Portrait of Sholem Aleichem

Birthday profile

Sholem Aleichem

Jewish writer and playwright of Yiddish, who worked in Russian Empire, Switzerland, Germany and the United States (1859-1916)

Born
March 14, 1859
Died
May 13, 1916
Zodiac sign
Pisces
Birth year
1859

About Sholem Aleichem

Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (Russian: Соломон Наумович Рабинович; March 2 [O.S. February 18] 1859 – May 13, 1916), better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem, was a Jewish author and playwright who wrote in Yiddish and lived in the Russian Empire and in the United States. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on Aleichem's stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The Hebrew phrase שלום עליכם (shalom aleichem) literally means "[May] peace [be] upon you!", and is a greeting in traditional Hebrew and Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem's first venture into writing was an alphabetic glossary of the epithets used by his stepmother.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Sholem Aleichem was born

Sholem Aleichem was born in 1859. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1859

  • Best-selling bookOn the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineJohn Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
  • Technology milestoneEdwin Drake drills first successful oil well (Pennsylvania)
  • World population~1.39B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderJames Buchanan
  • U.S. population29.2M

1859 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Sholem Aleichem's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18592026
Population29.2M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.