1. The following abbreviations will be used: KZ: Simon Dubnow, Kniga Zhizni [Book of Life]. Vol. I (to 1903), Riga, 1934. Vol. II (1903–22), Riga, 1935. Vol. Ill (1922–33), Riga, 1940; republished, New York, 1957. Pis'ma: Simon Dubnow, Pis'ma o starom i novom evreistve [Letters on Old and New Judaism]. St. Petersburg, 1907. Sefer Dubnow: Simon Rawidowicz, ed. Sefer Shime'on Dubnov [Simon Dubnow, In Memoriam: Essays and Letters]. London: Ararat Publishing Co., 1954. Dubnow, Man and Work: Aaron Steinberg, ed. Simon Dubnow: The Man and His Work (A Memorial Volume on the Occasion of the Centenary of his Birth). World Jewish Congress, 1963. Dubnow's published articles are cited in the notes according to the numbers he assigned to them in his “Auto Bibliography” included at the end of the third volume of Kniga zhizni and republished in Dubnow, Man and Work. For those articles extending over two or more issues of a journal, the specific month will be cited in each note. Of special importance among studies of Dubnow is the biography by his daughter: Sofia Ehrlich-Dubnova, Zhizn' i tvorchestvo S. M. Dubnova [The Life and Work of Simon Dubnow], New York: S. M. Dubnow Committee, 1950.

2. For his use of synthesis, see for example, KZ, I, 241–42 and Pis'ma, pp. 14–15; on integratsiia dushi see KZ, II, 203. The title of Dubnow's autobiography alludes of course to the heavenly books annually balanced on the Days of Judgment. Frequently in his autobiography Dubnow integrates past and present through pausing to reflect on significant changes in his life and outlook, the effects of the passage of time on friends and places, and parallels between contemporary issues and historical events, e.g., KZ, I, 203, 244. The value of autobiography reoccurs in Dubnow's letters, especially to Ahad Ha-Am (Sefer Dubnow, pp. 275, 278, 288, 289, 316, 455).

3. For another example of this approach with a discussion of the relevant psychological theories, see J.E. Seigel, “Marx's Early Development: Vocation, Rebellion, and Realism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, III:3 (Winter 1973), 475–508.

4. See, in particular, Ben-Zion, Dinur, “The Historical Image of Russian Jewry and Problems Connected with Its Study” [in Hebrew], Zion, XXII (1957), 93–118,Google Scholar and Yehudah, Sloutsky, “The Rise of the Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia” [in Hebrew], Zion, XXV, nos. 3–4 (1960), 212–37.Google Scholar

5. Kalman Shulman's translation of Sue's novel was first published in four parts between 1854 and 1860. The impact of Mistorei Pariz is often mentioned in autobiographies of Russian Jews of the second half of the nineteenth century. For example: Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Kol kitvei Moshe Leib Lilienblum (Cracow: Joseph Fischer, 5672–73 [1911/12–1912/13]), II, 249; Ahad Ha-Am, Kol kitvei 'Ahad Ha-Am (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 5725 [1964–65]), p. 494. Also see David, Patterson, The Hebrew Novel in Czarist Russia, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), p.223;Google Scholar and his Abraham Mapu: The Creator of the Modern Hebrew Novel (London: East and West Library, 1964), p. 103. Mistorei Pariz impressed Dubnow and his brother Wolf so strongly that the boys decided to copy the whole work by hand before returning it to the owner, and actually managed to record the whole first volume in this way. After having read Abraham Mapu's two historical novels, 'Ashmat Shomron and 'Ahavat Tsiyon, they were able to locate in Mstislavl only the first volume of his 'Ayit savu'a, a contemporary tale of the conflict between the maskilim and the traditionalists; they ordered the remaining parts from a local bookstore and paid for them with money filched from the cashbox of their mother's store (KZ, I, 43). At the age of thirteen Dubnow wrote an essay entitled “A Vision of the Holy Tongue” in the melitsah style; the work concerned an allegorical figure, the Hebrew language, who attacks the obscurantists for their insistence on the exclusive study of the Talmud, neglect of the Bible, and hostility to the new Hebrew literature (Ibid., pp. 44–45). Dubnow then read the lyrics of Micah Joseph Lebenson (Mikhal) and the bound volumes of the Hebrew journals that appeared in Russia beginning in the late fifties. When a synagogue hanger-on informed his grandfather that the young boy was an 'epiqoms, Dubnow wrote and distributed an ardent pamphlet against the men of darkness who fought the light of knowledge (Ibid., pp. 55–56).

