The Hebrew newspaper
The Russian newspaper
The liberal reforms enacted by Tsar Aleksandr II (r. 1855–1881) at the outset of his rule, which included among others a letup in cencorship., encouraged Samuel Joseph Fuenn (1818–1891) to submit a request for a licence to the authorities in order to publish a weekly newspaper in Hebrew that would include supplements in Russian and German. Fuenn, who was at that time also a supervisor and teacher of Bible and Hebrew at the state sponsored rabbinical seminary in Vilnius, also served as an inspector for the district's Jewish schools and was one of the editors of a Hebrew periodical which appeared briefly in Vilnius during 1841 under the name Pirḥey Tsafon (Heb. ‘Northern Flowers’). Fuenn’s efforts bore fruit—apparently, his connexions with representatives of the Tsarist régime proved of help—and four years later, he received the desired license. Thus, on 26 June 1860, the first issue of ha-Karmel was published in Vilnius, preceding Aleksander ha-Kohen Zederbaum’s ha-Melits (Heb. ‘The Advocate’) in Odessa by five months and thus earning the title of the first Hebrew weekly in Russia. The license that Fuenn obtained for the newspaper did not allow him to publish articles on matters of statecraft or politics and, for this reason, he limited himself to dealing with matters literary and relevant to Jewish culture. This restriction impaired ha-Karmel’s ability to compete with ha-Maggid (Heb. ‘The Preacher’), which had appeared since 1856 in the Prussian city of Lyck (today Ełk, Poland), just across the border, and which was not subject to similar constraints. Nevertheless, the character of the newspaper fit the nature and outlook of Fuenn, who was not, as Gedaliah Elkoshi (1910–1988) observed, a crusading journalist, ‘but a scholar, linguist, and lexicographer, lodged underneath the tent of Torah’.
Indeed, Fuenn’s approach as an editor and guiding force of the newspaper was generally compromising on subjects that stirred controversy and, unlike the frequent, sharp editorials that Aleksander Zederbaum published in ha-Melits, demonstrating the latter's total commitment to open intellectual enquiry, Fuenn withheld from taking a stance on current events and from expressing opinions that might antagonise his Orthodox readership.
The format of ha-Karmel as crystallized during its first year fo appearance included two principal sections: the first one was informative, with news from the ‘Jewish arena’ (in Russia and abroad), and with occasional publication of translations of official edicts. For news on the Jewish world, ha-Karmel (like its counterparts ha-Maggid and ha-Melits) relied upon correspondents who sent reports to the staff from both within Russia and outside of the country. While news from Palestine was copied from ha-Levanon
(Heb. ‘The Lebanon’), which began to appear in Jerusalem in 1863, ‘general Jewish news’ was taken from the German-Jewish press. The other section of ha-Karmel was scientific and theoretical and was called ha-Sharon (Heb. ‘The Sharon’); throughout the years of its existence, a number of the leading figures in Hebrew literature and letters of the period contributed to its pages. The German-language supplement, to which Fuenn had committed upon receipt of the license for publishing the newspaper was in effect omitted already during the first year and the Russian-language supplement did not appear regularly during the first three years. Ḥayyim Löb Judah Katzenellenbogen (c. 1814–1876), one of the leaders of the Hebrew intellectual community in Vilnius, as well as linguist, and religious scholar in his own right, who had collaborated with Fuenn already on Pirḥey Tsafon endeavour, dealt with the editing and physical printing of ha-Karmel
. From its third year (1863), ha-Karmel was published in the printing house owned by Fuenn and his partners. The scope of the newspaper’s circulation did not exceed a few hundred and, for most of its existence, it suffered from a paucity of subscribers.
From an ideological stand point, ha-Karmel
reflected the values of the Jewish Enl