Writing East European Jewish History ― Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe

This volume is devoted to the development of Jewish historiography in the three east European centres-Congress Poland, the Russian empire, and Galicia-that together contained the vast majority of world Jewry at that time. Drawing widely on the multilingual body of scholarly and popular literature that emerged in that turbulent environment, the contributors to this volume attempt to go beyond the established paradigms in the study of Jewish historiography, and specifically to examine the relationship between the writing of Jewish history and of non-Jewish history in eastern Europe. In doing so they expose the tension between studying the Jewish past in a communal setting and considering it in a wider, regional setting that locates Jews firmly in the non-Jewish political, economic, and cultural environment. They also explore the relationship between 'history'-seen as the popular understanding of the past-and 'scholarly history'-interpretation of the past through the academic study of the sources, which lays claim to objectivity and authority. The fruit of research in many disciplines and from different methodological points of view, this volume has much to offer scholars of modern Jewry trying to understand how east European Jews saw themselves as they struggled with the concepts of modernity and national identity and how their history continues to be studied and discussed by an international community of scholars. (Series: Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 29) [Subject: Jewish Studies, History, Eastern European Studies]

Natalia Aleksiun is an associate professor of Jewish History at Touro College, New York.

Brian Horowitz is Sizeler Family Chair Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University.

Antony Polonsky is Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and chief historian of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He is Chair of the Editorial Board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry.