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Gershon Hundert

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Gershon David Hundert
File:Gershon Hundert.jpg
Born1946
Toronto, Canada
Occupation(s)Historian, Professor
TitleLeanor Segal Professor
Academic background
Alma materColumbia University
Academic work
DisciplineJewish History
Sub-disciplinePolish Jewish History
InstitutionsMcGill University

Gershon David Hundert FRSC (b. 1946) is a noted Canadian historian of Early Modern Polish Jewry and Leanor Segal Professor at McGill University.[1]

Biography

Born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Gershon Hundert is one of the three sons of Charles and Norma Hundert and a third generation immigrant from Eastern Europe.[2] His paternal grandparents arrived in Canada in the early 1910s from Obertyn (part of the Ruthenian Voivodeship in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the Second Partition in 1792, western Ukraine today) and maternal grandparents from Łódź.[3]

Hundert received his B.A. from Jewish Theological Seminary and School of General Studies at Columbia University (1968) and M.A. from Ohio State University (1971), where he wrote a thesis on 18th-Century Hasidic Rabbi Abraham Kalisker under the supervision of Zvi Ankori (1920-2012), a specialist of Byzantine Karaites and a student of Salo Baron.[4]

Following Ankori, Hundert returned to Columbia to pursue a doctorate degree in history. He primarily studied with Andrzej Kaminski [pl] (b. 1935), political and diplomatic historian of early-modern Poland-Lithuania, and completed his dissertation in 1978 titled “Security and Dependence: Perspectives on Seventeenth-century Polish-Jewish Society Gained Through a Study of Jewish Merchants in Little Poland.”[5] He was also deeply influenced and mentored by Israel historian Jacob Goldberg [de] (1924-2011), the pioneer scholar of Polish-Jewish relations.[6]

In 1975, Hundert came back to Canada and taught at McGill University ever since. He was appointed as lecturer (1975-1978), assistant professor (1978-1983), associate professor (1983-1992), Montreal Jewish Community Professor of Jewish Studies (1993-2002) and currently Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies (since 2002). He has served as Department Chair of Jewish Studies twice (1984-1988 and 1998-2007). He also held visiting professorships at Harvard, Yale and the Hebrew University.[7] He was the editor-in-chief of The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2008) and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2011- ).[8]

Hundert is married to Ruth, daughter of notable WWII Veteran Nathaniel Mencow.[9] They raised one son and two daughters.

Scholarly Contributions

Succeeding Raphael Mahler and Ignacy Schipper [de], Gershon Hundert represents the postwar-born generation of premodern Polish Jewish historians and, along with Moshe Rosman and Ada Rapoport-Albert, establishes “a new era of the historiography of Polish Jewry.” [10]

His first monograph, The Jews in a Polish Private Town (1992), studies social and economic history of Opatów Jewry in the eighteenth century, exemplifying Jewish autonomy and identity and their crucial commercial roles in the later period of the Commonwealth. The work also sheds new light on Polish local history and Jewish microhistory.

His more renowned second monograph, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (2004), is an essential revisionist work in early modern European Jewish historiography. It examines the life of the understudied, but extremely important, East Central European Jewry -- world’s largest Jewish community at the time, and argues for their mentalité of chosenness and their particularities on the path towards modernity.

Another achievement is the groundbreaking The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe published in 2008. 450 leading scholars from the world have contributed to this decade-long project, of which Hundert served as the editor-in-chief. The work includes more than 1,800 entries and covers all aspects of Eastern European Jewish experiences from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century.[11] The online searchable version of the encyclopedia was launched in 2010.

Besides, he edited an essay collection on the development of scholarship on Hasidism in 1991 and co-complied a bibliography on Eastern European Jewish historiography in 1984.