6. Dubnow's parents had five sons and five daughters (one son died in childhood). Two of them were unable to break away from the traditional milieu and establish successful new lives. His oldest brother became a talmudic scholar; after marrying he tried business without success and died at an early age in Moscow. One sister, whom he describes as full of lively and romantic inclinations, had an unhappy love affair which resulted in a still-born illegitimate child, and a later marriage ended in divorce (Ibid., pp. 18–19, 84). His brother Wolf, a year and a half older than Simon, was his constant companion in youth. (In 1882 Wolf went to Palestine as a Biluist; although he returned to Russia three years later, Wolf remained enthusiastic about the Bilu ideal and influenced Simon in the direction of a nationalist conception of Jewish identity.) Being a middle child may have given Dubnow greater freedom to strike out on his own. He refused to continue studying in yeshivah after the age of thirteen, and his family did not press the issue (Ibid., pp. 49–50).

7. Dubnow remembered his mother as a “typical Jewish woman of the old style” who continually worried about the family's debts for rent, clothes, food, and teachers, and supplemented her husband's income with earnings from a small china shop which did almost all its business just before the Passover season (Ibid., p. 17). His father was in the lumber business of his rich but stingy father-in-law and lived at home only during the autumn. He portrays him as rather remote, sometimes irritable, often gloomy and preoccupied, but capable of tenderness. Because his horizons were not limited to the outskirts of Mstislavl, his son's ambitions for a broader education were not beyond his understanding (Ibid., pp. 15–17, 41, 49, 105). Dubnow's grandfather was a pillar of Mstislavl's Jewish community. He had been a merchant, but retired around the age of forty to lecture on talmudic subjects in the main synagogue; as his reputation spread, he attracted students from throughout Belorussia. He despised Hasidism, avoided pilpul, and emphasized the plain meaning of the texts in the tradition of Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the famous “Vilna Gaon.” On the grandfather, the most important figure of authority in Dubnow's childhood, see Ibid., pp. 11–14, 49, and many other places in the first volume of the autobiography.

8. The cosmos was always viewed by Dubnow as understandable, though he claims as a child to have had glimpses of the abyss of its impersonal coldness (Ibid., pp. 27–28).

9. In 1890, shortly after his grandfather's death, Dubnow was working on his first Hebrew essay since childhood: “I inscribed my brochure on the first page, 'To the memory of him who all the days of his life did not depart from the tent of the Torah.' I felt that I was obligated to this hero of the spirit, who had given me an inheritance and an affection for the tent of Torah, although it was a completely different, broader, and free Torah” (Ibid., p. 270).

10. Through the Haskalah the nonconformist became an established social type within the still predominantly traditional East European Jewish world. Many localities in the 1860s already had what amounted to an informal society of maskilitn. The traditionalists' suspicion of the maskilim was exacerbated by the tendency of the latter to look to the Russian government for support to enforce their program, so that the “Berlinchiks” appeared at times to represent not the interests of the Jews as a whole, but the narrower interests of the class of modernized intellectuals and wealthy merchants (Patterson, Hebrew Novel, p. 158; Elias Tcherikower, Yehudim be-'ittot mahpekhah [Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1957], p. 123). Although Dubnow described his conversion to Haskalah solely as the result of the books he read and his natural inclination to rebel against casuistry and the supposed terrors associated with the Other World, there were several people in Mstislavl who undoubtedly exercised a strong influence on him. A family living on the outskirts of town possessed a secret library of Haskalah literature from which he was able to borrow. Also, a group of friends, who had begun a small collection of Russian books, provided strong moral and emotional support for his later sallies into secular education. Thus, Dubnow's autobiographical account of a highly individualistic child holding aloft the banner of reason against the united forces of obscurantism is not entirely accurate. (KZ, I, 27–28, 35–38, 51–53, 61.)

