SHIMEN
DUBNOV (SIMON DUBNOW) (September 18, 1860-December 1, 1941)
He was born in Mstislavl,
Byelorussia, into an elite family of scholars and merchants. The Dubnov family drew its pedigree from the
renowned kabbalist R. Yoysef Dubno, who took his surname from the city of his
birth, Dubno, in Volhynia, from whence Dubnov’s ancestors came at the end of
the eighteenth century to Mstislavl. His
father, Yankev Meyer, was employed as a clerk in the timber business of his
wealthy father-in-law. He would come
home only on the major holidays. His
father’s earnings were insufficient to support a family with numerous children,
and his mother, Sheyne, had also, in addition to her housework, to run a shop
selling glassware and porcelain. For Dubnov’s
education, he turned to his grandfather, R. Ben-Tsiyon Dubnov, one of the most
prominent householders in their town, a well-known scholar and opponent of
Hassidism. His entire life, he sat
before the Torah and prayer, and over the course of forty-five years he ran a
yeshiva in the study chamber of Mstislavl, during the daytime for younger
pupils and in the evenings for adult Jewish scholars. Shimen Dubnov studied Tanakh and Gemara in
religious elementary school. With a
thirst for knowledge from his earliest childhood years, by age nine he
zealously consumed the Yosippon,
which he had discovered by chance in his grandfather’s library. The episodes from this historical drama,
which he read in the abridged Hebrew version of Flavius Josephus’s historical
work, sparked his youthful imagination, and already at that age he was not
satisfied with the traditional style of Tanakh instruction in elementary
school. He began looking for other
commentaries to the text and ultimately stumbled across Mendelssohn’s
commentary which was considered heretical.
Hiding it from the rabbi and from the adults around him, he read through
the entirety of this commentary alone and with his friends. In subsequent years, he followed a well-worn
path, that a young lad would have experienced in that era, one who had transgressed
and become a follower of the Jewish Enlightenment. Dubnov quickly acquainted himself with
Haskalah literature in Hebrew. He
matured early and there awakened in him the need and the desire to extract himself
from his fanatical religious surroundings.
After his bar-mitzvah he became a student in his grandfather’s
yeshiva. At that time, however, the
young Dubnov was not only thoroughly engrossed in Haskalah writings, but also
in currents events writings by Enlightenment journalists, as well as in
learning Russian and mathematics. His
bolting from the traditional path caused his grandfather great heartache, as he
had no choice but to yield to Dubnov’s desire to attend the local state school
for Jewish students. This transpired in
the spring of 1874. Over the course of
three months in this school, he completed a three-year course, but at just that
time the Russian government abolished this sort of specialized school. He then became a student in a Russian
school. For the eighteen-year-old
Dubnov, thus began a series of years of self-study. He failed in an effort to attend the
teachers’ institute in Vilna, and in the same manner he lost out in a
subsequent endeavor to receive, as an external student, a high school diploma,
initially in Dvinsk (Daugavpils), until in
1880 he set out for St. Petersburg. At
the time he still had not relinquished his plan to get the necessary diploma,
so as to attend a university. Meanwhile,
the main hall of the municipal library was becoming his university, where he
was able to satisfy his spiritual hunger.
His principal interest was concentrated on historical research, a
pursuit which drew out an intrinsic passion in him. His difficult material circumstances
compelled him, however, to discontinue his intense studies and to seek a means
of earning a living. After several
successful and unsuccessful efforts, he published in a Russian Jewish monthly, Russkii Evrei (The Russian Jew), April
1881 issue, the first
chapter of his first major work: “Neskol’ko momentov
v istorii razvitiia evreiskoi mysli” (Several moments in the history of the
development of Jewish thought). From
1882 he was a regular contributor to Voskhod
(Sunrise). He contributed as well to Razsviet (Dawn) and Hashiloaḥ (The shiloah). During
this period, until the late 1890s, he published a number of important
historical monographs. Some of these he
later included in chapters of his work Weltgeschichte
des Jüdischen Volkes (The world history of the Jewish people), and
others subsequently appeared in book form.
