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He was born on May 23, 1863 in Rietavas, Russia (now Lithuania), the son of David and Rachel (Zundelewitz) Selikovitsch.
As a youngster his brilliant record as a student in Hebrew and the Talmud won him the reputation of a boy prodigy.
He attended several Talmudic schools and was tutored privately in the Russian and German languages and in secular subjects. In 1879 he went to Paris, where he studied at the Ecole des Hautes, displaying a special aptitude for oriental languages, mastering Egyptian, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Sanskrit and their literatures. He was graduated in 1884.
In 1885 he was engaged by the British war office as chief interpreter to Lord Wolseley for the Arabic and Nubian dialects during the British expedition to relieve General Gordon from the Sudanese at Khartum, but was released from his duties when it was suspected that he was sympathetic with the natives.
Before his return to France he visited Abyssinia, Morocco, Algeria, and Asia Minor, familiarizing himself with the life and customs of the natives and their tongues. The results of his travels and researches published in French and Hebrew journals gained for him a wide reputation.
He came to the United States in 1887 and lectured on hieroglyphics and Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He had hoped to follow an academic career, but personal reasons compelled him to relinquish this idea, and he thereafter took up Yiddish journalism as a profession.
For several years he edited Yiddish periodicals in Boston, Chicago, and New York City, and in 1901 he joined the staff of the Jewish Daily News in New York City, with which he was associated until his death.
Of his Hebrew works which attracted commendation are Ziure Mass (Warsaw, 1910), travel sketches of Africa, and Torath Buddha (New York, 1922), an excellent translation into Hebrew from the Sanskrit of the Tripitaka. His treatises in other languages include The Dawn of Egyptian Civilization (1887), published also in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, May 1887.
He died in 1926.
In addition to scholarly contributions in French and Hebrew, Goetzel Selikovitsch also wrote in Yiddish feuilletons, poems and trivial novels: Ziure Mass, travel sketches of Africa, and Torath Buddha, The Dawn of Egyptian Civilization. His Yiddish journalism gained him worthwhile recognition for the weekly column, which he conducted for a number of years in the Jewish Daily News entitled "Literatur un Lomdos".
He was fond of life and of living, possessed a keen sense of humor, and took a vivid interest in everything that went on about him. He had extraordinary erudition and phenomenal linguistic knowledge.
