Micha Yosef Berdyczewski was a Ukrainian-born writer, journalist and Hebrew scholar who is best known for his modernist writings on the Jewish faith. The son of a rabbi, Berdyczewski was raised in a traditional Hasidic household, but turned to secular literature in his youth. Strongly influenced by the haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, he began publishing widely in the Hebrew press; in the years 1899–1900, Berdyczewski published two novellas that became highly influential in the world of Hebrew modernism and deeply affected the next generation of Hebrew writers, Makhanayim (Two Camps) and Urvah parakh (Nonsense).