Simon Dubnow

Buch des Lebens, Band 1-3 Simon Dubnow

Simon Dubnow (18601941) is one of the most important historians in Jewish history. His famous world history of the Jewish people has long been available in German translation, but not his memoirs, of which only a greatly abridged version appeared in 1937. This first complete German-language publication of his memoirs brings the personality and work of the great Russian-Jewish historian back to the German-speaking world. Here, in Berlin, Dubnow lived between 1922 and 1933; It was here that he completed his memories. In the first volume, Dubnow describes his persistently pursued educational path from the cheder to the schools of the Enlightenment. Coming from a respected family of timber merchants, he worked as a young journalist in the milieu of the Russian-Jewish Petersburg intelligentsia around the magazine "Voschod". The anti-Jewish policy of Alexander III. destroyed any hope of cultural integration. Dubnow finally went to Odessa, where he developed the foundations of his ideas on Jewish history and, as a "missionary of history," became the initiator and mentor of the Russian-Jewish history movement. The following volumes describe the 20th century from the perspective of a contemporary witness, its historical View from Eastern Europe reflects the intellectual and social upheavals in the centers of world affairs St. Petersburg (19061922) and Berlin (19221933). In 1941 in Riga, Simon Dubnow was the victim of the National Socialist annihilation of European Jewry, which was his life's work would have.