»Historicizing the Jewish People – A Conference in Honour of Simon Dubnow at 150«

The historian of  Jewish history Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) is considered the modern founder of secular Jewish historiography from an East European perspective. Against the backdrop of a multi-national and multi-religious reality within an imperial context, and confronted with an accelerating process of modernization in czarist Russia, Dubnow developed a »sociological concept« for understanding Jewish existential experience in the Diaspora.

The Annual International Conference of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig, brought together experts on the life, work and impact of Simon Dubnow for a two-day exchange of insights and ideas in Leipzig. The conference provided a platform for exploring questions of the historical formation of tradition, historical theory, linguistic culture, and most particularly the crisis-ridden seismic shifts during the inter-war period on the eve of the Catastrophe in respect to diasporic self-understanding as reflected in Dubnow's thought and work.

This year's conference in honor of  Simon Dubnow, with English as the working language, was held to mark the hundred fiftieth anniversary of the historian's birth on 10 September 1860. It was a joint conference of the Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig, the Hebrew University Jerusalem and the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

On the occasion of Simon Dubnow's hundred fiftieth birthday a biography was published on September tenth, 2010. Please find more information here.