11. Ibid., pp. 67–68. Lilienblum's novel was first published in Vienna in 1876 and was unique among semiautobiographical works in nineteenth-century Hebrew literature for its excellent psychological analysis. In Lilienblum's book the “sins of youth” are really the sins against youth, for the enlightenment has given the narrator no purpose in life; Dubnow remarked that it seemed at the time that the book clearly pointed the way to a new generation of Jews totally indifferent to Judaism (Ibid., pp. 77–79). After reading Borne's Letters from Paris in Russian translation, Dubnow was impudent enough to quote him in a final examination. When his politically conservative teacher read the statement-“the noble man may be the slave of circumstances, but he who becomes the lackey of circumstances is an ignoble man”-Dubnow was suspected of revolutionary leanings and graded down accordingly (Ibid., p. 70). At the time when the young Moses Mendelssohn was his hero, Dubnow read Georges Bernard Depping's History of the Jews in the Middle Ages and toyed with the notion of going to the Breslau Theological Seminary in order to become a rabbinical reformer (Ibid., pp. 79–81).

12. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia: Studies in History, Literature and Philosophy, 2 vols.; 2d ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), II, 48. The Russian radicals' materialism was largely drawn from the German popularizers of science, such as Ludwig Buchner. Buchner, in his widely read Kraft und Staff, which went through nine editions beginning with 1855, presents a monist conception of reality which rejects the separate existences of spirit and matter, and insists that mind is but an epiphenomenon of the human body. On the “materialist controversy” of the fifties in Germany generated by Buchner, Moleschott, and others, see Frederick, Albert Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance(New York: Humanities Press, 1950), pp. 262–84;Google ScholarMerz, John Theodore, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 4 vols. (New York: Dover, 1965), II, 322–23,Google Scholar and Hajo, Holborn, A History of Modern Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), HI, 120–21. From this aspect of Russian radicalism Dubnow acquired a lifelong antipathy to metaphysics; he considered German idealist philisophy to be “fuzzy thinking” and could not accept the notion that speculative reason gives knowledge of being, independent of the findings of the sciences. From positivism he also acquired a passion for exactitude and the systematic organization of facts-together with an impatience with epistemological questions characteristic as well of the writings of the Russian critics. Dmitry Pisarev, for example, insisted that “manifestness is the best guarantee of reality” and that the “impossibility of manifestation excludes any reality of existence” (Dmitry Pisarev, Selected Philosophical, Social, and Political Essays [Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958], p.104).Google Scholar

13. The principle of utility rests on the assumption that man's only object is to seek pleasure and shun pain, and that terms such as just and unjust, moral and immoral, good and bad, can be resolved into pain and pleasure, without recourse to metaphysics. From this is derived the principle that actions are right as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse. Jeremy Bentham rejected the concept of natural rights, but was able to bring his system into harmony with democratic radicalism through the famous phrase “the greatest good for the greatest number,” which was interpreted as “everybody is to count for one, nobody for more than one.” (See Jeremy, Bentham, “Principles of Legislation,” in Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West [New York: Columbia University Press, 1954], II, 313–15;Google ScholarJohn, Stuart Mill, Selected Writings, ed. Maurice, Cowling [New York: New American Library, 1968], p. 249;Google ScholarWarner, Fite, An Introductory Study of Ethics [New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903], p. 88.)Google Scholar The personal implications of utilitarianism ultimately depend on what constitutes pleasure for the utilitarian; the Russian radicals disavowed “frivolous pleasure” and hedonism, and considered most fine literature and art useless except as propaganda. Thus, utilitarianism was interpreted by them to buttress their concern for social betterment. (On Bentham's influence in Russia and on Mill's interpretation of duty in the category of pleasure, see Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Victorian Minds [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968], pp. 286–87.) For Dubnow, who was not drawn into the social struggle, the purpose of life was the acquisition of scientific knowledge and self-perfection. John Stuart Mill's “gospel of individualism” became his “model of clear, honest thinking.” He decided that he had been sacrificed by his parents to the despotism of public opinion and thus unjustly deprived of the general education he wanted (KZ, I,100–102).Google Scholar

