Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism” Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy Edited by Elliot R. Wolfson (New York University) Christian Wiese (University of Frankfurt) Hartwig Wiedebach (University of Zurich) VOLUME 21 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sjjt 1. Dubnow, as a young man. Used with the permission of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. 2. Dubnow, Odessa 1913. Used with the permission of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism” Diaspora Nationalism and the World History of the Jews By Robert M. Seltzer LEIDEN • bOSTON 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seltzer, Robert M., author. Simon Dubnow’s “new Judaism” : diaspora nationalism and the world history of the Jews / by Robert M. Seltzer. p. cm. — (Supplements to the Journal of Jewish thought and philosophy, ISSN 1873-9008; volume 21) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-26052-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26067-2 (e-book) 1. Dubnow, Simon, 1860–1941. 2. Jewish historians—Russia—Biography. 3. Dubnow, Simon, 1860–1941— Political activity. 4. Jews—Russia—History—19th century. 5. Jews—Russia—Social conditions— 19th century. 6. Russia—Ethnic relations—History—19th century. I. Title : Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism”. II. Title: Diaspora nationalism and the world history of the Jews. DS115.9.D8S45 2014 909’.04924007202—dc23 [B] 2013032477 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1873-9008 ISBN 978-90-04-26052-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26067-2 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. 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CONTENTS Preface .............................................................................................................. xi Note ................................................................................................................... xvii PART ONE BREAKING WITH THE PAST, 1860–1886 Chapter One Leaving the Shtetl ........................................................... 3 Russian Jewry in the Reign of Alexander II ..................................... 3 Dubnow’s “First World” .......................................................................... 8 The Vilna Haskalah and the Beginning of Simon’s Rebellion .... 16 Chapter Two From Haskalah to Positivism ...................................... 27 The Search for a Secular Education ................................................... 27 The Impact of Radical Maskilim, Russian Nihilists, and their Western Exemplars ............................................................................ 34 Dubnow’s Self-Image in his Early Twenties .................................... 38 Chapter Three Young Dubnow as a Jewish Positivist .................... 47 The Jewish Press in Nineteenth-Century Russia ............................ 47 The Budding Career of a Russian-Jewish Critic .............................. 54 Kritikus/Externus on the Backwardness of Russian Jewry .......... 61 PART TWO RECONSIDERING THE PAST, 1886–1897 Chapter Four Coping with New Realities .......................................... 81 Rejection ..................................................................................................... 81 In and Out of an Emotional Crisis ..................................................... 87 Discovering History ................................................................................. 99 Chapter Five Romantic Positivism ...................................................... 107 The Influence of Renan and Graetz ................................................... 108 The Influence of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky ..................................... 118 Historical Integratsia Dushi .................................................................. 123 x contents PART THREE THE EXIGENCIES OF THE PRESENT, 1897–1907 Chapter Six The Historian Becomes a Nationalist .......................... 133 Activism ...................................................................................................... 133 The Odessa Circle .................................................................................... 142 Autonomism .............................................................................................. 155 Chapter Seven From the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century 165 The Letters on Old and New Judaism .................................................. 166 On Dubnow’s Historiography ............................................................... 182 From Vilna to St. Petersburg/Petrograd to Berlin to Riga ........... 191 Chapter Eight Reconsiderations ........................................................... 199 Are the Jews a Nation? ........................................................................... 200 Defensive Nationalism ........................................................................... 211 Dubnow, Then and Now ........................................................................ 222 Bibliography ................................................................................................... 227 Dubnow’s “Auto Bibliography” ................................................................. 243 Index ................................................................................................................. 273 PREFACE Simon Dubnow’s intellectual development is a microcosm of the modern- ization of East European Jewish identity during more than a half-century of challenge and crisis. Noted for his ideology of diaspora nationalism and what he called his “sociological” approach to the study of the Jewish past, Dubnow was the author of a remarkable oeuvre of essays and scholarly articles of high quality that included a pioneering history of Hasidism, studies of Jewish writers in Yiddish and other languages, a comprehensive ten-volume his tory of the Jewish people, and one of the great Jewish auto- biographies of modern times. Dubnow’s reputation rests on a position he had begun to articulate fully in 1897, an auspicious year in Jewish history that witnessed the cre- ation of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Workers Bund of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania. His Letters on Old and New Judaism (col- lected and published as a book in 1907) is a classic argument on behalf of a stance that resonated among adherents of Jewish diaspora nationalism and well beyond to all those who adhered to alternative views of Jewish peoplehood. He remained faithful to this ideology until his death in Riga in 1941—that is, his murder in the Holocaust at the age of eighty-one. What we will call “Dubnovism” took shape in Dubnow’s mid-forties after a literary career that had begun twenty years earlier when his views were those of a cosmopolitan liberal of the mid-nineteenth century. Most of what has been written about Dubnow concentrates on the latter part of his life, but it is the first part, when he gradually formulated his worldview, that offers insight into a metamorphosis paralleling the reorientation of modern Jewish thought, politics, and historiography in that part of the world and elsewhere. Dubnow was born in 1860 in Mstislavl, a town in what is now Belarus, during the reign of the reforming tsar Alexander II. Rejecting traditional religion during his adolescence, Dubnow embraced, first, the Haskalah (the Hebrew Enlightenment) and then the Russian version of the Positivism of August Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. As a budding journal- ist for Russian-Jewish periodicals, he advocated sweeping Jewish reforms as those that had been done by acculturated German Jews. Although he wrote only for Jewish publications, he saw himself as a cosmopolitan in his inter- ests and perspective. Because of the pogroms of 1881–1882 and the restric- tions imposed in their aftermath by the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, xii preface the appeal of this optimistic program had drastically declined among many spokespeople for the modernization of Russian-Jewish life. After a while, Dubnow changed his point of view also. He never had much use for formal religion. He eventually integrated some of the central values of Judaism into a secular liberalism that remained rooted in the European Enlightenment as updated in the nine- teenth century. In his middle twenties he experienced an emotional crisis which we will examine in some detail. He was increasingly drawn to Jew- ish history, which led to efforts to further the study of the East European Jewish past. Like others of his cohort but in his own way, by the end of the century he had become a Jewish nationalist.