ZHITLOVSKY Chaim (Khaim) (1865, Ushachi, Vitebsk Province – 1943, Calgary, Canada), publicist, theorist of socialist autonomism, and staunch Yiddishist.

Chaim Zhiltovski was the son of an enlightened and deeply religious merchant. He attended cheder and studied Russian and secular sciences at home. He studied at the Vitebsk Gymnasium, where in 1878 he befriended S. Ansky, under whose influence he became fascinated with Narodniki and in 1882 left his home and studies to ‘go to the people.’ However, under the influence of M. Lilienblum's articles, Zhitlovsky soon decided to combine participation in the Russian revolutionary movement with the struggle for the rights of the Jewish people. Nevertheless, when he founded a group of the People's Will party in Vitebsk with his Russian friends in 1884 and proposed the formation of a Jewish organisation within the party, its leadership accused Zhitlovsky of separatism, and his attempt in 1888 to establish the publication of socialist literature in Yiddish in Zurich was called ‘Jewish fantasies’ by his Russian comrades. After publishing his work ‘Thoughts on the Historical Destiny of the Jewish People’ in Russian in 1887, Zhitlovsky continued to actively participate in the Narodnik movement and in 1893 became one of the seven founders of the Union of Russian Socialist Revolutionaries Abroad (the core of the future Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which Zhitlovsky joined when it was formed in 1901–1902) and editor of the organisation's magazine Russky Rabochiy (Russian Worker). In his philosophical works, published in 1895–96 in German and Russian journals, Zhitlovsky criticised dogmatic Marxism, arguing, in particular, that materialism was incompatible with ‘dialectical logic,’ and defended the ‘subjective sociology’ of P. Lavrov and N. Mikhailovsky.

In 1892, Zhitlovsky received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Bern. In the same year, Zhitlovsky published a brochure in Russian entitled ‘A Jew to the Jews’ in a Narodnik publishing house in London, in which he called on the Jewish intelligentsia to return to their people. In this pamphlet, Zhitlovsky argued that Jews needed not civil but national equality, since they were an independent people (‘not 4% of someone else, but 100% of themselves’); that the parasitic nature of Jewish economic life could be remedied by the formation of Jewish agricultural cooperatives; that the Jewish working class could become the backbone of the Jewish socialist movement and that Jews should participate in the all-Russian revolutionary struggle. This was one of the first formulations of the idea of autonomism, which differed from the principles proclaimed five years later by S. Dubnov in its sharply socialist and revolutionary orientation. Zhitlovsky contrasted his idea with that of Zionism in his work ‘Zionism or Socialism’ (1898), published in Der Yiddisher Arbeiter, the organ of the Bund, with which he had become close at that time. In the article Dos Yiddishe Folk un di Yiddishe Shprakh (The Jewish People and the Yiddish Language, 1904) for the non-partisan newspaper Freind and in many other articles, Zhitlovsky defends the idea of the viability of Jewish culture in the countries of the Diaspora.

After the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, Zhitlovsky leaned towards territorialism. Still rejecting Zionism, maintaining ties with the Socialist Revolutionaries and cooperating with the Socialist Jewish Labour Party, Zhitlovsky continued to search for a synthesis of international socialism and national forms of culture and social life, attempting to combine autonomism and territorialism, that is, recognising the need for Jews to have their own land, where most of the people would be concentrated, but remaining faithful to the idea of a worldwide union of Jewish workers. In 1904, Zhitlovsky was sent by the Socialist Revolutionaries to the United States to promote their cause and raise funds. He returned to Russia briefly, and in 1908 he chaired the Chernivtsi Conference on the Yiddish language, after which he settled permanently in New York, where he published the monthly magazine Dos Naye Lebn (1908–13) and contributed to Tog and other periodicals, devoting his journalism to promoting a socialist structure for Jewish life and the Yiddish language. He visited Eretz Israel in 1914, which was regarded by Zhitlovsky as only one of the potential centres of world Jewry. In 1916–17, Zhitlovsky formally joined the Poale Zion party and in 1918 signed a proclamation calling for the creation of a Jewish Legion. In 1929–30, he boycotted the communist newspaper Freiheit for its pro-Arab statements.

In 1936, influenced by the Nazi victory in Germany, Zhitlovsky took a friendly position towards the Soviet Union, and in the Jewish settlements in Birobidzhan he saw the embodiment of his idea of freedom of national development in a multinational socialist state. Zhitlovsky even found justification for the Moscow trials of 1936–38, thereby alienating many of his friends. But Zhitlovsky finally isolated himself completely with his statements that the Nazi ‘Anschlus’ was retribution for the artificial division of a single national organism by borders, and that the actions against the Jews were revenge for their ‘parasitism’ and unwillingness to engage in agriculture. These statements by Zhitlovsky were eagerly picked up by Nazi propaganda.

Through his essays and journalistic writings, Zhitlovsky significantly enriched the scientific and philosophical vocabulary of the Yiddish language and contributed to its development. Zhitlovsky's archive and library were donated to the YSO ( Yiddish Studies Organization, New York) in accordance with his will.