Jacob Moiseyovych Eichenbaum (Yiddish: יעקב בן־משה אייכענבוים, Ukrainian: Я́ків Мойсе́йович Ейхенба́ум; 12 October 1796 – 27 December 1861), born Jacob Gelber, was a Galician Jewishmaskil, educator, poet and mathematician.
By the age of eleven, he was already in his first marriage, but it didn't last long until the divorce, as his father-in-law suspected that he was a secularist.[3] In 1815, when he was eighteen, he remarried, adopted the name "Eichenbaum" and settled in Zamość.[1] There he encountered a progressive Jewish youth circle, and began studying Hebrew, German, philosophy, and (in particular) mathematics.[2] In 1819, he translated Euclid's Elements from German into Hebrew.[1]
He worked as a travelling private tutor,[1] teaching Hebrew subjects and mathematics in wealthy households throughout Ukraine.[2] In 1835, Eichenbaum opened a private school for Jewish children in Odesa,[1] which had become an important educational centre for Ukrainian Jews.[2] In 1836, he published Kol Zimrah,[1] one of the first books of Modern Hebrew poetry published in the Haskalah period.[2] In 1840, he published Ha-Kerav, a poetry book describing a variety of chess moves in verse.[4]
Eichenbaum's educational and literary work attracted the attention of the Russian government, which advanced his position in the Jewish education system of the Russian Empire.[5] In 1844, Eichenbaum was appointed as director of the Bessarabian Jewish school in Chișinău, and in 1850, he was appointed as chief inspector of a Yeshiva in Zhytomyr,[6] a position which he maintained until his death.[5]
During his final years, he continued to publish works of mathematics and poetry.[5] In 1857, he published a Hebrew arithmetic textbook, Ḥokhmat ha-Shi'urim,[6] which he had adapted from a work in the French language.[3] In 1861, he wrote an allegorical poem, Ha-Kosem, which he published in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melitz.[5]
On 27 December 1861, Jacob Eichenbaum died in Kyiv.[2]
