ZEITLIN, WILLIAM

ZEITLIN, WILLIAM (Ze'ev; c. 1850–1921), bibliographer. Born in Gomel, a member of the Zeitlin family of Shklov, he began at an early age to write poems and to translate from Russian. In the early 1870s he went to Germany to study. After several efforts at creative writing, he turned to bibliography, becoming an outstanding expert, especially in those fields which he pioneered, such as contemporary Jewish literature, the Haskalah, and Zionism. His major work, Bibliotheca Hebraica Post-Mendelssohniana (1891–95), in which he lists the Hebrew Haskalah literature from its beginnings to the end of the 1880s, still remains an invaluable aid for the study of that literature. In this book, published in German, only the titles of the works are listed in Hebrew. He also published lists of pseudonyms, the death dates of scholars and writers, and similar material. In Ha-Maggid (1873), 5–6, he published, in Hebrew, the first bibliographical article on the Hebrew press. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A.M. Habermann, in: Yad la-Koré, 2 (1951), 146–50; Kressel, Leksikon, 2 (1967), 716. (Getzel Kressel)