14. At this stage, Dubnow's view of history was drawn from Comte, Henry Thomas Buckle's History of the Civilization in England (1857–61), and John Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (first published in 1862). James Billington discusses the great influence of Comte in Russia (“The Intelligentsia and the Religion of Humanity,'” American Historical Review, LXV [July 1960], 807–21). While the Russian materialists dethroned the mind as an independent force, they thoroughly believed in the ability of critical thinking to shape the future. In the first half of his twenties Dubnow was very sympathetic to the Comtean conception of history, with its sharp distinctions between periods of development and its emphasis on the development of man's intellectual life from the theological to the metaphysical to the positive stages. Later, Dubnow moved closer to Herbert Spencer's more gradualist view of progress. (On Dubnow's early attitude to Buckle, Draper, Comte, Spencer, and Karl Marx: KZ, I, 107–8.)

15. Ibid., pp. 175–76.

16. Abram Tertz defines printsipial'nost' as “a mental habit of referring every matter, however small, concrete or trivial, to lofty and abstract principles” (Abram Tertz [pseud.], On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis [New York: Pantheon Books, 1960], p. 31).

17. KZ, I, 176.

18. Dubnow explained: “For that era this was a very daring step, not only with respect to our relatives in the provinces, but to our social circle in Petersburg; yet it was no obstacle to me since it was a matter of being true to my convictions” (Ibid., p. 152).

19. Ibid., p. 176.

20. Ibid., p. 176. 20. On his absence from his son's circumcision: Ibid., p. 220. He did not go to the synagogue during the year of mourning for his father to read the traditionalprayers about God's will because “I myself did not know whose will created the world where a poor wanderer could not rest in his rebuilt family nest during his declining years” Ibid., p. 213).

21. Ibid., pp. 180, 192. He overcame his eye troubles in 1890 when he was given special lenses to correct his astigmatism (Ibid., p. 237), but some of the physical pain of those years was certainly a result of mental crisis. His suffering may also have given him a greater sense of the physical limitations of concrete reality.

22. In the summer of 1884 he decided that he had made “too severe demands” on literature by insisting that it be concerned only with “world problems and Weltschmerz.” When he burst into tears while reading Turgenev he concluded that “you cannot divide the sphere of Reason so sharply from that of Emotion. A true artistic production without a definite ideological foundation, as well as a good philosophical treatise, can be a source for deep thought” (Ibid., p. 172). The joint portraits of Mill and Shelley stood on his writing desk for a number of years (Ibid., p. 170). Although he regarded the theater, opera, and painting with indifference, he had a lifelong fondness for lyric poetry, especially that of Heine, Byron, Shelley, Pushkin, ermontov, and, above all, Victor Hugo (Ibid., pp. 171, 178). On his love of nature and the freshness of the countryside as against the city: Ibid., pp. 105, 198, 205, 215.

23. Ibid., p. 192. Soon after, he made some notes on Job and Ecclesiastes, and derived the following scheme, which he called the “psychological and ethical basis of pessimism”: first, there was “the yearning inherent in each man for the infinite, which is unobtainable in view of his finite nature”; then, a war existed between man's “feeling and mind” and in the struggle for existence “often not the moral but the physically stronger wins”; finally, in place of the utilitarian concept of the greatest happiness, he concluded that one should substitute the principle that an increase in happiness is simply the result of a decrease in suffering. “In those days I reviewed my whole world view and stood in horror before the abyss of life” (Ibid., p. 194).

