Iulli Gessen

Born in Odessa in the Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) to a Russified Jewish family, Iulii Isidorovich Gessen received a secular Russian education at the city’s commercial school. In 1896, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked as a banker, wrote for Russian newspapers, and developed an interest in Russian Jewish history. The publication of his first Russian Jewish history, Iz istorii i zhizni evreev (On the History and Life of Jews, 1899–1901) led to his being the first Jew to gain access to the tsarist administrative records, later the basis for his Istoriia evreev v Rossii (A History of the Jews in Russia, 1913). In 1905, amidst the quickening of liberal demands for political reform and rights that played a part in Russia’s 1905 Revolution, Gessen cofounded Soiuz dlia Dostizheniia Polnopraviia Evreev v Rossi (Association for the Attainment of Equal Rights for Jews in Russia), an organization that propounded the long-standing Jewish liberal demand for Russian Jewish emancipation along individual-legal lines. He was a prolific historian who contributed sections to the Russian-language Encyclopedia Judaica (Evreiskaia entsiklopediia) while completing his five-volume 1913 magnum opus. In the Soviet period, he turned his focus to labor history in accordance with Bolshevik historiographical dictates.