Dubnow, Simon [key], 1860–1941, Jewish historian and ideologist, b. Belorussia. Self-educated, he settled after extensive travels in St. Petersburg, where he taught Jewish history. He was one of the founders and directors of the Jewish Historico-Ethnographical Society there (1909–18) and was asked to prepare several publications by the Bolshevik government, none of which was ever published. In 1922 he moved to Berlin. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Dubnow went to Riga, Latvia, where he remained at work until killed by the Nazis in Dec., 1941. Among Dubnow's numerous works are History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (3 vol., 1916–20) and History of the Jews (10 vol., 1925–29; tr. 5 vol., 1967–73), in which he maintained that Jewish survival had resulted from the communal and spiritual independence of Jews in the Diaspora.
See biographies by A. Steinberg, ed. (1963), and R. M. Seltzer (1970).
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