Mishpaṭ shalom

Mendele Mokher Sefarim, 1835–1917

Mishpaṭ shalom: ṿe-hu asefat maʼamarim shonim (Judgment of Peace, and Collection of Various Articles)

Vilna: Bi-defus Y.R. Rom, 1860

Mendele Mocher Sforim (born Sholem Yankev Abramovich) published his first book, a collection of Hebrew essays, in Vilna (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1860. The book included some early Hebrew criticism that clearly identified his position as an uncompromising young maskil when he addressed the attempts of other writers to bridge the Haskalah with religious orthodoxy. The book also featured some of the author’s original Hebrew poems. He was 24 years old at the time and had not yet adopted the pen name—Mendele Mocher Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler)—that made him famous just a few years later, when he began writing more in Yiddish. He also began to gradually shift away from his early maskilic radicalism.  

The title of the book, Mishpat shalom (Judgment of Peace), alludes to the author’s name and could also be translated as Judgment of Sholem. In order to conceptualize the idea of the book, he included the following quote from the book of Zechariah (8:16–17) on the title page: “These are the things you are to do: speak the truth to one another, render true and perfect justice in your gates; not a single one of you shall contrive evil against another."

Mendele Mocher Sforim was born in Kapulia (Kopyl), a town in present-day Belarus, but spent most of his life in Ukraine. He went on to have a prolific literary career that spanned five decades and covered Haskalah, the development of Yiddish literature against the backdrop of liberal reforms in Russia, the Jewish pogroms of 1881 and their aftermaths, and the emergence of major Jewish ideological movements.