24. The most important articles of his early stage are: #, “Several Stages in the History of Jewish Thought,” Russkii Evrei, 1881; # 16, “What Kind of Self-Emancipation Do the Jews Need?,” Voskhod, 1883; #23, “Palestinophilism and Its Main Advocate (Smolenski) [sic],” Voskhod, 1883; #31, “A Last Word on the Condemned Jewry,” Voskhod, 1884; #39, “On the Reform of the Jewish School,” Voskhod, 1885. His remarks on the joint effort of Jews and government to fight “the abuses of Hasidism” are in #16 (July-August), pp. 21–22.

25. On his difficulties in obtaining permission to live in St. Petersburg and the ruses that he was forced to employ to remain there even briefly: KZ, I, 106–107, 115–16, 143, 201. Late in 1886, after a two-month wait in the capital to achieve bona fide legal residence there, his request was again denied and he was ordered to leave the city within twenty-four hours. He went to the nearby village of Tsarskoe Selo, greatly perturbed. The snowdrifts among which he walked were “a symbol of frozen Russia, a lifeless country crushed under the Tsarist regime,” and “the sign of Cain, 'Jew,' follows me everywhere” (Ibid., p. 202). In 1890 he made a final effort, writing a petition “asking them to give me through graciousness that which a dog is given without applying” (Ibid., p. 242). Even though his editor asked Baron Horace Gunzberg to recommend Dubnow personally, this appeal was decisively turned down (Ibid., p. 243).

26. Dubnow had almost no contact with the Russian intelligentsia in St. Petersburg; his acquaintances there were relatives, Jewish journalists, and a few russified Jewish writers, such as Grigori Bogrov, Akim Flekser-Volinsky, and his closest friend at the time, the poet Simon Frug. The only non-Jewish writer Dubnow knew personally was Nikolay Leskov. Leskov used Jewish themes sympathetically in a number of his stories and wrote a widely cited defense of equal rights for Russian Jews, but Dubnow found some of his attitudes and private actions repulsive (see Ibid., pp. 150–52). He gradually concluded that the Russian intelligentsia of his time was, as a whole, indifferent to, if not actually infected with, antisemitism. (See for example #10, p. 740; #31, p. 3; #78, p. 40; #60, p. 12; #90 [February], p. 19.)

27. #90, p. 25.

28. KZ, I, 206–207.

29. In 1888, several years after his anti-positivist mood had first seized him, he told the father superior of the Mstislavl monastery, who had isited him to attempt his conversion, that “I relate to all religions as an investigator and not as a participant” (Ibid., pp. 221–22). I hope to treat Dubnow's indebtedness to Ernest Renan in detail in a separate article. On Dubnow's attitude toward Renan, see Ibid., p. 221 and #123 (April), p. 31.

30. Dubnow's closest associates in Odessa were Sholem Aleikhem, Mendele Mokher Seforim, Ahad Ha-Am, the journalist Mark Rabinovich (Ben Ami) and the lawyer and civic leader Michael Margulis; other acquaintances there were future Zionist leaders and outstanding literary figures, such as Yehoshua Ravnitsky, Micah Berdichevsky, Hayyim Bialik, Sh. Ben Zion, Hayyim Tchernowitz, and Meir Dizengof.

31. Dubnow's “historism” is to be distinguished from the “historicism” that has been detected among nineteenth-century German scholars; Dubnow strongly rejected ethical relativism, whereas it has been pointed out that “historicism … came to be confronted by ethical nihilism as the logical consequence of its position that all values and cognitions are bound in their validity to the historical situation in which they arise” (Iggers, Georg G., The German Conception of History [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968], P270).Google Scholar

32. #98, p. 1. This discussion introduces his influential article calling for the establishment of a Russian Jewish historical society. The essay is prefaced with a motto from Cicero: “Not to know history means always to be a child” (Ibid.). Dubnow explains that the child knows the present through direct sensations and lives primarily for immediate joys; his sense of the future consists of promised rewards and feared punishments, while his past is composed of fragmented memories not logically or causally related to his present. When the growing person learns to anticipate consequences, he acquires the faculty of foresight. But the practical man, who concerns himself exclusively with the present and future and is preoccupied with achieving expedient results, remains incomplete. Full maturity requires “a conscious relationship to the past.”

33. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Dubnow insists that religion does not account for Jewish cohesion, since in the forefront of the Jewish national movement stand freethinkers indifferent to religion; unconscious racial characteristics also explain nothing because typical Jewish mannerisms disappear in the upper classes without necessarily weakening their ties to the people (Ibid., p. 6). See also #111 (October-November), pp. 120–21, where he explains that the conscious and unconscious elements of “the Jewish national soul” have been produced over the course of centuries as a result of the “magnetic power” of similar historical fortunes.

34. #111 (October), p. 121; #98, pp. 4–5.

35. #111 (October), p. 120.

36. “What Is Jewish History?” (#111) appeared in the October-November and the December 1893 issues of Voskhod. In his diary Dubnow described the fifty-page “philosophical-historical synthesis” as his “historical credo in miniature.” Later he reappraised it as “a hymn to Jewish history” (KZ, I, 274–75). An English translation was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1903, reprinted in S., Pinson Koppel, ed., Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism by Simon Dubnow (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), pp. 253–324.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., pp. 344–45. One summer evening in 1898, sitting on a bench in a country garden overlooking the Dnieper, Dubnow felt that he had a “single vision beyond all human understanding…. From then on I was strongly moved by a cult of nature, a kind of pantheism which I called emotional. Thus I found peace between two opposing principles: burning historism and cold cosmism. The unconsciously religious [feeling] which the contemplation of nature gives us, together with the conscious, scholarly element, were the basis of my harmonious world view” (Ibid.).

38. Ibid., p. 221.

39. I hope to deal with the influence of Lavrov and Hugo on Dubnow in a separate article. Lavrov and other populist theoreticians emphasized that the study of human consciousness required an introspective method and therefore materialism was inapplicable to the domain of history. In Hugo's poetry Dubnow apparently found a reverence for cosmic infinity, together with a faith in liberty and progress, close to his own view (Ibid., p. 245; KZ, III, 147).

40. Ibid., pp. 160–61. Dubnow insisted that Tolstoy's thought had a Jewish character because it postulated the triumph of the moral over the merely aesthetic (“Yesod ha-Yahadut she-betorat Tolstoy,” Ha-Shiloah [1911], pp. 627–28).

41. Dubnow began writing his series of Letters on Old and New Judaism at the end of 1897. During the summer of 1906 and the spring of 1907 they were in part rewritten and arranged in an orderly sequence for publication. The book is divided into three parts: “General Principles,” “Between Social Tendencies,” and “Between Inquisition and Emancipation, 1903–1907.” Included also is published material not originally labeled “Letters,” some of which appears in appendices. An abridged English translation of the Letters is included in Nationalism and History (see note 36 above), pp. 73–241.

42. Dubnow's ideology became the platform of the Folkspartei, allied with the left-wing Kadets. The Folkspartei was founded in 1907, and remained a small group in St. Petersburg without agents, funds, or initiative to recruit in the provinces; it was revived briefly in 1917 and reappeared with more success in Poland, especially between 1916 and 1926 (see 170). The party platform demanded that Russia be a multinational state with a democratic constitution recognizing national rights as well as civil freedom. National rights were defined as the freedom of the individual to identify himself as a member of his true nationality. According to the platform, territorial minorities should receive regional autonomy, while nonterritorial minorities, “which are scattered over various provinces without being a majority in any, will have communal and cultural autonomy” (Pis'ma, p. 83). The Jews were, of course, the main instance of a non-territorial nationality. The Folkspartei program envisioned establishing a general Jewish va'ad or council, which would select a permanent executive to supervise Jewish life in Russia, support national Jewish culture, attempt to improve Jewish economic conditions, and exert influence on the Russian administration and parliament in all matters of Jewish interest. Hayyim Zhitlovsky and Nathan Birnbaum advocated similar programs of Jewish minority rights. The Austrian Social Democratic Party also developed an influential concept of “personal” nationalism, but its main spokesmen did not consider the Jews a legitimate nationality. By 1907 every modern Jewish party, including the Bund, Zionism, and even anti-Zionism, had accepted this principle in some form. (See Oscar, Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights [1898–1919], [New York: Columbia University Press, 1933]Google Scholar and Henry, Tobias, “The Jews in Tsarist Russia: The Political Education of a Minority,” Minorities and Politics, ed. J., Tobias Henry and Charles E. Woodhouse [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969], pp.19–38.)Google Scholar

