Ben-Zion Dinur

The Israeli educator, historian, and founder of the Zionist Jerusalem School of Jewish historiography Ben-Zion Dinur (born Dinaburg) came from a religious home in a small town in Ukraine and had a traditional yeshiva education. He was an autodidact in secular subjects, although he received advanced training as a historian in Berlin, where he studied under the Russian historian Michael Rosovtzeff (1870–1952) and the German historian Eugen Täubler (1879–1953); he also studied in Bern and at the University of Petrograd. In the years after Russia’s February Revolution, he taught Jewish history in both Hebraist and Yiddishist institutions for teacher training and at the University of Odessa. He immigrated in 1921 to Mandate Palestine, where he found employment teaching Jewish history at the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem. Remaining there for almost thirty years and producing a stream of books, articles, and reviews on all aspects of Jewish history, in 1932 he also began teaching modern Jewish history at the Hebrew University, where he was ultimately appointed to a professorship in 1948. In 1935, he began coediting Zion, Israel’s leading journal of Jewish history to this day. From 1951 to 1955, Dinur served as the Israeli government minister of education and culture, during which time he established Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in 1953 and served as its director from 1953 to 1959. He was awarded the Israel Prize in 1958 and again in 1973.