Small Riga Ghetto

147
Professor Simon Dubnow
and His Final Journey
I have set myself a difficult task: writing a chapter dedicated to our great historian
of this century, Professor Simon Dubnow.
Although this is not easy for me, I have to do it nonetheless, because apart
from the fact that his last journey is bound up with the churbn of Latvia, I am
one of the few survivors to have had the great honor of seeing him — if not in
his final hours, then at least in the final days before he died.
Professor Simon Dubnow was born on 23 September 1860 in the city of
Mstislawl (Mogilew under the Russian government). As a young man he left
the tschertha-osiedlosci (the Jewish pale, or area reserved for Jews) and moved
to Petersburg. There, in the former capital of Russia, he started as a young
man to work for the Jewish journal "Woschod" (Sunrise). Later he moved to
Odessa. There he decided to dedicate his life to Jewish history. For this reason
he was attracted to Vilno, great Jewish Vilno, the Jerusalem of Lithuania. In
this city he found the right place for himself and the right surroundings for his
work (Dr. Zemach Schabad, Dr. Wigodski and others). From that point on,
life in Vilno was closely bound up with Dubnow's scholarly studies. Wherever
he could, he promoted his newly adopted home city and tried to attract the
greatest Jewish public figures to it.
Later on, before World War I (1914), he went to Russia and remained there
until the outbreak of the great Bolshevik October Revolution. Then he moved
for a short time to Kovno in Lithuania. He finally found a permanent place to
do his work in Berlin. There he wrote his well-known ten-volume history of
the Jewish people and his history of Hasidism.
Professor Dubnow explained the riddle of how Judaism had survived for
thousands of years by means of his theory of its wandering centers (Palestine,
Babylon, Persia, Spain, Poland, Russia, America, and once again Palestine).
Furthermore, he argued that the influence of religion on Judaism had weakened
greatly in recent times, and he ascribed this fact to the secularization of
Jewish culture. Accordingly, Professor Dubnow was criticized for having underestimated
the significance of the Jewish religion as a factor in the preservation
of Judaism.
When National Socialism in Germany forced Dubnow to look for a new
place to settle, he chose Riga, the capital of the small Republic of Latvia.
In the beautiful Riga suburb of Mežaparks (Kaiserwald) he created a new
Jewish intellectual center, and the Professor's white villa, nestling deep in the