Simon Dubnow

Simon Dubnow was a Jewish-Russian historian, writer and activist.

Life and career

In 1860, Simon Dubnow was born Shimon Meyerovich Dubnow to a large poor family in the Belarusian town of Mstsislaw. A native Yiddish speaker, he received a traditional Jewish education in a heder and a yeshiva, where Hebrew was regularly spoken. Later Dubnow entered into a kazyonnoye yevreyskoe uchilishche where he learned Russian. In the midst of his education, the May Laws eliminated these Jewish institutions, and Dubnow was unable to graduate; Dubnow persevered, independently pursuing his interests in history, philosophy, and linguistics. He was particularly fascinated by Heinrich Graetz and the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
In 1880 Dubnow used forged documents to move to St Petersburg, officially off-limits to Jews. Jews were generally restricted to small towns in the Pale of Settlement, unless they had been discharged from the military, were employed as doctors or dentists, or could prove they were 'cantonists', university graduates or merchants belonging to the 1st guild. Here he married Ida Friedlin.
Soon after moving to St. Petersburg Dubnow's publications appeared in the press, including the leading Russian-Jewish magazine Voskhod. In 1890, the Jewish population was expelled from the capital city, and Dubnow too was forced to leave. He settled in Odesa and continued to publish studies of Jewish life and history, coming to be regarded as an authority in these areas.
Throughout his active participation in the contemporary social and political life of the Russian Empire, Dubnow called for modernizing Jewish education, organizing Jewish self-defense against pogroms, and demanding equal rights for Russian Jews, including the right to vote. Living in Vilna, Lithuania, during the early months of 1905 Russian Revolution, he became active in organizing a Jewish political response to opportunities arising from the new civil rights which were being promised. In this effort he worked with a variety of Jewish opinion, e.g., those favouring diaspora autonomy, Zionism, socialism, and assimilation.
In 1906 he was allowed back into St Petersburg, where he founded and directed the Jewish Literature and Historical-Ethnographic Society and edited the Jewish Encyclopedia. In the same year, he founded the Folkspartei with Israel Efrojkin, which successfully worked for the election of MPs and municipal councilors in interwar Lithuania and Poland. After 1917 Dubnow became a professor of Jewish history at Petrograd University.
He welcomed the first February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, regarding it, according to scholar Robert van Voren, as having "brought the long-anticipated liberation of the Jewish people", although he "felt uneasy about the increasing profile of Lenin". Dubnow did not consider such Bolsheviks as Trotsky to be Jewish, stating: "They appear under Russian pseudonyms because they are ashamed of their Jewish origins. But it would be better to say that their Jewish names are pseudonyms; they are not rooted in our people."
In 1922 Dubnow emigrated to Kaunas, Lithuania, and later to Berlin. His magnum opus was the ten-volume World History of the Jewish people, first published in German translation in 1925–1929. Of its significance, historian Koppel Pinson writes:

With this work Dubnow took over the mantle of Jewish national historian from Graetz. Dubnow's Weltgeschichte may in truth be called the first secular and purely scholarly synthesis of the entire course of Jewish history, free from dogmatic and theological trappings, balanced in its evaluation of the various epochs and regional groupings of Jewish historical development, fully cognizant of social and economic currents and influences ...

During 1927 Dubnow initiated a search in Poland for pinkeysim on behalf of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, while he was Chairman of its Historical Section. This spadework for the historian netted several hundred writings; one pinkes dated to 1601, that of the Kehillah of Opatów.
In August 1933, after Hitler came to power, Dubnow moved to Riga, Latvia. He chose Latvia in part for its government's support for Jewish self-reliance and the vigorous Jewish community in the small country. There existed a Jewish theater, various Jewish newspapers, and a network of Yiddish-language schools. There his wife died, yet he continued his activities, writing his autobiography Book of My Life, and participating in YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research. On the initiative of a Latvian Jewish refugee activist in Stockholm and with help from the local Jewish community in Sweden, Dubnow was granted a visa to Sweden in the summer of 1940 but for unknown reasons he never used it. Then in July 1941 Nazi troops occupied Riga. Dubnow was evicted, losing his entire library. With thousands of Jews, he was transferred to the Riga ghetto. According to the few remaining survivors, Dubnow repeated to ghetto inhabitants: Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt. He was among thousands of Jews to be rounded up there for the Rumbula massacre. Too sick to travel to the forest, he was murdered in the city on 8 December 1941. Several friends then buried Simon Dubnow in the old cemetery of the Riga ghetto.

Political ideals

Dubnow was ambivalent toward Zionism, which he felt was an opiate for the spiritually feeble. Despite being sympathetic to the movement's ideas, he believed its ultimate goal, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine achieved with international support and substantial Jewish immigration, to be politically, socially, and economically impossible, calling it "a beautiful messianic dream". In 1898, he projected that by the year 2000, there would only be about 500,000 Jews living in Palestine. Dubnow thought Zionism just another sort of messianism, and he thought the possibility of persuading the Jews of Europe to move to Palestine and establish a state fantastical. Beyond improbability, he worried that this impulse would drain energy away from the task of creating an autonomous Jewish center in the diaspora.
Much stronger than his skepticism towards Zionism, Dubnow rejected assimilation. He believed that the future survival of the Jews as a nation depended on their spiritual and cultural strength, where they resided dispersed in the diaspora. Dubnow wrote: "Jewish history the conviction that Jewry at all times, even in the period of political independence, was pre-eminently a spiritual nation," and he called the push for assimilation "national suicide".
His formulated ideology became known as Jewish Autonomism, once widely popular in eastern Europe, being adopted in its various derivations by Jewish political parties such as the Bund and his Folkspartei. Autonomism involved a form of self-rule in the Jewish diaspora, which Dubnow called "the Jewish world-nation". The Treaty of Versailles adopted a version of it in the minority provisions of treaties signed with new east European states. Yet in early 20th-century Europe, many political currents began to trend against polities that accommodated a multiethnic pluralism, as grim monolithic nationalism or ideology emerged as centralizing principles. After the Holocaust, and the founding of Israel, for a while discussion of Autonomism seemed absent from Jewish politics.

