Language:
English
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
East European Jewish Affairs
Angaben zur Quelle:
38,3 (2008) 257-280
Keywords:
Cherikover, I. M.,
;
Dubnow, Simon,
;
Jews Historiography
;
Suffering Religious aspects
;
Judaism
;
History
Abstract:
Elias Tcherikower (1881-1943), a prominent Yiddish-language historian, was renowned as a chronicler and researcher of the Russian Civil War pogroms of 1918-20. Describes the transformation from 1915-41 of his views on the writing of Jewish history. A Dubnow disciple, Tcherikower departed from his teacher's views and embraced the "lachrymose conception" of Jewish history, stressing the centrality of martyrology in his writing. As a diaspora nationalist and secularist, he searched for meaning (other than religious) in Jewish suffering. He maintained that every wave of Jewish suffering was followed by a rise in Jewish creativity, and that memory of suffering could unite the Jewish people. On the eve of World War II and during it, Tcherikower became disappointed with what seemed to him a lack of cultural renaissance in the wake of Nazism. He concluded that secularism had robbed the Jews of their ability to find redemptive meaning in suffering.
DOI:
10.1080/13501670802450863
URL:
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