Shimon (Simon) Dubnow
Shimon Dubnow was born in 1860, in White Russia, and
was murdered in 1941 by the Nazi regime during the liquidation of the
Riga ghetto. He is most renowned for his studies pertaining to Jewish
history, and has been noted as one of the first scholars to research
and publish his findings on Russian-Jewish history, and Jewish history
at large. His studies have also been noted as embodying both a secular,
national and modern perspective on and of the Jewish population living
during his time. In addition to his being a historian, he was also well
acclaimed as a publicist, politician and political thinker. It was said
that he was influenced by the liberal political culture of Western Europe,
which helped him to semi- unbiasly and properly analyze the Jewish history
of the period. For the most part, his fundemental beliefs aligned themselves
along the line of his desire for the Jewish people to reach a balance
through which they were able to achieve their civil obligations, while
securing thier autonomy and maintaining their Jewish culture and religion.
For his time, his extensive memoirs were termed the
"encyclopedia of Jewish life," and made him the historian
of his time. However, most of his works focused in on everyday social
and economic aspects of Jewish life, placing less emphasis on the portrayal
of traditional historical methods of study. His autobiography included
various reports and commentaries made by then prominant intellectual
contemporaries. He also was known to have documented key events in Jewish,
and general history, from the periods between the late 19th into the
first half of the 20th century.
Some of his works include the translation of Heinrich
Graetz's Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden into Russian,at the
age of 21, while his Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes von den
Uranfängen bis zur Gegenwart, whichfirst appeared in 10 volumes
in German during the 1920s. Furthermore, he published his views pertaning
to Jewish history in several theoretical pieces on Judaism, Jewish history
and its historiography. A prime example is the treatise, What is Jewish
History? (1893), translated from Russian into German and published in
1897. More widely known were his Letters on Ancient and Modern Judaism,
published in the journal Voskhod between the years 1897 and 1903.
Wishing to escape his strict background, Dubnow late
lived in such cities as St. Peterburg, Odessa and Vilna. It was at that
time that he became involved in the social struggle of the Russian Jews,
from the era of reform under Alexander II until the first years of Soviet
rule. Perhaps not realizing it at the time, it was during this period
that he came into contact, and debated with the central personalities
from the circle of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia (Ginsburg, Frug,
Kagan, Kulisher, Lifschitz, Kantor et al.), and learned of the Jewish
plight. His experiences later allowed him to fully comprehend, and become
one of the critical commentators of the pogroms, which took place in
the late Tsarist empire and the great revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
He was able to publish his political perspectives in an array of essays,
which were published in the journals Voskhod, Russkii evrei and elsewhere.
One of many such articles is his "What Kind of Auto-Emancipation
do the Jews Need?", written in 1883.
Shortly after the collapse of the Tsarist empire Dubnow
decided to emigrate to Berlin. He once again took up his anthropological
and sociological studies concerning the similarities and differences
between the eastern and western Jewries in the Prussian metropolis.
Some of his works also indicate his observations and reflections on
the rise of National Socialism in Germany. From the age of sixty -two
till seventy-three, Dubnow lived in Berlin. Due to his popularity and
general respect within the community,on September 24, 1930 the scholarly
world celebrated his seventith birthday in the city. When the Nazis
seized power in 1933, he found himself compelled to leave Germany, however,
although he had been offered an immigrant visa to the United States,
he chose to immigrate to an area where he already had family in Riga;
this later would prove to be a fatal decision, seeing as in time the
Nazi regime came to occupy the city.