LEVIN, EMANUEL

LEVIN, EMANUEL (Menahem Mendel ; 1820–1913), author and communal worker, early pioneer of *Haskalah in Russia. A teacher of Russian and German in new schools in Vilna and his native Minsk, Levin wrote Dikduk Leshon Rusyah ("Grammar of the Russian Language") in 1846 and published a Russian translation of Pirkei Avot with notes in 1868. He founded a school for girls in Minsk, and in 1852 he was appointed as a teacher in the government rabbinical seminary in *Zhitomir. In 1857 he entered the service of the barons Y. and H. *Guenzburg, becoming their confidant and secretary for Jewish affairs. Under their instructions he drafted memoranda and appeals to the authorities, including a memorandum on the pogroms of 1881–82 to the Pahlen Commission, the government committee which discussed the Jewish question (see *Russia). Levin published several collections of the special laws concerning the Jews in Russia (Sbornik ogranichitelnykhzakonov… o yevreyakh, 1902). He also drafted the constitution of the *Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia and served as its first secretary (1863–72). From 1895 Levin was a member of the historical committee of the society and one of the collaborators in the publication of the collection Regesty i Nadpisi. Levin was also the secretary of several conventions of the leaders of Russian Jewry, including the meetings of the communal delegates during the years of the pogroms of 1881–82. He died in St. Petersburg.

bibliography:

Goldstein, in: Yevreyskaya Starina, 9 (1916), 253–75.

[Yehuda Slutsky]