Regional history

Dubnow's political thought perhaps can better be understood in light of historical Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe. It flourished during the early period of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, when it surpassed the Ottoman Empire and western Europe as a center of Judaism. Dubnow here describes the autonomous social-economic and religious organization developed by the Jewish people under the Commonwealth government:

Constituting an historical nationality, with an inner life of its own, the Jews were segregated by the Government as a separate estate, an independent social body.... They formed an entirely independent class of citizens, and as such were in need of independent agencies of self-government and jurisdiction. The Jewish community constituted not only a national and cultural, but also a civil, entity. It formed a Jewish city within a Christian city, with its separate forms of life, its own religious, administrative, judicial, and charitable institutions. The Government of a country with sharply divided estates could not but legalize the autonomy of the Jewish Kahal." The Jews also did not speak Polish, but rather Yiddish, an Hebraicized German. "The sphere of the Kahal's activity was very large." "The capstone of this Kahal organization were the so-called Waads, the conferences or assemblies of rabbis and Kahal leaders. the highest court of appeal." Their activity "passed, by gradual expansion, from the judicial sphere into that of administration and legislation.

Each provincial council or Waad eventually joined with others to form a central governing body which began to meet regularly. Its name became "ultimately fixed as the Council of the Four Lands." These four lands were: Wielkopolska, Malopolska, Ruthenia, and Volhynia ; the fifth land Lithuania withdrew to form its own high Waad. The 'Council of the Four Lands' consisted of the six "leading rabbis of Poland" and a delegate from the principal Kahalem selected by their elders, in all about thirty members. "As a rule, the Council assembled in Lublin in early spring, between Purim and Passover, and in Yaroslav at the end of summer, before high holidays."

The Council or Wadd Arba Aratzoth "reminded one of the Sanhedrin, which in ancient days assembled... in the temple. They dispensed justice to all the Jews of the Polish realm, issued preventive measures and obligatory enactments, and imposed penalties as they saw fit. All difficult cases were brought before their court. To facilitate matters 'provincial judges' to settle disputes concerning property, while they themselves examined criminal cases, matters pertaining to hazaka and other difficult matters of law." "The Council of the Four Lands was the guardian of Jewish civil interests in Poland. It sent its shtadlans to the residential city of Warsaw and other meeting-places of the Polish Diets for the purpose of securing from the king and his dignitaries the ratification of the ancient Jewish privileges.... But the main energy of the Waad was directed toward the regulation of the inner life of the Jews. The statute of 1607, framed the Rabbi of Lublin, is typical of this solicitude. prescribed for the purpose of fostering piety and commercial integrity among the Jewish people.

This firmly-knit organization of communal self-government could not but foster among the Jews of Poland a spirit of discipline and obedience to the law. It had an educational effect on the Jewish populace, which was left by the Government to itself, and had no share in the common life of the country. It provided the stateless nation with a substitute for national and political self-expression, keeping public spirit and civic virtue alive in it, and upholding and unfolding its genuine culture.

Yet then the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth suffered grave problems of institutional imbalance. Eventually, the Commonwealth was removed from the map of Europe by successive partitions perpetrated by her three neighboring states, each an autocracy, the third and extinguishing partition coming in 1795. Following the Congress of Vienna the Russian Empire uneasily governed most of these Polish and Lithuanian lands, including the large Jewish populations long dwelling there. The Russian Empire first restricted Jewish residence to their pre-existing Pale of Settlement, and later began to further confine Jewish liberties and curtail their self-government. Not only were their rights attacked, but several of the Tzars allowed the imperial government to propagate and to instigate a series of murderous pogroms against the Jewish people of the realm.
In the cruel atmosphere of this ongoing political crisis in the region, Simon Dubnow wrote his celebrated histories and played an active rôle in Jewish affairs. He supported the broad movements for change in the Russian Empire; yet in the main he sought to restore and to continue the Jewish autonomy, described above at its zenith under the old Commonwealth, into the 20th century.
During his life various large and tragic events were to impact the region, which can be considered as the most horrific of places during the first half of the 20th century. Among these events, ranging from a few positive to news headlines to crimes against humanity, were: the pogroms, the co-opted 1905 Russian Revolution, the founding of the Folkspartei, the First World War, the February Revolution followed by the October Bolshevik, the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Versailles Treaty, the Polish–Soviet War, the Weimar inflation, the U.S.A. Immigration Act of 1924, exile of Leon Trotsky by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Gulag, the Great Depression, the Holodomor in Ukraine, the Nazi regime, the Nuremberg racial laws, Stalin's Great Purge, Kristallnacht, the 1939 White Paper, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Second World War, the Soviet-Nazi War, and the Shoah. The catastrophe of the genocide claimed the life of the aged historian.