About Moriah

Moriah

Moriah was a Hebrew-language newspaper that was published in Jerusalem in Ottoman Palestine between 1910 and 1915. It was founded by the printer Rabbi Yehuda Aharon Weiss and was edited throughout its life by Yitzhak Yaakov Yellin. The paper began as a weekly and later became a daily, and it took over the position that Habazeleth had previously held as the leading newspaper of Jerusalem's Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jewish community. Produced by a Jerusalem printing house that bore the same name, Moriah set itself an unusual mission for an Orthodox paper of its time: it sought to reform the public conduct of the Old Yishuv, the long-established Orthodox community of the city, and it promised its readers free expression and objectivity. The Ottoman authorities shut it down on 11 January 1915, in the middle of the First World War, after its editor defied an order forbidding newspapers to deal with political matters. Although it lived for less than five years, a later generation of religious journalists remembered it as a founding title of the religious press in the country, and its issues were preserved in the archive of the National Library of Israel.

Jerusalem and the Hebrew Press

Moriah appeared at a moment when Jerusalem already had a long, if fragile, tradition of Hebrew journalism. Hebrew periodicals had developed in the city during the nineteenth century alongside the growth of the Jewish community, and titles such as Ha-Levanon and Habazeleth had served the traditional readership of the Old Yishuv. Habazeleth, first issued in 1863 and published for decades, was for much of that period the principal newspaper of Jerusalem's Haredi community. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, Habazeleth was in decline, and its downfall left Jerusalem's Orthodox public without a leading paper of its own. At the same time, the Hebrew press in Palestine was changing: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had converted his weekly Ha-Zevi into a daily in 1909, new papers were appearing in Jaffa, and the parties of the labour movement had begun to publish journals of their own. It was into this gap, on the Orthodox side of the city's public life, that Moriah stepped in 1910.

Founding and the Ottoman Permit

The newspaper was founded in Jerusalem by the printer Rabbi Yehuda Aharon Weiss, and its first issue appeared on 6 May 1910. The name Moriah, drawn from Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, was also the name of the printing house that produced the paper. That printing house was owned by Weiss together with his partner, Rabbi Moshe Samuel Schinbaum. Because newspapers in the Ottoman Empire required official permission, Weiss had to obtain a permit to publish from the Ottoman authorities, and the permit was granted after the authorities had been assured that the paper would abide by Ottoman law. The arrangement placed Moriah inside the legal framework of the late Ottoman press regime from its first day: it was a licensed Jerusalem paper, published by a named printing house, under owners known to the authorities. That legal standing made its eventual closure by official order, less than five years later, a pointed demonstration of how conditional press freedom remained in the empire's final years.

The Editor: Yitzhak Yaakov Yellin

The newspaper's chief editor, throughout all its years of publication, was Yitzhak Yaakov Yellin, who also wrote a significant portion of its articles himself. Yellin was born in the Old City of Jerusalem into a family of biblical grammarians. His grandfather, Rabbi Shalom Shachne Yellin, known as the Proofreader of Skidl, was regarded as one of the proofreaders of the most popular Torah books in the world, and his name was connected with the notes and commentary on the Aleppo Codex. Yellin had been a publisher since his youth: already at seventeen years of age he had begun publishing a weekly newspaper called The Zionist, which was distributed in the yeshivas of Jerusalem, in which he preached the spreading of the Zionist idea and its adoption by the ultra-Orthodox public to which he himself belonged, and urged yeshiva students to join the workforce. He also taught Hebrew language, grammar and mathematics for many years at the Yeshiva Etz Haim, and he was remembered as the first figure to initiate Hebrew lessons in Torah schools, despite the bitter objection of ultra-Orthodox Jews, at a time when it had been customary to study Hebrew through translation into Yiddish. His combination of deep Orthodox roots, commitment to the Hebrew language and willingness to challenge communal custom made him an editor unlike any other in the Jerusalem of his day.

A Mission to Reform the Old Yishuv

Together with Weiss, Yellin made it a goal for the newspaper to reform the Old Yishuv and its public conduct. Right from the first issue, the founders expressed their intent of addressing the Haredi Jews in a manner representing free speech and objectivity. For a paper owned and edited by men of the Orthodox community itself, this was a deliberate programme rather than a slogan. Moriah did not attack the Old Yishuv from outside, as secular and Zionist papers often did; it criticised the community's public affairs from within, in Hebrew, in the name of the community's own improvement. A scholarly study of the paper published by Yad Ben-Zvi described it in its title as a fighting Haredi newspaper working for the betterment of Jerusalem. That fighting character distinguished Moriah from the more cautious Orthodox journalism that had preceded it: the paper treated communal institutions, public behaviour and the conduct of Jerusalem's religious society as legitimate subjects for open discussion, and it held that an Orthodox readership deserved reporting and argument rather than silence.

