TARNOPOL, JOACHIM ḤAYYIM

TARNOPOL, JOACHIM ḤAYYIM (1810–1900), maskil in *Odessa, author, communal worker, and wealthy merchant. At the beginning of the reign of Alexander ii, he began his endeavors for the emancipation of the Jews and their reconciliation with the Russian people. In 1855 he published his pamphlet Notices historiques et caracteristiques sur les Israélites d'Odessa. In 1856, together with his friend Y. *Rabinowitz, he approached the Russian authorities and requested permission to publish a Jewish periodical in Russian which would propagate the ideologies of the Haskalah and reconciliation with the Russian people. In May 1860, Tarnopol, together with Rabinowitz, edited the first Russian-Jewish newspaper, *Razsvet ("The Dawn"). A dispute, however, immediately broke out between them as to whether a Jewish newspaper in the country's language should publicly condemn the internal deficiencies of the Jewish people and thus arm the hands of its enemies outside the community and estrange the youth that had received a foreign education. Tarnopol, who was against criticizing Jewish internal affairs before outsiders, resigned from the editorship of the newspaper (from the 20^th issue). He published his reasons for this step in a letter to the editorial board of *Ha-Maggid (nos. 45–46, 1860). In 1868 his book on "an attempt at cautious reform within Judaism, meditations on the internal and external way of life of Russian Jews" was published in Odessa in Russian. It was a summary of his outlook on the road to be followed by Russian Jewry.

bibliography:

Yu. I. Gessen, in: Perezhitoye, 3 (1911), 38–52; S. Zinberg, Istoriya yevreyskoy pechati v Rossii (1915), 39–48, 257–60; B. Shoḥetman, in: He-Avar, 2 (1954), 61–66; Y. Slutsky, Ha-Ittonut ha-Yehudit-Rusit ba-Me'ah ha-xix (1970), 40–44.

[Yehuda Slutsky]