The Legacy of Dubnov and Eastern European Jewry in Israeli Scholarship

In a 1936 article to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of Simon Dubnov, published in the first volume of Zion, the journal of the Historical Society of Israel, the historian Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973) wrote:

Dubnov’s critique of Zionism does not stem from the foundations of his views; on the contrary, Dubnov’s fundamental assumptions support Zionism in all respects. It is clear: the “spiritual essence” of the nation of which Dubnov speaks is not some metaphysical “essence” [. . .] it is a mental backdrop that binds the shared lives of the people of the nation [. . .]. This “spiritual essence” requires the existence of a real framework, where each member of the national collective can be “whole as he is”; that is, the “logical conclusion” of the “spiritual essence” is precisely the “Jewish State.”

How did the historiographical doctrine of the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnov (1860–1941) unfold—spreading from St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Riga to the emerging center of the New Yishuv in Palestine—gain a Zionist interpretation, and become part of the fabric of modern Hebrew culture? In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, hundreds of Russian Jewish intellectuals settled in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. These men and women played an influential role in the development of modern Hebrew culture and in shaping the political, social, and organizational infrastructure of the New Yishuv. Writers, poets, painters, sculptors, philosophers, journalists, and educators had been exposed to Western cultural influences through the imperial (Russian) language of their homeland, in the years prior to emigrating. They brought with them from Tsarist Russia the variations of Jewish modernism in an Eastern European key, injecting them into the Jewish cultural center of Ottoman Palestine.

Many of them had acquired their knowledge of Jewish history from studying Heinrich Graetz’s (1817–1891) landmark work Geschichte der Juden in its Hebrew translation by Shaul Pinchas Rabbinowicz (alias ShePheR, 1845–1910). In its Hebrew translation published in Imperial Russia, Graetz’s monumental history was a kind of textual way station between the German Wissenschaft of the nineteenth century and the Zionist historiography of Eretz Israel in the twentieth. Thus, it is quite fitting to open a discussion of the story of the reception (Rezeptionsgeschichte) of the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnov in Israeli culture in general and by the historians of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University (the so-called Jerusalem School) in particular, with mention of Graetz’s work.

The migration of Jewish national historiography from Eastern and Central Europe to Ottoman Palestine was part of a multicultural, transnational network that sprung from the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews) in Berlin, spreading to Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Odessa, and from there to London, New York, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Dubnov’s multifaceted body of work played a fundamental role in this “historiographical migration,” representing a classic case of writing Jewish history in a national spirit. His works posed a challenging non-Zionist antithesis to studies by the historians of the new Jerusalem School, precisely because of their proximity to Zionist historiography. In the early twentieth century, their influence expanded beyond the small Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in British Mandate Palestine to later become accepted in academic institutions throughout the State of Israel.

Dubnov regarded the small scholarly community associated with the Hebrew University, joined by Eastern European Jewish Wissenschaft scholars from centers that were being liquidated by the new regime in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, as an intellectual-political extension of the Russian-Jewish national cultural milieu. Among local scholars in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Dubnov was considered a great teacher and founding father of the national historiographical school, even though they did not accept his support for the diasporic status of the Jewish nation. Indeed, they objected to his concept of contemporary Jewish autonomy in European countries, as well as to his vision of shifting centers in Jewish history.

Dubnov’s colleagues in Jerusalem and Tel...