Among Dubnov’s first works in the Russian Jewish and Hebrew periodicals:
a series of treatises concerning the movements of Shabatai Zvi and Jacob Frank;
the rise of Hassidism; and the Council of Four Lands. At the same time in this early period, he
also published current events articles in which he reacted to the events of the
day and contemporaneous issues, and parallel with these, he was also turning
his attention to literary criticism (using the pen name “Kritikus”). Aside from criticism and reviews of Russian
Jewish and Hebrew books, Dubnov responded to events in literature in “zhargon”
(Yiddish) and aroused interest and respectability for Yiddish literature, still
in its youth. Around 1883 he married Ida
Fridlin and thus settled with his family for several years in his
hometown. Over the years 1890-1903, he
lived in Odessa, and 1903-1906 he spent in Vilna. In 1906 he returned to live in St. Petersburg
where he was accepted as a lecturer in the faculty of social science at the
free higher school of Professor Peter Lesgaft.
In this second period of his residence in St. Petersburg, he managed to
occupy himself with various sorts of work: literary, community, and
academic. More than anything else, though,
realizing the goal that he placed before himself dominated: to write a
ten-volume work on the world-history of the Jewish people. To be able to do this work without any
obstacles, he declined an offer to assume the editorship of a Jewish
encyclopedia in Russian. The fee for
this work, 5,000 rubles per year for five years running, would have materially
secured him for a long period of time.
However, Dubnov would not allow himself to contemplate the thought of
cutting himself off from his work for five years, a work that he conceived as
his mission in life. In subsequent
years—years of WWI, revolution, and civil war—under the harshest of conditions,
he discontinued his scholarly research.
In the spring of 1922, he received permission from the Soviet regime to
leave Russia. He was delayed en route
for several months in Kovno, and in September of the same year he reached
Berlin. Over the years 1925-1929, the
Jüdischer Verlag initially brought out the full ten-volume edition in German
translation of his Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen
Volkes. In the years prior to WWI, when single
original volumes in Russian were published, and in the first years following
WWI, before all ten volumes had been translated into German, there appeared in
Yiddish: Algemeyne yidishe geshikhte fun
dem urelter biz der nayer tsayt (General Jewish history from ancient to
modern times) (Vilna, 1909), part 1, 266 pp., part 2, 506 pp., translated by Z.
Kalmanovitsh. In 1920 Historisher farlag
in Vilna brought out the same translation in ten parts. Di
nayste geshikhte funem yidishn folk (The recent history of the Jewish
people), vol. 1, 1789-1815, translated by N. Shtif, under the editorship of the
author (Berlin, 1923), 284 pp. Single
volumes of Dubnov’s Weltgeschichte
appeared in Warsaw as well. The
historical section of YIVO in Vilna published volumes 8, 9, and 10 in
1938. Digests of his work in adaptations
for school came out at various times in Europe and the United States. From his other historical writings, we have: Geshikhte fun khsidizm (History of Hassidism),
Yiddish translation by Z. Kalmanovitsh, vol. 1 (Vilna, 1930), 290 pp., vol. 2
(Vilna, 1931), 239 pp. (Both volumes
were reissued by the YIVO Library in Vilna in 1938.) Vol. 3 of this work remained in the Hebrew
original. All three volumes appeared in
Yiddish: Buenos Aires: Kultur-kongres, 1957-1958). Aside from Hebrew, his world history—in full
or summary form—was published in almost all languages of culture. Over the years 1948-1955, the World Jewish
Culture Congress in New York and Buenos Aires published a complete ten-volume
edition of his world history from antiquity through contemporary times. The volumes were translated at different
times as separate works by: Y. Rapoport, L. Hodes, Z. Kalmanovitsh, N. Shtif,
Yudl Mark, and Kh. Sh. Kazdan. As for
Dubnov’s work in Yiddish: for the first time in 1907 he published in Fraynd (Friend) a polemical article in
connection with the Folkspartey
(Jewish People’s Party) which he, incidentally, was the inspiration. Shortly thereafter he published in the same
newspaper two further current events pieces.
