Chaim Zhitlowsky

Chaim Zhitlowsky
Born	Chaim Zhitlowsky 19 April 1865 Ushachy, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	6 May 1943, age 78
Occupation	Philosopher and writer
Known for	Founding Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries and Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia

Chaim Zhitlowsky (Yiddish: חײם זשיטלאָװסקי; Russian: Хаим Осипович Житловский) (April 19, 1865 - May 6, 1943) was a Jewish socialist, philosopher, social and political thinker, writer and literary critic born in Ushachy, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Usachy Raion, Vitebsk Region, Belarus).

He was a founding member of the Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries; later, a founding member and theoretician of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia; and an ideologist of Yiddishism and Jewish Diaspora nationalism, which influenced the Jewish territorialist and nationalist movements. He was an advocate of Yiddish language and culture and was a vice-president of the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908, which declared Yiddish to be "a national language of the Jewish people."

Issued by the Zhitlowsky Anniversary Committee in 1935:

Chaim Zhitlowsky was born in 1865, in the small town of Ushachy, in the province of Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire. When he was five years old, his parents moved to Vitebsk, the capital of the province. On his mother's side he was descended from artisans and merchants, on his father's—from an aristocratic and well-educated family. His father, Joseph, studied to be a rabbi in the Yeshiva of Volozhin, but chose to become a merchant. Though an ardent Lubavich Chassid he was well versed in Haskalah (enlightenment) literature, and often recited satiric Haskalah tales and poems in Yiddish and Hebrew at family gatherings.

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