In Memoriam: Jonathan Frankel, 1935–2008

Jonathan Frankel, who was Professor Emeritus in Russian studies and modern Jewish history at The Hebrew University, died in Jerusalem on May 7, 2008, at age seventy-two. With his passing, the world of Jewish studies lost one of its seminal thinkers, an honored colleague and teacher, and, to those who were privileged to have known him, a beloved friend.

Although Frankel is perhaps chiefly remembered as a scholar of Russia and Russian Jewry, in fact his oeuvre broadly embraced the history of modern Europe, Israel and Zionism, and the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States. Like Simon Dubnov (the iconic "father" of Russian Jewish historiography) before him, Frankel understood that Jewish history must be a Weltgeschichte. The link is not accidental: when writing an introduction to Sophie Dubnov-Erlich's biography of her father, Frankel pointed admiringly to Dubnov's innovations in the field of Jewish historiography, including some that were the hallmarks of Frankel's own scholarship: "[He] emphasized the impact of external political factors on the internal life of the Jews . . .[and] he rightly predicted as early as the turn of the [twentieth] century that Palestine and America were destined to be the new centers of the Jewish world. And that world, as he insisted it would be, is now multicentered."¹

Frankel's own lasting influence, as was abundantly clear in his lifetime, was also as an innovative and original scholar. Born in England, he completed his Ph.D. at Jesus College, Cambridge, under the tutelage of E. H. Carr. His magnum opus, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (1981), quickly became the gold standard for scholarship on Russian Jewish political movements before the Bolshevik Revolution. It challenged older perspectives on the supposed clash between socialism and nationalism by highlighting the common sources of both beliefs in the culture of Jewish student radicalism and in the ranks of the so-called "half-intellectuals," the youthful rebels of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. He closely parsed the ways in which the myriad competing camps across the modern Jewish political spectrum related to the compelling counter-claims of their rivals, so that the agenda of social revolution and political reform became intertwined with the pathos of national crisis and survival. Significantly, too, Frankel pointed to the transnational character of modern Jewish political development, indicating that strategies honed for recruiting Jewish workers to the radical cause in New York, in Yiddish, were subsequently adopted with equal success in Vilna.

Most scholars are considered blessed if they produce one such monumental work among the books and articles they leave to posterity. Jonathan Frankel's other definitive study, The Damascus Affair: Ritual Murder, Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (1997), rightfully placed him in a rare group of those who are twice blessed. In this uncompromising exploration of mid-nineteenth century imperialist rivalries and diplomacy, incipient Jewish politics, and the ever-persisting "Jewish question," Frankel masterfully integrated the Mediterranean "East" and the Sephardi realm with Western and Ashkenazi history.

Among his several other signal accomplishments, Frankel was the founding editor of the annual journal, Studies in Contemporary Jewry. From the beginning, back in 1980, Frankel and his team of co-editors, Ezra Mendelsohn and Peter Medding, envisioned this Israeli-based, U. S.-published, English-language journal as tying together the two major centers of Jewish scholarship across the cultural divide that seemed to separate them. Frankel guided the journal's formation as a clearinghouse for ideas, essays, and reviews in which veteran scholars as well as younger academics emerging from American, Israeli, and European universities achieved exposure in an old, Russian-style "thick journal."

The journal, steered by the aforementioned trio, was just one example of the impact within The Hebrew University's ranks of a group of Anglo-Americans who were drawn to Jerusalem in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, it should be noted that when the university was going through a major surge in the humanities and social sciences (alas, not replicated since), it was able to draw upon a ready reservoir of talented and committed Jewish academics from the English...