43. Pis'ma, pp. 81, 160 (footnote), 258–59. Dubnow's concept of national unfolding bears a superficial resemblance to Hegelianism, but it is actually a form of social Darwinism. Dubnow considered the basic social unit (the nation) a primordial entity, whereas the state was an artificial creation at a certain stage of history and not absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation. The biological metaphor was irresistible: according to Dubnow a nation wages a perpetual struggle to survive in the face of other national organisms that seek to dispossess or destroy it, and a nation acquires definite characteristics as it is gradually shaped by the social environment. Dubnow's nationalism rests on an impersonal elan vital, perhaps akin to the ultimate force which Dubnow sensed in his pantheistic moments a vast natural power before which the individual is dwarfed and yet which he feels pulsating within himself. Although Dubnow's nationalism is analogous to kinship, the basis of the nation's will-to-live was psychic, not physical. “The nation's consciousness is the main criterion of its existence. 'I think of myself as a nation therefore I am' “ (Ibid., p. 26).

44. See, for example, Ibid., pp. 31, 47, 117–18, 123–25, 258–9.

45. Ibid., pp. 51, 79. The expression “putting on their masks” is found on p. 241.

46. “The antithesis [the enlightenment] humanized us, but at the same time denationalized us” (Ibid., p. 80). For his criticisms of cosmopolitanism see, for example, Ibid., pp. 25, 45, 67, 275

47. Although Dubnow insisted on the validity of the nineteenth-century aspiration for freedom of religious and philosophical thought among the Jewish people, he viewed the enlightenment when pushed to its ultimate conclusion as national suicide (Ibid., p. 79). The “New Judaism” would preserve the best of the “thesis” (the medieval communal pattern) without its oligarchy, isolation, and intellectual fetters; it would acknowledge the necessary and important achievements of the “antithesis” (the Haskalah and related movements) without the latter's seif-destructiveness. Having affirmed that the Jewish nation required the right to the means that would insure its survival, Dubnow concluded: “Here I found and crossed the bridge from Mill's doctrine of the absolute freedom of the individual to the doctrine of the freedom of the collective” (KZ, I, 329–30).

48. See such expressions as “defensive wall” and “mailed soul” (Pis'ma, p. 47), the “fulcrum” must be within (Ibid., p. 52), voluntary “isolation” (Ibid., p. 108). An emancipation that acknowledges explicitly the existence of the Jewish nation will not be a “gift of kindness” but an act of justice to an ancient cultured personality which “has resided nineteen centuries in Europe” (Ibid., pp. 44, 238).

49. For the extended dispute among East European Jewish ideologists between spiritual nationalism and spiritual Zionism on the one hand, and political Zionism on the other, see Sh. Brayman, Ha-pulmos ben LiUenblum le-ven 'Ahad Ha-Am ve- Dubnov ve-ha-reqa' shello (Jerusalem: Sifriat ha-makhon le-madrikhim, 1951). Spiritual nationalism, which Dubnow arrived at in his own way, is a recurrent position in nineteenth-century Jewish thought, extending back to Graetz, Smolenskin, and even Krochmal.

50. I do not wish to minimize the importance of the disputes that divided the Jewish community of Russia at the time and that differentiated Dubnow's approach from his ideological opponents among the Bundists and Zionists. The background of his attitudes toward such issues as the class struggle, the transvaluation of values, the future of Yiddish versus Hebrew, and the affirmation or negation of the galut—all merit special and extended treatment elsewhere.