Moshe Mishkinsky (1917–1998)

Abstract

This chapter commemorates Moshe Mishkinsky. Mishkinsky was one of the premier scholars of the history of the Jewish labour movement. Born in Białystok in 1917, Mishkinsky emigrated to Palestine at the age of 19, where he developed an interest in the Jewish workers’ movement. He distinguished himself in the scholarly community as an authority on the Jewish labour movement in general and on the history of the Bund in tsarist Russia in particular. He was among the first scholars to challenge the prevailing view, enshrined in the Bund’s own post-war five-volume Geshikhte fun bund, that the development of a national programme within Jewish socialist circles was the result of pressure from below, from the Jewish masses. Mishkinsky’s second contribution included a pioneering study, published in English in 1969, on the role of regional factors in the formation of the Jewish labour movement.