Since the 1990s research on the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) has greatly increased. His memoirs, newly edited in 1998 by Viktor Kel’ner,^[1] have been translated into French and German,^[2] and a lot of works have been published which deal with certain questions concerning his biography, his historical works and political thoughts.^[3] In 1995 the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, which aims at researching the life-worlds (Lebenswelten) of the Jews primarily in Central, East Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, was founded at Leipzig University. This emphasised once more the significance of this historian who referred to himself as a “missionary for history.” But notwithstanding the lively research interest in Dubnow’s work, a detailed and comprehensive analysis of his historiographical concept and of his specific theoretic-historical paradigm has for long been a desideratum. This gap is now filled by Anke Hilbrenner’s excellent study “Diaspora-Nationalism: On Simon Dubnow’s Construction of History,” published in the series Studies of the Simon Dubnow Institute.^[4]
In 1891 Simon Dubnow issued his often quoted claim that neither a Russian-Jewish historiography nor a Russian-Jewish historical consciousness yet existed.^[5] As Benjamin Nathans and others have shown in their works,^[6] this was in a literal sense untrue because lay historians and a few professionally trained scholars of law and philology had already begun to deal with the Russian-Jewish past. But Dubnow, however, thought about a specific kind of historiography that would no longer present the Jews as a passive object, as for example in the studies concentrating on tsarist legislation and the Jews’ legal standing, but as a collective subject of history. He sought a Russian-Jewish historiography that could evoke and foster the formation of a national historical consciousness, which he thought to be the cornerstone of a modern, secular, Jewish identity. The conception of history Dubnow developed in the 1890s mainly on the basis of this postulation forms the subject of Hilbrenner’s study, a revised version of her Ph.D. dissertation.
Dubnow created a historical narrative of the Jewish people from an Eastern European Jewish perspective, a Jewish national history that did not presuppose the existence of a nation state but was directed towards the Jewish people as a plural transterritorial nation in the diaspora. Hence, in her introduction Hilbrenner develops the thesis that because of the apparent absence of the paradigm of territorial sovereignty, which seems to be rather compulsory in modern science of history, Dubnow’s historical narrative can be seen as a “highly individual form of paradox modernity” (S. 14).^[7] Hilbrenner argues that this narrative can only be understood within the context of its genesis in the Eastern European Jewish diaspora – the Eastern European multi-ethnical and multi-national reality of the Russian Empire before World War I. With this contextualization she extends the approach of Jeffrey Veidlinger, who, while acknowledging the context of the Jewish intelligentsia of Odessa and St. Petersburg, the German Wissenschaft des Judentums movement and the contemporary Western European philosophers, additionally pleads for a more complete understanding of Dubnow’s conception of history by investigating the Russian intellectual climate.^[8]
In five chapters Hilbrenner reconstructs the evolution of Dubnow’s “national synthesis,” analyzes the crucial factors constituting it, and interprets the core of Dubnow’s conception not only against the background of the Jewish tradition Zakhor! (Remember!), but also on the basis of the Eastern European context. Moreover she examines the effect Dubnow’s conception had on Russian-Jewish policy as well as on the science of history, and analyzes the remembrance of Simon Dubnow after his forced death in the Riga ghetto. Apart from Dubnow’s historical works and historic-political essays Hilbrenner takes into account not only a wide range of archival materials on Dubnow’s public activities, but she also to a great extent works with his autobiography which the historian stylized as a classical Bildungsroman (S. 32).
Narrating the story of his personal development in the form of an “evolutionary triad,” Dubnow describes his way beginning with the “thesis” – the traditional Jewish life in Mstislav, where he was born and raised in a strictly Orthodox family. Then follows the “antithesis” – his years in St. Petersburg, when he, as Hilbrenner states, as “a classical representative of the Russian intelligencija of his time” (S. 65) followed the values of the Enlightenment and denounced his solidarity with the Jews of the Russian Empire as a collective (S. 82). In these years Dubnow worked as “scholarly Jew” for the Pahlen Commission and thus became an acher (the “other one,” “outsider”) among the Jews of the Russian Empire. With careful analysis that takes into account the biographical as well as the political and socio-historical context, Hilbrenner shows in the first chapter that Dubnow’s way from the “antithesis” to the “synthesis” did not proceed as directly as his “evolutionary triad” suggests, but that his decision for the national camp had many causes (S. 94). In 1890 Dubnow moved to Odessa where he came across a highly differentiated cosmopolitan Jewish community with a strong segmentation into different ideological camps, such as “assimilationists,” nationalists, Zionists, and religious Jews. As Hilbrenner’s analysis reveals, it was in the debates with these camps that Dubnow developed his “national synthesis,” merging premodern traditions and Jewish modernity “at a higher stage of development” (S. 108). He started formulating these thoughts in his “Letters on Old and New Judaism,” which he began to publish serially in 1897. Mainly on the basis of these essays Hilbrenner examines Dubnow’s “national synthesis,” which primarily finds expression in his doctrine of “diaspora nationalism.”
