The dual path of historian Artur Eisenbach

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to reconstruct the biography of Artur Eisenbach, who was both a prominent historian of the nineteenth century and one of the first historians to study the Holocaust. Born in Poland, Eisenbach survived the war in the Soviet Union. Upon his return to Poland, he joined the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH) in Warsaw, where he wrote many works on the Holocaust. During the course of the antisemitic campaign of 1968, he resigned as director of the institute. His subsequent research, carried out with colleagues at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), focused on Polish Jewry in the nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure precisely because he remained on the borderline between Jewish and Polish identities.