Awards and Honours

  • President, American Academy for Jewish Research, 2014-2018.[12]
  • Fellow, the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of the Arts and Humanities, 2011-
  • The Judaica Reference Award, from Association of Jewish Libraries, for Gershon Hundert, editor-in-chief, The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2008.[13]
  • Fellow, the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2007-2008.
  • Fellow, the American Academy for Jewish Research, 2006- .[14]
  • I. J. Segal Prize, for the best non-fiction book on a Jewish theme by a Canadian, for Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity, 2010.[15]
  • Oscar Halecki Polish and East Central European History Award, for Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity, 2005.[16]
  • Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa), Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Philadelphia, PA, 2003.
  • Montreal Jewish Community Professor of Jewish Studies 1994-2002.
  • Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies, McGill University, 2002- .[17]

Selected Publications

Books

  • Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. University of California Press, 2004 (Paperback, 2006). ISBN 978-0520238442

/ ISBN 978-0520249943. (Also published in Russian, Hebrew, Polish and Lithuanian).

  • The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 978-0801842733.

Edited Books / Encyclopedia

  • The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols., Editor in Chief. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0300119039.

http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org - launched 2010.

  • Jews in Early Modern Poland. [Polin, Volume 10] Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Vallentine Mitchell, 1997. ISBN 978-1874774310.
  • Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present. New York University Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0814734704.
  • Community and the Individual Jew: Essays in Honor of Lavy M. Becker. (edited with Ronald S. Aigen). Montreal, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College Press, 1986. ISBN 978-0938945000.

Talk: Record of Jewish Merchant from the 18th Century, the Newest Materials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t36ln-WbOyY

Talk: Jews and Other Poles: Problems of Language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyEUk6po164

Interview after the FRSC Election: https://blogs.mcgill.ca/jewishstudies/2011/11/22/interview-with-professor-gershon-hundert/

References

  1. ^ https://www.mcgill.ca/history/gershon-hundert; https://www.mcgill.ca/jewishstudies/faculty/hundert
  2. ^ https://www.geni.com/people/Charles-Hundert/6000000015677912581
  3. ^ https://www.geni.com/people/Szmelke-Hundert/6000000020378665030; https://www.geni.com/people/Louis-Hundert/6000000015678331406
  4. ^ Gershon David Hundert, “Toward a Biography of R. Abraham Kalisker,” (Master Thesis, Ohio State University, 1971).
  5. ^ Gershon David Hundert, “Security and Dependence: Perspectives on Seventeenth-century Polish-Jewish Society Gained Through a Study of Jewish Merchants in Little Poland,” (PhD. Diss., Columbia University, 1978).
  6. ^ For Hundert’s three teachers, see Gershon David Hundert, “Security and Dependence,” xxvi-xxvii, and Gershon David Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 227-228.
  7. ^ https://www.mcgill.ca/students/courses/files/students.courses/UGART212.pdf, p.117; https://www.mcgill.ca/students/courses/files/students.courses/UGART02B.pdf, p.113.
  8. ^ The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon David Hundert (Yale univ. press, 2008); http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/editorialboard.aspx; to search RSC fellow directory, see https://rsc-src.ca/en/search-fellows.
  9. ^ https://www.telegram.com/article/20070528/OBIT/705280310; Gershon David Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town, 229.
  10. ^ Gershon Bacon, Review of The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century, by Gershon David Hundert, The Jewish Quarterly Review 86, No. 3/4 (Jan. - Apr., 1996): 419.
  11. ^ http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/about.aspx
  12. ^ https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/docs/default-source/ajs-perspectives/ajs-magazine-spring-2018-2.pdf, p. 49.
  13. ^ https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300119039/yivo-encyclopedia-jews-eastern-europe
  14. ^ http://www.aajr.org/officers-fellows/
  15. ^ https://jewishbookreview.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/j-i-segel-awards-announced/
  16. ^ https://www.piasa.org/awards.html
  17. ^ For all of Hundert's awards, see https://www.mcgill.ca/jewishstudies/faculty/hundert
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