Abraham Baer Gottlober (pseudonyms Abag and Mahalalel, 1810–1899), Hebrew and Yiddish writer and poet. Born in Staro-Konstantinov (Volhynia), Gottlober was taken to Tarnopol (now Ternopol), Galicia, by his father at the age of 17. In Galicia he came in contact with the Haskalah, of which he was a staunch advocate most of his life, and met Joseph Perl in 1828. Upon his return to Volhynia, his pious father-in-law, violently opposed to his secular studies, compelled him to divorce his wife. Gottlober, embittered by the affair, developed a hostility toward orthodoxy and Hasidism which found satiric expression in his writings. At 19 he remarried and moved to Podolia where, under the influence of Menahem Mendel Levin's works, he began writing in Yiddish and in Hebrew. He wandered from place to place, living between 1830 and 1850 in Bessarabia, Berdichev, and Kremenets. In Kremenets he married for the third time and befriended I. B. Levinsohn. Upon obtaining a government teaching license in 1850 he taught school until 1865 when he was appointed instructor of Talmud at the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir. There he remained until the government closed down the seminary in 1873.