Simon Dubnow

Viktor E. Kelner, a specialist on Simon Dubnow based in St. Petersburg, presents the life and work of Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) in eight chronologically ordered chapters. Dubnow's interpretation of diasporic Jewish life worlds, particularly in the age of nationalism, is a singular endeavor. The author follows the various stations in Dubnow’s biography between his birthplace in Mstislawl in White Russia, raised in a traditional family, and the ghetto in Riga, where the scholar was murdered by the German forces when the ghetto was liquidated. During his life, Dubnow was active in the centers of European Jewish history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – in St. Petersburg, Vilna, Odessa and Berlin. In the 1920s and early 1930s in Berlin, Dubnow published his »Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes,« and at the same time finished the greater part of his memoirs.

This biography is a basic work on the life and impact of Dubnow as historian and public personality in the Jewries of Russia and East-Central Europe. It is the first comprehensive study of the life and work of the great historian. Two years after publication in Russian, the biography is now available in an unabridged German edition. It is the contribution of the Simon Dubnow Institute to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Simon Dubnow, the institute's eponym.