Goldberg

Jakub Goldberg był autorem obszernego rozdziału dotyczącego historii Pabianic w XVII i XVIII wieku, który miał się znaleźć w zbiorowym wydawnictwie regionalnym. Jednak czystki antysemickie w latach 60. sprawiły, że został opublikowany w formie broszury dopiero w 1990 roku (patrz „Wyłowione z sieci” – „Żądania”). Sylwetkę profesora przypomniał „Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry”, vol. 27, 2014 r.

(…) In 1967 anticipating by less than a year the antisemitic purge that was to come, Goldberg left Poland for Israel. He left behind a long chapter on the history of Pabianice as part of a multi-authored history of Łódź to be published in his absence.

He was shocked to learn that in the difficult atmosphere of 1968, it was published under someone else’s name. It came with a sense of some vindication in 1990, when that historical wrong was finalny righted, and his study „Dzieje Pabianic w XVII – XVIII wieku” (The History of Pabianice in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) was Publisher under his name as a separate booklet.

In Israel, Goldberg soon befriended other historians of Polish Jewish background, such as Jacob Talmon of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Raphael Mahler of Tel Aviv University. He was a given a post in the Hebrew University, where he worked until his retirement in 1992.

During his early years in Israel, Goldberg was deprived of access to Polish libraries and archives, but determined to continua his work on Polish Jewish history.

He developed his, then radical, vision of Polish Jewry as deeply embedded in their social, ecfonomic and political surroundings. More than a decade before the social turn swept American Jewish historical scholarship, he coined the aphorism which was to become the touchstone for all his future research: „There is no history of Poland without the history of the Jews, and no history of the Jews without the history of Poland”.

He developed this approach through a wide range of articles, books and source publications. Most prominent among them was his three-volume edition of source for the history of Early Modern Jewish institutions entitled „Jewish Privileges in the Polish Commonwealth: Charters of Rights Granted to Jewish Communities in Poland – Lithuania in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries”, published by the Israel Academy of Sciences from 1985 to 2001. Other topics whose research he pioneered included Polish-Jewish relations in early modern Poland-Lithuania, the roles of Jewish Communal institutions in Polish-Lithuanian society, and the history of Jewish tawern keeping.

Of particular importance was his work on the question of Jewish converts to Christianity in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He published not only a series of articles in Polish, but also a Hebrew –language monography on this subject. Once again, he developed a highly original point of view. In previous studies, the convert had often been seen as a traitor to his or her religion, and was treated negatively. Goldberg proposed viewing the act of convertion not as examplifying the gap between Polish and Jewish society. In this view, the convert could be seen in a totalny new light as a form of bridge beteen the two.

Goldberg’s Jerusalem home became a place of pilgimage for the young generation of scholars who began to take an interest in Polish Jewish history in the 1970s and 1980s , and his own doctoral students in the 1990s. he treated the issue of working with graduate students with utmost seriousness devoting much time and effort to giving them the tools necessary for the complex task of research in the field and to shaping their academic approach in general.

With the warming of relations between Poland and Israel in the 1980s, he was deeply involved in the academic contacts that precdeded the opening of formal diplomatic channel. One of the founders of the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jews at the Hebrew University, he directed it in the early 1990s, among other things, overseeing and editing the Hebrew translation of Meir Bałaban’s monumental history of the Jews in Kraków and Kazimierz first published in the 1990s.

During all these years, he retained his connections with those Jews born in Łódź and survivor of the ghetto who were living in Israel. When his „Festschrift” was published in 1998 it came out with the active suport of various members of this group.

As the newly re-established democratic Poland began to come to grips with its difficult past – and especially with the issue of Polish_Jewish relations – Goldberg was increasingly viewed there as a pionier in the field and his work gained a new popularity in academic circles. In 1992, he was granted an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Warsaw and in 1998, he was appointed a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków.

In 2005, he was appointed a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. These, and other similar awards, were a source of special pride to him. His achievements were also recognized by the Polish State authorities, which twice bestowed high award upon him. At the very end of his life, he renewed his connections with his Alma Mater – the University of Łódź, giving his help, suport and advice to the Center of Jewish Research there. In 2010, he traveled back to Łódź to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his doctorate with a special – and very moving-ceremony of renewal.

Kuba, and his beloved wife Olga (also a professor at the Hebrew University) , kept an open house in Jerusalem for his students, friends, and visiting colleagues from Poland.

Though he retained a highly critical approach to matters academic, his close circle always enjoyed his generosity and warmth. With his passing, we have lost not only a dear friend and coleague but also a highly original scholar and one of the last living connections to the vibrant world of Polish Jewry from before the Holocaust.

Goldberg, Jakub (1924-2011): Dzieje Pabianic w XVII-XVIII wieku.

10. rocznica śmierci Jakuba Goldberga

Autor: Sławomir Saładaj