Micah Joseph Lebensohn

• Name — Micah Joseph Lebensohn • Pen Name — Mikhal • Born — 2 February 1828 • Birthplace — Vilna, Russian Empire • Died — 17 February 1852 • Place of death — Vilna, Russian Empire • Occupation — * Poet • translator • Language — Hebrew • Movement — Haskalah, Romanticism • Relatives — * Avraham Dov Ber Lebensohn (father) • Joshua Steinberg (brother-in-law)

• Illustration — Title page of Shirei Bat-Tsiyyon (1851) Micha Joseph Lebensohn was born on 2 February 1828 in Vilna, the son of maskilic poet Avraham Dov Ber Lebensohn (Adam ha-Kohen), where he received a thorough Jewish education. Having met in his father's house many prominent Jewish writers, he developed an early interest in literature. He began to translate poetry into Hebrew at the age of twelve, and at the age of sixteen composed his first original poem, Ha-Aḥvah ('Fraternity'), written to his brother Noah. As a teenager, Lebensohn, besides his perfect command of Hebrew, was privately tutored in Russian, French, Polish and German. By the late 1840s, Lebensohn discovered early symptoms of tuberculosis. In 1849, on the advice of his doctor, he went to sanatoria abroad for medical treatment. During a winter in Berlin, he attended the philosophy lectures of Schelling at the University of Berlin, and came under the influence of German Romanticism. At the same time, he became closely acquainted with scholars Shneur Sachs and Leopold Zunz, who encouraged him to write original poetry on Jewish and Biblical heroes. He also visited the spa towns of Salzbrunn and Reinerz to seek relief from the disease. He returned to Vilna in 1850, where he lived until his death shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday, on 17 February 1852. His last poem, Ha-tefilah ('Prayer'), is dedicated to 'Prayer, Daughter of Hearts'.

In 1847, Lebensohn wrote a translation into Hebrew of the third and fourth books of Virgil's Æneid (after Schiller's German translation), under the title Harisut Troya ('The Destruction of Troy'). The following year he wrote translations of Alfieri's Saul (as Aḥarit Sha’ul) and Goethe's Erlkönig (as Melekh balahot), among other works. Other compositions of this period include translations of Arnault's La feuille (as Daliyyah niddaḥat) and Mickiewicz's Farys (as Ha-Aravi ba-midbar), as well as elegies on the death of M. A. Günzburg. While in Berlin, Lebensohn wrote a cycle of lyric poems, including Ahuva azuva ('Sorrowful Lover'), Yom huledet ahuvati ('My Beloved's Birthday'), Aḥot lanu ('A Sister to Us'), and Ḥag ha-aviv ('The Festival of Spring'). Lebensohn wrote his best known work, the poetry collection Shirei Bat-Tsiyyon ('Songs of a Daughter of Zion', published 1851, second edition 1869), in 1850. It consists of six epic poems on Jewish subjects with naturalistic description: Shelomo ('Solomon'), Kohelet ('Ecclesiastes'), Nikmat Shimshon ('Samson's Vengeance'), Yael ve-Sisra ('Jael and Sisera'), Moshe al Har ha-Avarim ('Moses on Mount Abarim'), and Yehuda ha-Levi ('Judah Halevi'). The best known among them, Shelomo and Kohelet, contrast the optimism of a young King Solomon with the disillusionment of the monarch in his old age. In the Jewish Encyclopedia (1904), Herman Rosenthal and Peter Wiernik wrote that