The Making of Professional Polish Jewish Historians

Abstract

This chapter studies the academic agenda of professional Jewish historians who received their training before 1918, in the imperial context of Austria–Hungary, at the universities of Lwów, Kraków, and Vienna, and the social and political contexts in which they were active. It shows that Polish Jewish historiography emerged as a field of interest among the Polish intelligentsia and the enlightened Jewish elite throughout partitioned Polish lands in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This new cohort boasted professional university training and saw themselves as part of the guild. In the early works of Schorr, Schiper, and Bałaban in the first decade of the twentieth century, a more substantial and critical scholarship on the history of the Jews of Poland emerged. The chapter then argues that their understanding of Polish Jewish history was shaped by their immersion in Polish historical writing and by their responses to political developments in Galicia, such as the emergence of the Jewish national movement and the increasingly complex position of the Jewish community in the region in relation to the Polish and Ukrainian national narratives.