Background
Dubnow was born on September 10, 1860 in Belarussia.
Dubnow was born on September 10, 1860 in Belarussia.
Dubnow received a traditional Jewish education. By the age of eleven he became disillusioned with religion, and travelled to Dvinsk, Vilna, and Saint Petersburg to seek secular knowledge. Having obtained a resident’s permit by bribing a clerk and enlisting as a laborer, Dubnow was free to study at the Imperial Public Library in Saint Petersburg, where he prepared for university. His attempts to enter Saint Petersburg University ended with his failure to pass the mathematics and writing exams.
In 1890, Dubnow moved to Odessa, then the great center of Jewish literature. There he began to gather materials for his studies. From 1898 he wrote a series of works on Jewish history, believing that through the study of history, he could find a solution to the future of the Jewish people. He rebelled against Jewish historiography based primarily on martyrdom and literature, and pio¬neered in introducing the social sciences into the study of Jewish history. He considered the Jews a European people, whose homeland is the entire world. Accordingly he rejected Zionism, which he called a pseudo-messianic venture, and advocated in its stead, his own plan of Diaspora nationalism which he named autonomism.
In 190. Dubnow moved to Vilna and in 1906, to Saint Petersburg, to occupy a chair for Jewish history in a progressive university. The first volume of his great ten-volume history of the Jews appeared in 1910. In 1922 he left Russia for Berlin.
With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Dubnow was offered refuge by friends in Switzerland, America, and Israel. The first he disliked, the second was too far for him and his wife (both in their seventies), and Israel he refused, saying that he saw a danger to Judaism in the emptying of the Diaspora.
He settled in Riga. After Riga’s capture by the Germans, his work was confiscated, and he could only continue writing by engraving upon copper containers. In 1941 the eighty-one-year-old Dubnow was rounded up by the Nazis with the other Jews of Riga. Sick and feverish, he did not move quickly enough and a drunken Latvian guard shot him on the spot. He was buried in a mass grave in the Riga Jewish cemetery.
Related to his beliefs was his attitude to religion, which he considered a necessary discipline, imposed upon the nation when it stood alienated from the other cultures of the world (Christianity and Islam). In the age of emancipation, however, he believed that religion was no longer necessary. His History of Hasidism praised East European Jewry for its preservation of tradition, but warned that the Jews should cooperate with the other nations of the world by adopting a secular culture
Dubnow’s life work was the study of Jewish history and its sociological interpretations. In his Introduction to Jewish Philosophy he advanced the thesis that Jewish history is a pattern of autonomous centers of Jewish national creation and hegemony. At all times one community has been more independent and creative than the others and this center has exercised a hegemony over the others, as in the case of Babylonia in the early Middle Ages. Jewish nationality is the highest type of cultural-historical or spiritual nation. The teachings of Judaism approximate the culture of humanity.
Quotations: It was related that his last words were “Brothers, don’t forget! Recount what you hear and see — record it all.”