Shaping the Jewish Enlightenment
Solomon Dubno (1738–1813), an Eastern European Maskil
Drawing from diverse multilingual sources, Krzemień delves into Solomon Dubno's life (1738–1813), unraveling complexities of the Haskalah movement's ties to Eastern European Jewish culture. Dubno, a devout Polish Jew and adept Hebrew grammarian, played a pivotal role in Moses Mendelssohn's endeavor to translate the Bible into German with a modern commentary (Biur). The book explores Dubno's library, mapping the intellectual realm of a Polish Maskil in Western Europe. It assesses his influence on Mendelssohn's project and the reasons behind their divergence. Additionally, it analyzes Dubno's poetry, designed to captivate peers with the Bible's linguistic beauty. The outcome portrays early Haskalah as a polyvocal, polycentric creation shaped by diverse, occasionally conflicting, visions, personalities, and egos.
Zuzanna Krzemień (1987-2021) received her doctorate from the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at University College London. She held fellowships from the Posen Foundation and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and served as the curator of East European collections in the British Library in London.
Noëmie Duhaut is a research associate at the Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on Jewish internationalism in the context of post-Ottoman state-building in the Balkans. Her second book project is a biography of the nineteenth-century French Jewish leader Adolphe Crémieux. Her work has appeared inFrench HistoricalStudies, European History Yearbook and Archives Juives.
Wojciech Tworek is assistant professor in the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław. He is the author of Eternity Now(SUNY, 2019) which examines the teachings of Shneur Zalman of Liady, the founder of Chabad Hasidism. Currently he is completing a book on the Chabad community in interwar Poland and – together with Marcin Wodziński – an anthology of Hasidic stories.
Monika Biesaga with a historical study on Jewish libraries in interwar Poland (1918-1939). Apart from the history of Jewish libraries, her research interests include also the fate of Jewish book collections after the Second World War.
