In Memoriam: Jonathan Frankel, 1935-2008 (In Memoriam)
By American Jewish History
- Release Date: 2008-09-01
- Genre: Social Science
Description
Jonathan Frankel, who was Professor Emeritus in Russian studies and modern Jewish history at The Hebrew University, died in Jerusalem on May 7, 2008, at age seventy-two. With his passing, the world of Jewish studies lost one of its seminal thinkers, an honored colleague and teacher, and, to those who were privileged to have known him, a beloved friend. Although Frankel is perhaps chiefly remembered as a scholar of Russia and Russian Jewry, in fact his oeuvre broadly embraced the history of modern Europe, Israel and Zionism, and the Jewish immigrant experience in the United States. Like Simon Dubnov (the iconic "father" of Russian Jewish historiography) before him, Frankel understood that Jewish history must be a Weltgeschichte. The link is not accidental: when writing an introduction to Sophie Dubnov-Erlich's biography of her father, Frankel pointed admiringly to Dubnov's innovations in the field of Jewish historiography, including some that were the hallmarks of Frankel's own scholarship: "[He] emphasized the impact of external political factors on the internal life of the Jews ... [and] he rightly predicted as early as the turn of the [twentieth] century that Palestine and America were destined to be the new centers of the Jewish world. And that world, as he insisted it would be, is now multicentered." (1)