The detailed analysis of the genesis and contents of the “national synthesis” in the second chapter uncovers different elements of “diaspora nationalism,” which Hilbrenner interprets especially with regard to their function in Dubnow’s conception of history. The interpretation reveals that in Dubnow’s synthesis Judaism is understood as a historical phenomenon with great impact on Jewish life. The shared self-conception of Jews leads to a shared history of the Jewish people, and therefore the Jewish national idea has its origin in historical consciousness (S. 108-109). In regarding the Jewish people as a collective personality, Dubnow, according to Hilbrenner, reconciles the modern principle of free individuals with the traditional belonging to a collective (S. 110).
Hilbrenner reconstructs Dubnow’s three-step presentation of the development of the Jewish people. She notes that the first two stages in the process of nation-building – that of the association by descent (at the time of the Patriarchs and the time of the Egyptian slavery) and the territorial-political stage (at the time of the kings, the Hasmonians and the Roman wars) – conform to contemporary national thinking. But with the third stage – the cultural-historical or spiritual stage, when the state is no longer needed for the national life of the Jewish people – Dubnow establishes a continuity that is independent of the existence of a state. Hilbrenner points out that Dubnow exceeds Heinrich Graetz’ ideas and the idea of a spiritual community without a state found in the Russian intellectual history by establishing a concept of nation that does not need a national state but nevertheless has to be understood in a political sense (S. 114-115).
In Dubnow’s “diaspora nationalism” the concept of the kahal, the Jewish communal administration, plays a central role. It is the Jewish people’s striving for autonomy that originates continuity and contingency (S. 116). Hilbrenner shows how Dubnow updates the traditional concept of kahal on the basis of the experiences within the Eastern European reality. The third chapter presents a further examination of the function of the kahal in Dubnow’s narrative of development. Whereas the introductory remarks to this part concerning Dubnow’s role as the founder of a specific Eastern European Jewish historiography focussed on the kahal have to be underscored, it has to be questioned whether Dubnow’s ideas in the early 1890s, especially in his essay “On the study of the History of Russian Jews and on the Foundation of a Russian-Jewish Historical Society,” were still as closely attached to the Wissenschaft des Judentums and to the thoughts of the Enlightenment as Hilbrenner maintains (S. 132). For it was not only the assumed “backwardness” of Russian Jews that caused him to claim for their historical education, but also his conviction that constructing the history of the eight-century-long life of Jews in Russia was “one of our most sacred national duties.”^[9]
The analysis in chapter three concentrates first on Dubnow’s theory of the “shifting centers,” whereby at any given time a specific Jewish community dominated the rest of the Jewish world. Hilbrenner comes to the conclusion that the autonomous community represents the Jewish people as a collective personality, who in the sense of a modern history of development proceeds through times and spaces of world history. The conception of “shifting centers” uses the motive of the years of travel which is central for the Bildungsroman, but applies it to the collective personality of the Jewish people. With the help of this approach the stereotype of the “wandering Jew” is reinterpreted in a positive way and merges with the traditional-occidental perception of the translatio imperii, as well as with the idea of Moscow as the “third Rome,” which was actualized in the nineteenth century. Hence, Hilbrenner concludes, in this synthesis of premodernity and modernity within its specific Eastern European context the history of the Jewish people is coherently deterritorialized and defined in the moment of motion. So the principle of diaspora that represents premodern traditions and ties into the Eastern European Jews’ world of experiences becomes a symbol of modern development thinking (S. 136).