From 1925 he frequently contributed to such serials as: Forverts (Forward), Tog (Day), and Tsukunft
(Future) in New York; Frimorgn
(Morning) and Dos folk (The people)
in Riga; Folksblat (People’s
newspaper) in Kovno; Literarishe bleter
(Literary leaves) in Warsaw; Yivo-bleter
(Leaves from YIVO) in Vilna; Dos fraye
vort (The free word) in London; and Afn
sheydveg (At the crossroads) in Paris.
He wrote current events essays, articles, and chapters from his
memoirs. His Yiddish period was
particularly distinguished by the book, Fun
“zhargon” biz yidish (From “jargon” to Yiddish) (Vilna, 1929), 177 pp. Other works in Yiddish include: Briv vegn altn un nayem yidntum (Letters
concerning old and new Judaism), Yiddish trans. by Shoyel Ferdman (Mexico City,
1959), xvi, 464 pp.; Dos bukh fun mayn
lebn, zikhroynes un rayoynes (The book of my life, memoirs and thoughts)
(New York-Buenos Aires: Kultur-kongres, 1962-1963), 3 vols. (Yiddish trans. of
vol. 1 and 3 by Y. Birnboym; vol. 2 by Y. Okrutni).
In his approach to Jewish
history, he was the first great Jewish historian who ceased treating Jewish
history solely in its purely spiritual process of development. He argued that Jewish life in Europe was not
only an attachment to pious Jewishness, to a cultural heritage, but a social
way of life. Dubnov was the first among
the great Jewish historians who saw in his world history of the Jewish people
not only the historical yesterday, but a pulsating, national today as
well. He composed his life work in
Russian, in the language that he had begun his current events work and literary
criticism in the early 1880s. Dubnov’s
extraordinary service on behalf of the history of Yiddish literature consisted
in the fact that he was one of those who aided the growth of Yiddish literary
and language consciousness; he helped Yiddish literature attain the position
that it had in Jewish cultural life; and he assisted the Yiddish language in
making the transition from jargon to Yiddish.
In his emphasis on the Jewish folk masses and the here and now, Dubnov
consequently became an ideologue for national Jewish cultural autonomy in the
countries of their dispersion. The Jewish
people’s language, according to Dubnov, ought to become the political and
cultural instrument of all Jewish organs of autonomy. Several months after the Nazis came to power
in 1933, Dubnov had perforce to leave Berlin.
He settled in a suburb of Riga, where he continued intensively to work
on his memoirs, Kniga zhizni: Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia (Book of life, reminiscences and reflections),
portions of which were published in Tsukunft
over the years 1932 to 1937. In 1935 he
participated in a conference in Vilna to commemorate the tenth anniversary of
the founding of YIVO. In April 1940, when
he was ill and heartbroken (his wife died in early 1934), he made another a
visit to Vilna where he attended the celebration that YIVO organized to honor
the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Y. L. Peretz. On that occasion Dubnov made two appearances
before large audiences. The reception
that the refugee writers and journalists gave Dubnov in Vilna was of historical
proportions. On this occasion he also
visited Kovno and from there returned to Riga, because he wanted to be close to
his archive. With the outbreak of WWII,
Dubnov’s American friends tried to persuade him to come to the United
States. He put them off for a time, “until
it becomes dangerous for me to remain in the Baltics.” Meanwhile, he planned to “move to Vilna so as
to help with the restoration of our Yiddish Scientific Institute [YIVO], which
has suffered terribly from the war.”
Among the versions of Dubnov’s death in the Riga ghetto, one that
appears to be close to the truth was given by an eye-witness, Hillel Melamed:
in an Aktion on December 1, 1941, when they were loading the sick and weak on
buses, they chased Dubnov who was sick and harboring a high temperature out
onto the street. When he failed to get
onto the bus quickly enough, a drunken Latvian policeman shot him in the neck;
Dubnov died on the spot, and the next day he was buried in a mass grave in the
old Jewish cemetery in the Riga ghetto.