From Weekly to Daily

The first issues of Moriah were published weekly, but later it was published daily, with an extended weekly issue intended for readers outside the country. Reference tables of the Hebrew press recorded it as a weekly and daily Jerusalem paper of 1910 to 1915, Orthodox in character, and daily from 1913. The move from a weekly to a daily rhythm was a substantial undertaking for a small Jerusalem printing house, and it signalled that the paper had found a readership able to sustain frequent publication in the city itself. The extended weekly edition served the other half of its audience: supporters and readers abroad, in the diaspora communities whose interest in Jerusalem's Orthodox society, and whose financial support for it, had always linked the Old Yishuv to Jewish communities overseas. In this dual structure, a daily sheet for Jerusalem and a fuller weekly issue for readers outside the country, Moriah mirrored the geography of the community it served.

Voice of Jerusalem's Haredi Community

Because it succeeded Habazeleth as the leading newspaper of the Haredi community in Jerusalem, Moriah occupied a central place in the public life of the Old Yishuv during the last years of Ottoman rule. Its pages were the forum in which that community read about itself: its institutions, its disputes, its religious and civic concerns, and its relations with the wider city and with the Jewish world beyond Palestine. Yellin's own voice was present throughout, since he wrote a substantial share of the articles in addition to editing the paper. The paper's stance combined loyalty to Orthodox life with criticism of its failings, an editorial position that required constant judgement about how far reformist argument could go before it alienated the readers it hoped to persuade. That it survived and expanded, moving from weekly to daily publication, suggested that a significant part of the Jerusalem Orthodox public was willing to read a paper that examined the community's conduct openly. In the small and intensely literate world of pre-war Jerusalem, such a paper was both a news source and an instrument of communal self-examination.

War and Closure

The First World War ended Moriah's career. The newspaper was shut down by the Ottoman authorities on 11 January 1915, the twenty-fifth of Tevet in the Hebrew year 5675, at the height of the war, after Yellin breached the order to refrain from dealing with political matters. Accounts of Yellin's life described the same event in personal terms: Moriah was closed in 1915, during the war, under a decree of the Turkish authorities, after Yellin refused to follow the decree that forbade newspapers to write about political issues. The closing was final. Unlike some Jerusalem papers that reappeared under changed names or after the war under a new regime, Moriah did not resume publication when Ottoman rule in Palestine ended. Its run, from May 1910 to January 1915, remained a closed chapter of less than five years, bounded at its start by an Ottoman publishing permit and at its end by an Ottoman closure order.

Yellin's Later Work

The closure of Moriah did not end its editor's career in print or in education. Among the other newspapers that Yellin wrote, edited and published were Lefi Sha'a and Be'inyanei Dyuma, which were printed during the First World War, as well as the weekly newspaper Hed Ha'am, published in 1924 and 1925. He was also a member of the daily newspaper Do'ar Hayom and later wrote for Ha'aretz. His work as a Hebrew teacher continued in print as well: he wrote two grammar books for teaching Hebrew, The Punctuation Book in 1921 and The Verbs Book in 1930, which were distributed and used as the basis for teaching the Hebrew language in Torah schools and colleges, and he also published a detailed book about grammar as an element in Jewish law. For his achievements and his work for Jerusalem and its people, Yellin was presented with the Ot HaRishonim badge of the city of Jerusalem. All of his literary and journalistic inheritance was donated to the Yad Ben-Zvi institute in Jerusalem, where a corner was dedicated to his memory.

Survival in the Archives

Although the newspaper itself was short-lived, its issues survived. The National Library of Israel held an archive of Moriah, and a full-text search version of the paper was made available through the Historical Jewish Press project, which collected Jewish newspapers published in various countries, languages and periods and opened them to researchers and the general public. Through that archive, the daily and weekly issues that Jerusalem readers had handled between 1910 and 1915 remained available long after the printing house that produced them had disappeared. The survival of a searchable run mattered for scholarship: Moriah was one of the few sustained Hebrew voices of Jerusalem's Orthodox community in the final Ottoman years, and its pages preserved the concerns, language and internal debates of the Old Yishuv at a moment just before the First World War transformed the city. Historians of the Hebrew press and of Jerusalem could therefore consult the paper directly rather than relying only on later summaries of it.

Legacy

Moriah's legacy rested on the position it had created rather than on the length of its life. In 1951, a retrospective article in the religious newspaper HaTzofe described Moriah as the father of the religious press in the Land, a judgement that placed the small Jerusalem paper at the head of a tradition that later produced a substantial Orthodox press in Israel. The description fitted the paper's historical role: it had shown, before the First World War, that a Haredi newspaper could be produced daily in Jerusalem, could speak to its own community with free expression and objectivity, and could campaign for the reform of that community's public conduct without abandoning Orthodox life. Its founding filled the vacancy left by Habazeleth, its editorship gave Jerusalem's Old Yishuv a distinctive and argumentative Hebrew voice, and its closure by the Ottoman authorities in January 1915 recorded the limits placed on that voice in wartime. Remembered through its surviving archive and through Yellin's papers at Yad Ben-Zvi, Moriah remained a key source for the history of Jerusalem, of the Old Yishuv and of the Hebrew press in the last years of Ottoman Palestine.