Majer Bałaban

The most important prewar historian of Polish Jewry, Majer (Meir) Bałaban was born in Lwów/Lemberg in Habsburg Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine) to a family of book publishers who maintained traditional Judaism but were distant from the regionally dominant Hasidic movement. He studied law at university without graduating, only to return to study history, and in 1904 he completed a dissertation about Jewish life in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Lwów/Lviv. Although unable to find a university position—he taught in a modern Jewish high school for many years—Bałaban became the acknowledged leading voice in an emerging field of Polish-language Polish Jewish history that sought both to apply critical historiographical tools to early modern East European Jewish history and to demonstrate the rootedness of Jews to (their fellow) Poles. After serving in the Austrian army during World War I and becoming a citizen of the newly created Polish Republic, Bałaban gained a position at the University of Warsaw in 1928. That same year he founded the Institute for Jewish Studies. Active in Polish Jewish intellectual life and straddling the divide between liberal assimilationist and pro-Zionist Polonized Jewish intellectuals, Bałaban was the main and beloved teacher of a generation of university-trained Polish Jewish historians. Throughout his life, he insisted on the importance of objective historical research amid the heated ideological debates of the era. During World War II, Bałaban was director of the Judenrat archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he died.