Sources: Dr. Y. Shatski, in Tsukunft (New York) (July 1923); Dr. M.
Vishnitser, in Tsukunft (January
1930); Vishnitser, in Literarishe bleter
(Warsaw) (September 26, 1930); Shmuel Niger, in Tsukunft (November 1930, May 1931, September 1938, December 1951);
Y. Leshtshinski, in Tsukunft
(February 1931); L. Shusheym, in Der veg
(Mexico) (September 18, 1943); Sh. Mendelson, in Veker (New York) (July 1943); Kh. Sh. Kazdan, in Undzer tsayt (New York) (July 1943);
Kazdan, in Tsukunft (March 1946,
July-August 1955, May-June 1957); Yivo-bleter
(New York) 23 (January 1944), pp. 163-77; Professor Chaim Tchernowitz (Rav
Tsair), Masekhet zikhronot (A
tractate of memories) (New York, 1945), pp. 107-15; H. Melamed, in Tsukunft (April 1946); L. Finkelshteyn,
in Veker (October 1, 1950); Y. Hart,
in Undzer tsayt (July-August 1951);
Sh. Berman, Hapolmos ben lilienblum leven
aḥad ha’am vedubnov vehareka shelo (The polemic between Lilienblum and Aḥad-Ha’am
and Dubnov and its background) (Jerusalem, 1951); S. Dubnov-Erlikh, Dos lebn un shafn fun shimen dubnov (The
life and work of Shimen Dubnov), Yiddish translation by M. Ferdman (Mexico,
1952);[1]
Dr. R, Mahler, in Arbeter-vort
(Paris) 42 (1952); Sh. Simon, Kinder-yorn
fun yidisher shrayber (The childhood years of a Yiddish writer) (New York,
1953), pp. 63-96; Sh. Rabidovits, Sefer
deshimon dubnov (On Shimen Dubnov) (London, 1954); H. Rogof, in Forverts (New York) (October 3, 1954;
May 23, 1955; September 23, 1956; April 7, 1957); Sh. Leshtshinski, Literarishe eseyen (Literary essays),
vol. 2 (New York, 1955); A. Menes, in Forverts
(February 13, 1955; March 16, 1958); Ben-Tsien Kats, in Tog-morgn-zhurnal (New York) (December 11, 1955); A. Levinson, Ketuvim (Writings) (Tel Aviv, 1956); Dr.
M. Vakhsman, Bishvili hasifrut vehamaḥashava
haivrit (Toward Hebrew literature and thought) (Tel Aviv, 1956); A.
Shmueli, in Molad (December 1956);
Sh. A. Ḥorodski, Zikhronot (Memoirs)
(Tel Aviv, 1957); Dr. F. Fridman, in Faktn
un meynungen (Facts and opinions) (New York) (May 1957); Dr. A. Mukdoni, in
Tog-morgn-zhurnal (December 1, 1957);
D. Shub, in Forverts (September 22,
1957); A. Trotski (in a series of articles), in Amerikaner (New York) (September 25, 1957); Kh. Bez, in Kultur un dertsiung (New York) (March
1957); G. Aronson, in Tsukunft
(December 1957); Tsum
hundertstn geboyrntog fun shimen dubnov, zamlung (On the 100th
birthday of Shimen Dubnov, collection) (New York: IKUF, 1961), 92 pp.; R. M.
Seltzer, Simon Dubnow: A Critical
Biography of His Early Years (unpubl. dissertation) (Ann Arbor, 1970).
Borekh Tshubinski
[Additional information from: Berl
Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun
yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York,
1986), col. 191.]
[1] Translator
note. There is an English translation of this work by Judith Vowles: The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnow: Diaspora Nationalism and
Jewish History, ed.
Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington, Ind., 1991).
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