Simon Dubnow, Simon Dubnow

Here he married Ida Friedlin. Koppel S. Pinson, "Simon Dubnow: Historian and Political Philosopher" at 13-69, 11, in Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History (Philadelphia 1958), edited by Pinson. In 1885 at Mstislavl, Belarus, their first child a daughter Sophia, was born.

With thousands of Jews he was transferred to the Riga ghetto. According to the few remaining survivors, Dubnow repeated to ghetto inhabitants: "Yidn, shreibt un fershreibt" (Yiddish: "Jews, write and record"). He was among thousands of Jews to be rounded up there for the Rumbula massacre. Too sick to travel to the forest, he was executed in the city on December 8, 1941. Several friends then buried Simon Dubnow in the old cemetery of the Riga ghetto. Pinson, "Simon Dubnow" at 13-69, 34-39, in Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History (1958).

Not all were assimilators, e.g., the autonomist Simon Dubnow, who spoke Russian and maneuvered to enter St. Petersburg (see here "Life and career"), yet speaking Russian was state coerced as well as perhaps chosen. Also, Yiddish is a German idiom.

In his Weltgeschichte he discusses the ancient rivalry between Sadducee and Pharisee, as a contest between the ideal of a political nation versus a spiritual nation . He favored the latter, and mounted a critique of the warlike policies of Alexander Jannaeus (r. 103-76 B.C.E.), a king of the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty (167-63 B.C.E.), which was founded by the Maccabees: "This was not the kind of state dreamed of by their predecessors, the hasidim, when the independence of Judea was attained and when the star of the Hasmoneans first began to gleam. Had Judea battled against the Syrian yoke, sacrificed for a quarter of a century its material goods and the blood of its best sons, only in order to become, after attaining independence, a 'despotism' or warrior state after the fashion of its pagan neighbors? The Pharisees believed that the Jewish nation was created for something better; that in its political life it was not to strive for the ideal of brute force but rather for the lofty ideal of inner social and spiritual progress." Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des Jdischen Volkes (Berlin: Jdischer Verlag 1925-1929) at II: 157; cf., 123-124, 143-147; as cited and quoted by Pinson, "Simon Dubnow" at 13-69, 44, in Dubnow, Nationalism and History (1958).

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