Kiev), was a Jewish linguist, literary historian, publisher, translator, and philologist of the Yiddish language and social activist. In his early years he wrote under the pen name Baal Dimion (or Bal Dimyen, "Master of Imagination").

Shtif was born on 29 September 1879 (6 October 1879 on the Gregorian calendar) to a prosperous family in Rovno, Volhynia (Rivne, Ukraine). He received both a Jewish and a secular education. Even as a student at a Russian secondary school and, later, at Kiev Polytechnic University (where he was enrolled between 1899 and 1903), he continued studying religious and modern Hebrew literature.

Following the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, he became an ardent Zionist and helped establish the radical student Zionist organization Molodoy Izrail (Young Israel), and also participated in the 1902 Minsk Zionist Conference. The scholar Gennady Estraikh reports that in an early, unpublished article, Shtif "pioneered an ideological concept later employed by the Zionist Socialist Workers Party: emigration and colonization as a means of creating a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 Shtif, could not exist in the repressive environment of Russia". Shtif argued that the creation of an academic institute to support scholarship was a necessary step in the growth of Yiddish culture: "There arrives the time when every people at a certain level of cultural development must and wishes to participate directly in the scholarly work of the entire intellectual world." On March 24, 1925, the Central Education Committee (Tsentrale Bildungs Komitet or TSBK), the Vilna branch of the Central Yiddish School Organization (Tsentrale Yidishe Shul Organizatsye or TSYSHO) and the Vilna Education Society (Vilner Bildungs Gezelshaft or VILBIG) met to discuss Shtif’s memorandum, which they approved in a brochure entitled, Di organizatsye fun der yidisher visnshaft (The Organization of Yiddish Scholarship, Vilna, April 1925). At a conference held in Berlin, on August 7 to 12, 1925, Shtif, along with Max Weinreich and Elias Tcherikover, among others, came to decisions about the research and publishing programs, and the organizational structure of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, commonly known as YIVO. With as yet only limited funds, the research sections of the new institute – organized essentially along the lines that Shtif had proposed – began their work, at first both in Berlin and in Vilna, in fall 1925.

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. In 1926, he was invited to oversee the Kiev Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (previously known as the Chair or Division for Jewish Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences). At the same time, he launched a professional philological journal, Di yidishe shprakh (The Yiddish Language; 1926 1930), later called Afn shprakhfront (On the Language Front; 1931 1933), which he also edited. He also 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. For a short time, he directed the Kiev Institute, but later headed only its philological section. Yoysef Liberberg, a Communist Party member, replaced Shtif as director of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture. In 1928, both men were severely criticized for attempting to bring Simon Dubnow to Kiev as a guest of honor for a ceremonial opening. Shtif died at his desk in Kiev on 7 April 1933, while attempting to vindicate himself of the charge made against him in Soviet Russia for his bourgeois and “provincial Yiddishist approach.”