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SELTZER / GRAETZ, DUBNOW, BARON
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scorned) were means employed by the nation to preserve itself
against the dangers o f history. Dubnow was influenced in this
regard by the popu lar Darwinism o f his day: the supreme
raison
d ’etre
o f organisms was survival, and psychologically strong na
tions were able to adjust to the challenges o f changing envi
ronm en ts and grow even stronger.
DUBNOW’S DEVELOPMENT
Dubnow’s historical writing became more overtly secularistic
and social-scientific in the late nineties in Odessa and af te r he
moved in the early years o f the new century to St. Petersburg.
In his
Letters on Old and New Judaism
(published as a book in
1907), Jewry is presen ted as the most evolved nation in the
world, a model o f the non-territorial personal nationhood o f
the fu tu re , inasmuch as it had demonstrated that a viable col
lective identity was not dependen t on a single land, language,
or state. This period also saw the issuance by him o f a series
o f textbooks on Jewish history, culminating in the
World History
of the Jewish People,
written du ring World War One and the
years o f revolution and civil war in Russia and published in
the 1920s in German and in the 1930s in Hebrew and Russian
editions.
Dubnow’s labelled his approach in the
Weltgeschichte
“socio
logical,” bu t it was above all a narration o f the political events
affecting the Jews and an analysis o f the successful adaptation
of the Jewish communities to changing diaspora conditions and
needs. Because Dubnow was a 19th-century liberal nationalist
(albeit a liberalism adjusted to the mass society o f pre-World
War One Europe) and had an unshakable faith in the benev
olent impact o f enlightenment, science, and progress, he looked
forward to the happy resolution o f the conund rum o f Jewish
survival. He felt this could be achieved th rough a synthesis o f
the old communal autonomy with the freedom o f though t o f
the Haskalah in a new
kahal
system to be incorporated into a
multinational structu re on the ruins o f the old order. This hope
gave substance to his unders tand ing o f the successes and fail
ures o f recent Jewish history, periodized according to various
waves o f emancipation and reaction. Aside from the close re
lation o f his historiography to his ideology, however, Dubnow
played a leading role in reorien ting Jewish historiography in