Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun Gershon Bacon Natalia Aleksiun. Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2021. xii + 329 pp. A chance encounter with the name of Polish Jewish historian Majer Bałaban, previously unknown to her, proved transformative for Natalia Aleksiun in her choice of career, and ultimately resulted in the excellent volume here under review. Conscious History is a delicately executed portrait of a small, but significant cohort of the interwar generation of Polish Jews, but it provides the reader with much more. It is a masterful and erudite summary of the writing of Polish Jewish history from its beginnings in the nineteenth century until the Holocaust. The chapter structure of the book is a felicitous combination of chronological and thematic approaches to the subject at hand. Chapter 1, “Beginnings,” speaks of the initial stage of historical research on Polish Jewry, usually by amateurs. Chapter 2, “The Making of Professional Jewish Historians,” is a fascinating portrayal of the first generation of university-trained Jewish historians, focusing on those scholars who played a crucial role in training the young historians of the interwar generation: Majer Bałaban, Ignacy (Yitzhak) Schiper, and Mojżesz (Moshe) Schorr. One point that stands out in her narrative is the centrality of Galician institutions (as well as the University of Vienna) in the formation of this first generation, in which another noted historian of Jewish origin, Szymon Askenazy, served as an enabler, even though his personal historical views as an integrationist differed from the more nationally minded scholars of the younger generation whom he encouraged. Chapter 3, “Becoming Polish Mainstream,” begins Aleksiun’s coverage of her main subject, namely the generation trained and active in the interwar period, now centered in Warsaw, with the leading role played by Bałaban, both in Warsaw University and in the Institute of Jewish Studies. Bałaban’s dual appointment at the two institutions created a formal scholarly setting of great consequence, enabling him to train over sixty male and female students of Jewish history who would earn university diplomas. He would become the first and only professor of Jewish history in a Polish university in the years before the Holocaust. Aleksiun rightly puts this phenomenon in its proper perspective. At the time that Bałaban and his cadre started their activity, the only comparable enterprises were the chair held by Salo Baron at Columbia University, the fledgling Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University, and a lone professorship in Jewish studies at the University of Madrid. As in the previous generation, here too a noted Polish historian of Jewish origin, Marceli Handelsman, gave important support to Bałaban’s professorship and to university-level teaching of Jewish history. The final two chapters of the book are thematic in nature. Chapter 4, “Beyond the Ivory Tower,” as its name implies, offers a wide-ranging survey of the activities of the university-trained young generation of Jewish historians. For the most part excluded from a career in Polish academia, or in state or non-Jewish institutions, [End Page 196] they worked in Jewish high schools, carried on their research, particularly in local history, and functioned as public intellectuals, publishing articles on popular history in numerous Jewish periodicals in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. In their work, the line between the academic and popular remained constantly blurred. History was a tool in the fight to define the relationship of Jews to Poland and to the Poles, and was a struggle about the present and future no less than the study of the past. In view of this trend, the chapter examines such things as the use of Jewish history in parliamentary debates, in the work of Jewish army chaplains, and in remaking the curriculum for training rabbis. The final chapter, “Themes and Trends of Historical Enquiry,” well illustrates the historical agenda and changing approaches of the younger generation, among other things, their growing emphasis on economic history. A substantive epilogue and an extensive bibliography round out this impressive study. While Aleksiun’s discussion demonstrates a progressive academization and...