Moses Schorr - Scientific Legacy

Scientific Legacy

The first stream of Schorr's scientific activity deals with the history of Polish Jews. Schorr's historiographic approach and view upon the methodology applied to the study of the history of Polish Jewry is summarized in his own writing:

The major defect of the methods of research of Jewish history in Poland is that the general issues were studied before the details had been exposed. There was attempt to present the history of the Jews in entire Poland, before this history had been reviewed in specific cities. The historical entireness was treated, before the elemental processes had been exposed. Therefore, also today's general works on the history of Polish Jewry, and they are few after all, are characterised by the dilettante forms, lacking integrity, accurateness and clarity in subject presentation. Their material used is meager and not sufficient to encompass the entirety of the history of Polish Jewry, neither in the political-economic sphere nor in the cultural developments. An appropriate solid basis for such a general task can only be constructed by virtue of the archival material, which is so abundantly accumulated in different archives and partially the libraries. The fundamental, scientific presentation of the entire history will only be possible when the factual historical, economic and cultural developments in the major cities will be multilaterally studied on the basis of archival sources. Publication and analysis of the archival documents should be the first task preceding the general studies." — M. Schorr. Lviv, October 1902

The techniques and methods Schorr used in historical studies were far ahead of his young age (28) and the time in which he worked. He began his scientific work as an auditor in Vienna University in 1897 with his paper entitled Zur Geschichte des Don Josef Nasi ("Concerning the history of Don Joseph Nasi"), which was published in Monatschrift fur die Wiessenschaft des Judenstum. In this work he analyses the relations of Joseph Nasi (1524-1579) with the Polish king Sigismund August (1520-1572) in light of the situation of Jews in Poland at that time. Joseph Nasi was a Portuguese born marrano (secret Jew) appointed the Lord of Tiberias and the Duke of Naxos and the Seven Islands. He was one of the first Zionists and an influential Ottoman statesman during the reign of Selim II (1566–1574). Schorr analysed the relations of Joseph Nasi with Poland. Though he was a 20-year-old student at the time, he corrected a fundamental error of Graetz, a leading historian, who claimed that Sigismund August acknowledged a number of commercial privileges for the Polish Jews by virtue of the services of Joseph Nasi to Polish diplomacy at the Ottoman court. On the basis of sources found by Schorr in the historical city archives of Lviv, he came to the conclusion that Joseph Nasi was not guided by altruism but wanted the privilege to trade in Lviv for himself, and obtained it.