DRBR 24: In which Newspapers are Handwritten

This caught my eye because it’s just weird to print a newspaper by lithography from a handwritten original. So I went a-searching, and discovered that this was the first Yiddish-language newspaper produced in America. Now the lithography makes much more sense; to produce a Yiddish newspaper you need a newspaper press and a set of Yiddish type. I think Yiddish books were being printed in New York at the time (based on a sort of general impression of an existing and literate community), but not periodicals, so it would make sense that the producer just didn’t have access to a newspaper press which could set Yiddish type.

They were also backed by Tammany Hall, which at this period was a rather unpleasant organisation controlling local politics, heavily Irish-immigrant, with violence and corruption, so perhaps Yiddish printers (in a nascent immigrant community) didn’t want to get involved?

Here are some sources from the internets:

The first entry in what would become a crowd of Yiddish newspapers in America, Di Yidishe Tsaytung first appeared on March 1, 1870, a self-described “weekly paper of politics, religion, history, science and art” with the English title, “The New York Hebrew Times,” emblazoned above the Yiddish logotype. Its publisher was I. K. Buchner, like so many of the first Yiddish editors a Lithuanian Jew devoted to the subjects of the New Enlightenment. It took its editorial material from German and other European Jewish periodicals, and was quickly scorned by English-language Jewish publications. The uptown Jewish Times said, “Buchner’s Yidishe Tsaytung is a weekly publication written in the Jewish and German-Polish jargon, and its contents are as laughable as its language. It provides reading material entirely suited to the recently imported Russian Jews, and is a shining example of Middle Ages superstitions and naivete.” The paper, produced by lithography, cost six cents, and loyally followed the party line of Tammany Hall. It finally expired in 1877.

–from Live and be Well, Richard F. Shepard, page 186.

The first Yiddish periodical published in America, Di yidishe tsaytung, was founded in 1870 by J.K. Buchner. He generally published his paper, which was subsidized by Tammany Hall, prior to election time or when a sensational story promised high sales…Its masthead identified it variously as a monthly and a weekly, but as few as fifteen issues appeared in a period of seven years; at most three issues are recorded extant today. The first commercially viable Yiddish dailies were published in the 1890s and in 1917 New York City alone had five dailies with a combined circulation of 600,000.

From the Jewish Theological Seminary’s exhibition catalogue People of Faith, Land of Promise.

And that bit about “three issues are recorded extant today”…this is one of the perks of doing volunteer work in a rare book room…