On the one hand, Hilbrenner interprets the concept of kahal as “a conceptual and narrative clue of Dubnow’s narration of history” (S. 148). On the other hand, she regards the kahal as a clue to Dubnow’s perception of the modern science of history. She describes in detail the “sociological conception,” as Dubnow called his novel approach to Jewish history, which assumes that “the Jewish people has at all times and in all countries, always and everywhere, been the subject, the creator of its own history, not only in the intellectual sphere but also in the general sphere of social life.”^[10]
For Dubnow’s novel periodization of Jewish history, the kahal is immensely significant as an organizing principle (S. 153). Throughout the centuries the Jewish people developed new forms of communal autonomy. But, as Hilbrenner finds out, Dubnow’s narration of the Jewish people’s evolution does not strictly follow modern development thinking, for it is constantly interrupted by a cyclic premodern image of history (S. 153). This analysis demonstrates that Dubnow’s narrative of progression follows in many ways the rules given by the Jewish commandment Zakhor! (S. 153-159). Examining the concept of kahal in its Eastern European context, Hilbrenner comes to the conclusion that the notion of collectivism that is inherent in the concept of kahal must be seen as complementary to the discourse about the obščina. Thus Dubnow’s “World History of the Jewish People” is deeply rooted in its Eastern European history of origins, and presents a historical narrative of the Russian Jews (S. 186).
Dubnow’s new approach focussing on the kahal must not only be interpreted as Eastern European advancement of the Western Wissenschaft des Judentums. It also opened up new types of sources, which Dubnow introduced into Jewish historiography (S. 273). Similarly, the kahal was the clue to Dubnow’s political concept of Jewish nationalism within the diaspora.
The fourth chapter examines the reception of Dubnow’s concept of kahal in Russian-Jewish politics and historiography to explore why his Eastern European alternative draft of history was marginalized in the twentieth century even though Dubnow himself attracted great interest for a long period of time (S. 34). Analyzing the development of Jewish national politics and of the folkspartaj (“People’s Party”) that advocated Dubnow’s “diaspora nationalism” and “autonomism,” Hilbrenner shows how all Jewish parties in the Russian Empire after 1905 and later in Eastern Europe until the Second World War adopted Dubnow’s national program. From this she concludes that Dubnow and his party became politcally dispensable (S. 275).
But it was Jewish historiography in the Russian Empire and its institutionalization on which Dubnow’s work had the greatest impact. Hilbrenner gives a short survey on Dubnow’s role in the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society (Evreiskoe istoriko-etnograficheskoe obshchestvo), and describes his contribution to the journal Evreiskaia starina (“Jewish Antiquity”) (S. 217-224). With his claim for using the internal Jewish communal records (pinkasim) as a historical source and his call for the collection of materials from the Jewish past, Dubnow since the 1890s fostered the implementation of his “sociological approach.” Hilbrenner reveals how the YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) in the mid 1920s took up Dubnow’s call, and by addressing the Jews in the new Eastern Europe transferred his approach to a new epoch (S. 235). Thus Dubnow became the “symbol of Eastern European Jewish historiography” S. 276).
The last chapter elucidates how the memory of Dubnow after his death in the Riga ghetto became part of the Jewish cultural memory within Eastern European Jewry, and how he was raised to a “martyr.” Hilbrenner skilfully examines a huge range of texts to show that in the memory of Dubnow’s death, the self-conception, the image of history, and the symbolic function of the historian merge with the remembrance of the Shoah (P. 276). In her concluding remarks she condenses her results to a very concise summary.
On the whole, this book presents a judicious and thorough analysis of Dubnow’s conception of history. Hilbrenner carefully brings together earlier research results concerning certain aspects of Dubnow’s work with the results of her own analysis. Her decision to base the interpretation not only on Dubnow’s historical writings but also on his autobiography proves to be very convincing. The well-structured analysis is based on the so-called “Technik des Einkreisens” (S. 31). Following this technique to “surround” Dubnow’s work from different sides, the analysis reveals many new insights and interrelations, but sometimes this technique unfortunately also results in unnecessary repetitions. It is the merit of the book under review not only to present a comprehensive and knowledgeable examination of Dubnow’s conception of history, but also to interpret it in its various contexts. In this way Hilbrenner exposes important references and links that until now have scarcely been taken into account. The book is most warmly recommended to anyone interested in Jewish and Russian history or in the history of historiography.