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Chapter 6 "Dialogue" with Heinrich Graetz, Polemic with Avram Harkavy: Simon Dubnov's Struggle for the Domination of Russian-Jewish Historiography, 1883-93 Simon Dubnov's relations with Heinrich Graetz reflect a nexus of intersecting tendencies of his life and thoughts in the key years when Dubnov was defining his mission in life. On the most surface level, Graetz's death sparked a strong emotional reaction, that of a student who finally decides to strive for intellectual independence. In his memoirs Dubnov relates: In my entry of the new year in 1892, I noted, "The aim of my life has become clear: the propagation of historical knowledge about Judaism and the scholarly study of Russian Jews. I had become a missionary of history as it were. To achieve this goal, I refrained from writing criticism and journalism. In those days I was fascinated with Graetz, whom I depicted in my long essay "The Historian of Judaism." The essay was written in an excited state, as you can judge from the following passionate tirades in the introduction: "With the battle cries of our time- Baron Hirsch, Argentina, the massive emigration of Russian Jews, conferences, committees in foreign lands-suddenly the terse announcement broke through the noisy choir: Graetz is dead! ... In those days when the coffin holding the remains of the deceased historian traveled from Munich to Breslav, along the whole Eastern Prussian border stretched a procession that was no less sad, although this procession was not ending in a funeral. Tens of thousands of sons of the ancient Jewish wanderers were leaving their fatherland and setting off across the sea in search of bread and a quiet comer [to rest] their insulted heart.. .. The historian has died; history is preparing material for the future Jewish martyrs... . Won't our memory memorialize him, the one who memorialized the entire past of our people in a single magisterial literary monument?"1 1 Dubnov, Kniga zhiZlli, 182-83. 100 EMPIRE JEWS In 1892, in that excited state, Dubnov set out on a new course that was to become decisive for his intellectual development. He decided to take the mantle from Graetz and become the most celebrated historian of the Jews in Russia. Gradually veering away from Graetz's approach to Jewish literary history toward social history, Dubnov began to question his own views of rationalism, rabbinical Judaism, and assimilation. At the same time Dubnov confronted Avram Harkavy, who was his main rival in Russia. It is my contention that not only Graetz, but Harkavy, too, was extremely influential in the formation of Dubnov's worldview. While Dubnov idealized Graetz, now a martyr, he attacked Harkavy, a living person, who had to absorb the brunt of Dubnov's polemics during the period of intense intellectual development, when he made the major transformations from book reviewer to philosopher of history and cosmopolitan thinker to Jewish nationalist2 Examining Dubnov's attitudes toward these two historians, I propose as a fundamental characteristic of Dubnov's creative process the paradigm of conflict , but not conflict pure and simple or for its own sake. From conflicts with intellectual influences, Dubnov borrowed ideas that enriched his worldview. Indeed, as his memoir, Kl1iga zhizni, shows us, in the late 1870s, Dubnov entered into extended "dialogues" with Western and Jewish culture, absorbing the ideas of Ernest Renan, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, as well as the literary works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Ivan Turgenev . I call such interactions "dialogues." Although it is true that he did not have an actual "dialogue" with those thinkers who lived before him, he approached even these thinkers as though he were speaking with them. He actively posed questions about their ideas, modified tl1eir views, and juxtaposed them to one another, giving his ultimate evaluation3 In Dubnov's case, dialogue involves the calm and methodical selection of those aspects of another 's thought useful for his own creative thinking. During the vital ten-year period between the late 1880s and 1890s, Dubnov entered into a dialogue with both Harkavy and Graetz, which inspired his idea of historiography as a path to Jewish cultural revitalization. Although he sided with Graetz and bitterly mocked Harkavy, he ultimately came to adopt aspects of Harkavy's thought in his formulation of the purpose of history for the Jewish people. 2 Robert Melvin Seltzer offers ambition as an important motive for Dubnov's evolution. See Seltzer, "Simon Dubnow: A Critical Biography of His Early Years" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia...

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