Dubnow, Simon

(1860–1941)

   Jewish historian. Dubnow grew up in White Russia and worked in Odessa and St Petersburg. He settled in Berlin in 1922. since he was unable to continue publishing in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1933 when Hitler came to power, he moved to Riga. After the Nazi occupation of Latvia in 1941, the aged scholar was shot by a Gestapo officer.

   Dubnow’s lifelong research and writings culminated in his monumental ten- volume world history of the Jewish people, published first in German and then in Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish and English as well. His other major works were the three-volume History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (1916–20; orig. Rus., 1914) and a two-volume history of Chassidism (1930–2).

   Dubnow’s basic premise was that the Jews had lost the territorial and political attributes of a normal nation-state, but had maintained their identity in different lands as autonomous centres with a common culture. In each period a particular centre had been dominant - Palestine, Babylonia, Spain, the Rhineland, eastern Europe. The Jewish future lay in developing this concept of Galut Nationalism, or autonomism, with Yiddish as a common language.

   In 1906 he founded the Folkspartei (Jewish People’s Party) to spread this ideology, but it remained small, and was attacked by assimilationists, Zionists and Bundists. It was echoed in the minorities treaties in the post-war successor states.

   But the collapse of the great European empires, the establishment of the Soviet Union, the growth of the Zionist yishuv in Palestine and the emergence of Hitler in Germany radically changed the pre-war Jewish world that had shaped Dubnow’s ideas. In his last years he started to move closer to Zionism.