Simon Dubnow - Regional History

Regional History

Dubnow's political thought perhaps can better be understood in light of historical Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe. It flourished during the early period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795), when it surpassed the Ottoman Empire and western Europe as a center of Judaism. Dubnow here describes the autonomous social-economic and religious organization developed by the Jewish people under the Commonwealth government:

"Constituting an historical nationality, with an inner life of its own, the Jews were segregated by the Government as a separate estate, an independent social body. ... They formed an entirely independent class of citizens, and as such were in need of independent agencies of self-government and jurisdiction. The Jewish community constituted not only a national and cultural, but also a civil, entity. It formed a Jewish city within a Christian city, with its separate forms of life, its own religious, administrative, judicial, and charitable institutions. The Government of a country with sharply divided estates could not but legalize the autonomy of the Jewish Kahal." The Jews also did not speak Polish, but rather Yiddish, an Hebraicized German. "The sphere of the Kahal's activity was very large." "The capstone of this Kahal organization were the so-called Waads, the conferences or assemblies of rabbis and Kahal leaders. the highest court of appeal." Their activity "passed, by gradual expansion, from the judicial sphere into that of administration and legislation."

Each provincial council or Waad (Hebrew vaad: committee) eventually joined with others to form a central governing body which began to meet regularly. Its name became "ultimately fixed as the Council of the Four Lands (Waad Arba Aratzoth)." These four lands were: Wielkopolska (Posen), Malopolska (Cracow and Lubin), Ruthenia (Lvov (Lemberg)), and Volhynia (Ostrog and Kremenetz); the fifth land Lithuania (Brest and Grodno) withdrew to form its own high Waad. The 'Council of the Four Lands' consisted of the six "leading rabbis of Poland" and a delegate from the principal Kahalem selected by their elders, in all about thirty members. "As a rule, the Council assembled in Lublin in early spring, between Purim and Passover, and in Yaroslav (Galicia) at the end of summer, before high holidays."

The Council or Wadd Arba Aratzoth "reminded one of the Sanhedrin, which in ancient days assembled... in the temple. They dispensed justice to all the Jews of the Polish realm, issued preventive measures and obligatory enactments (takkanoth), and imposed penalties as they saw fit. All difficult cases were brought before their court. To facilitate matters 'provincial judges' (dayyane medinoth) to settle disputes concerning property, while they themselves examined criminal cases, matters pertaining to hazaka (priority of possession) and other difficult matters of law." "The Council of the Four Lands was the guardian of Jewish civil interests in Poland. It sent its shtadlans to the residential city of Warsaw and other meeting-places of the Polish Diets for the purpose of securing from the king and his dignitaries the ratification of the ancient Jewish privileges. ... But the main energy of the Waad was directed toward the regulation of the inner life of the Jews. The statute of 1607, framed the Rabbi of Lublin, is typical of this solicitude. prescribed for the purpose of fostering piety and commercial integrity among the Jewish people."

"This firmly-knit organization of communal self-government could not but foster among the Jews of Poland a spirit of discipline and obedience to the law. It had an educational effect on the Jewish populace, which was left by the Government to itself, and had no share in the common life of the country. It provided the stateless nation with a substitute for national and political self-expression, keeping public spirit and civic virtue alive in it, and upholding and unfolding its genuine culture."

Yet then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth suffered grave problems of institutional imbalance. Eventually the Commonwealth was removed from the map of Europe by successive partitions perpetrated by her three neighboring states, each an autocracy, the third and extinguishing partition coming in 1795. Following the Congress of Vienna (1815) the Russian Empire uneasily governed most of these Polish and Lithuanian lands, including the large Jewish populations long dwelling there. The Russian Empire first restricted Jewish residence to their pre-existing Pale of Settlement, and later began to further confine Jewish liberties and curtail their self-government. Not only were their rights attacked, but several of the Tzars allowed the imperial government to propagate and to instigate a series of murderous pogroms against the Jewish people of the realm.

In the cruel atmosphere of this ongoing political crisis in the region, Simon Dubnow wrote his celebrated histories and played an active rôle in Jewish affairs. He supported the broad movements for change in the Russian Empire; yet in the main he sought to restore and to continue the Jewish autonomy, described above at it zenith under the old Commonwealth, into the 20th century.

During his life various large and tragic events were to impact the region, which can be considered as the most horrific of places during the first half of the 20th century. Among these events, ranging from a few positive to news headlines to crimes against humanity, were: the pogroms, the co-opted 1905 Russian Revolution, founding of the Folkspartei, the First World War, the February Revolution followed by the October Bolshevik, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Versailles Treaty, the Polish–Soviet War, the Weimar inflation, the U.S.A. Immigration Act of 1924, exile of Leon Trotsky by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Gulag, the Great Depression, collectivization of the Ukraine, the Nazi regime, the Nuremberg racial laws, Stalin's Great Purge, Kristalnacht, the 1939 White Paper, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Second World War, the Soviet-Nazi War, and the Shoah. The catastrophe of the genocide claimed the life of the aged historian.