JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

People’s University.” Dubnow was one of the founders and
directors of the Jewish Historico-Ethnographical Society and
from 1909 to 1918 editor of its quarterly Yevreyskaya Starina.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, Dubnow was asked to
participate in the work of various committees appointed to
prepare publications on Jewish themes; none of this work
was ever published.
In 1922 he left Russia. A proposal for him to become
professor of Jewish history at the University of Kovno met
with the opposition of the Lithuanian professors, and Dubnow
settled in Berlin, where he stayed until 1933. When Hitler
came to power, Dubnow found refuge in Riga, the capital
of Latvia. There the aged scholar continued his work in solitude,
but with undiminished vigor. Riga was captured by the
Germans in July 1941, and in a night of terror, on December
8, 1941, when the Jewish community was deported to a death
camp, Dubnow was murdered by a Gestapo officer, a former
pupil of his.
Dubnow’s lifework was the study of Jewish history, of the
relevant source material, and its “sociological” interpretation.
He began with the evaluation of such men as I.B. *Levinsohn,
*Shabbetai Ẓevi, and Jacob *Frank and his sect (Razsvet, 1881;
Voskhod, 1882). This he followed by a study of *Ḥasidism
(Voskhod, 1888–93; Ha-Pardes, 1894; Ha-Shiloʾaḥ, 1901). Dubnow
then published a series of documents and studies on Jewish
life in Eastern Europe (Voskhod, 1893–95). He translated H.
Graetz’s Volkstuemliche Geschichte der Juden (1881) into Russian,
with an introduction on the philosophy of Jewish history.
When the censor prohibited the publication of the translation,
Dubnow published his introduction separately (Voskhod, 1893;
also in German, 1897, 19212; in English, Jewish History, translated
by Henrietta Szold, 1903; and Hebrew, 1953). In 1896,
he published in two volumes an adaptation in Russian of S.
Baeck’s Geschichte des juedischen Volkes und seiner Literatur
(1878), and of M. Brann’s book of the same title (1893), adding
a chapter on the history of the Jews in Poland and Russia. In
his introduction, for the first time, Dubnow stated his main
thesis of Jewish history as a succession of “centers” and their
“hegemony” (see below).
In 1898, he began writing his series of works on Jewish
history, based on the works of Baeck and Brann: An Outline
of Jewish History (3 vols., 1925–29; Russian, 1901–05, 19102, and
translated into many languages); History of the Jews in Russia
and Poland (3 vols., 1916–20; Russ., 1914, and translated into
several languages); and finally his world history of the Jewish
people, first published in German (Die Weltgeschichte des juedischen
Volkes, 10 vols., 1925–29), then in Hebrew (1923–38)
and Yiddish (1948–58). A version in the Russian original was
published between 1934 and 1938. In 1940 an 11th volume was
published in Hebrew, updating the work to World War II.
An English translation by M. Spiegel began to appear in 1967.
Although engaged in the writing of general Jewish history,
Dubnow did not neglect research into its details. Thus, in
1922, he published the pinkas of the Council of Lithuania for
the years 1623–1761. At the age of 70 Dubnow summarized his
dubnow, simon
lifelong study of Ḥasidism in his history of Ḥasidism (Hebrew,
1930–32, many reprints; German, 2 vols., 1931). He also served
as an editor of the Russian and English Jewish encyclopedias.
Dubnow’s activities in the field of journalism began with the
foreign editorship of Razsvet (1881–83), and from 1883 to 1908
he was the literary critic of Voskhod.
Dubnow believed that his study of history gave him the
key to the understanding of the past, enabled him to work for
the improvement of the present, and even provided the solution
for the future of the Jewish people. According to him
the Jewish people in the Diaspora lost some of the attributes
which normally ensure the continuous existence of a people.
As a “natural” compensation it developed instead a special social
system and communal ideology. Through these the Jewish
people was able to exist in foreign countries in a state of judicial
autonomy and spiritual independence. In every period
there had been a Jewish community which had been more
successful than others in maintaining self-rule and national
creativity, and it was this community which became the “center”
and exercised “hegemony.” In the early Middle Ages it was
Babylon, taking over from the Palestinian “center”; this was
followed by Spain and the Rhineland; in the late Middle Ages
and the beginning of the Modern Age it was the *Councils of
the Lands of Poland-Lithuania. During the Middle Ages, the
Jews became a “European” people, and they have remained
one. Dubnow believed that not only was it possible to establish
in modern times a regime of internal independence
within the framework of a foreign country, but also that such
a regime would rest on firmer foundations and would be
more highly developed than during the Middle Ages. At this
point he showed the influence of ideas, prevalent in his time,
for a “State of Nationalities,” which could preserve the unity
of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires while satisfying
the demands for self-rule of the various peoples living in
them. The exceptional situation of the Jewish people during
the Middle Ages could become a rule of life for many peoples
and states in Europe. In this new period of Jewish history, the
“center” would be Russian-Polish, with its spiritual strength
and aspirations for self-rule. It was Dubnow’s hope that under
the new conditions Jewish creativity would lose the religious
character which it had acquired in the talmudic period and
the Middle Ages. Yiddish would be the language in which the
new Jewish culture would express itself.
Dubnow’s ideas placed him in strong opposition to both
Zionism and the various forms of assimilation. In the course
of time he became less outspoken in his anti-Zionist attitude
but did not give up his basic stand (cf. the amended and “expurgated”
Hebrew version of his “Letters on the Old and the
New Judaism,” 1937, with the original Russian version, 1907).
In a series of articles published during World War I in Novy
Voskhod, he outlined his position on the Jewish problem, demanding
an international solution. In Istoriya yevreyskogo
soldata (“History of a Jewish Soldier,” 1918; French, 1929), he
described the tragic situation of a Jew serving in a non-Jewish
army.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 35