Gershon Hundert Explained

Gershon David Hundert
Birth Place:	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Death Place:	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Occupation:	Historian
Leanor Segal Professor
Alma Mater:	Columbia University
Discipline:	Jewish history
Sub Discipline:	Polish Jewish history
Workplaces:	McGill University

Gershon David Hundert (1946 – October 27, 2023) was a Canadian historian of Early Modern Polish Jewry and Leanor Segal Professor at McGill University.^{[1] [2]}

Biography

Born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Hundert was one of the three sons of Charles and Norma Hundert and a third generation immigrant from Eastern Europe.^[3] 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.^{[4] [5]}

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.^[6]

Following Ankori, Hundert returned to Columbia to pursue a doctorate degree in history. He primarily studied with (born 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.”^[7] He was also deeply influenced and mentored by Israel historian (1924–2011), the pioneer scholar of Polish-Jewish relations.^[8]

In 1975, Hundert came back to Canada and taught at McGill University ever since. He was appointed lecturer (1975–1978), assistant professor (1978–1983), associate professor (1983–1992), Montreal Jewish Community Professor of Jewish Studies (1993–2002), and 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.^{[9] [10]} 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-).^[11]

Hundert was married to Ruth Mencow, daughter of World War II veteran Nathaniel Mencow.^[12] They raised one son and two daughters. He died on October 27, 2023, at the age of 78.^[13]

Scholarly contributions

Succeeding Raphael Mahler and, 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.”^[14]

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.^[15] The 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-compiled a bibliography on Eastern European Jewish historiography in 1984.

Awards and honours

• President, American Academy for Jewish Research, 2014–2018.^[16]
• 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.^[17]
• Fellow, the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2007–2008.
• Fellow, the American Academy for Jewish Research, 2006- .^[18]
• 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.^[19]
• Oscar Halecki Polish and East Central European History Award, for Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity, 2005.^[20]
• Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa), Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Philadelphia, PA, 2003.
• Montreal Jewish Community Professor of Jewish Studies 1994–2002.
• Fellow, Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, 2002-2003, 2013-2014.^[21]
• Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies, McGill University, 2002- .^[2]

Selected publications

Books

• Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. University of California Press, 2004 (Paperback, 2006). / . (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. .
• The Jews in Poland and Russia: Bibliographical Essays (with Gershon Bacon). Indiana University Press, 1984. .

Edited books / encyclopedia

• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols., Editor in Chief. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. . Online edition launched in 2010.
• Jews in Early Modern Poland. [Polin, Volume 10] Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Vallentine Mitchell, 1997. .
• Jews, Poles, Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal. [Polin, Volume 9] (edited with Antony Polonsky, Israel Bartal, Magdalena Opalski and Jerzy Tomaszewski). Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Vallentine Mitchell, 1996. .
• Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present. New York University Press, 1991. .
• Community and the Individual Jew: Essays in Honor of Lavy M. Becker. (edited with Ronald S. Aigen). Montreal, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College Press, 1986. .

External links

• Talk: Record of Jewish Merchant from the 18th Century, the Newest Materials.
• Talk: Jews and Other Poles: Problems of Language.
• Interview after the FRSC Election.

Notes and References

1. Web site: Gershon Hundert. History and Classical Studies.
2. Web site: Gershon D. Hundert. Jewish Studies מדעי היהדות.
3. Web site: Charles Saul Hundert. geni_family_tree. 26 April 2022 .
4. Web site: Szmelke Hundert. geni_family_tree. 26 April 2022 .
5. Web site: Louis Leibish Hundert. geni_family_tree. 17 December 2023 .
6. Gershon David Hundert, “Toward a Biography of R. Abraham Kalisker,” (Master Thesis, Ohio State University, 1971).
7. 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).
8. 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.
9. Web site: Part two, Faculty of Arts section, 2001–2002 Undergraduate Programs Calendar, McGill University . 2018-11-30.
10. Web site: Faculty of Arts, Part 3, 2002–2003 Undergraduate Programs Calendar, McGill University . 2018-11-30.
11. Book: YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Gershon. Hundert. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2008.
12. Web site: Nathaniel Mencow, 89.
13. Web site: Gershon David Hundert. Paperman & Sons. October 29, 2023. October 29, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20231029171430/http://paperman.com/en/funerals/2023-10-30-gershon-david-hundert.
14. 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.
15. Web site: YIVO – Preface to the Print Edition. www.yivoencyclopedia.org.
16. Web site: Perspectives magazine . 2018 . www.associationforjewishstudies.org .
17. Web site: YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe – Yale University Press. yalebooks.yale.edu.
18. Web site: Officers and Fellows. www.aajr.org. 2018-10-08. https://web.archive.org/web/20180520114741/http://www.aajr.org/officers-fellows/. 2018-05-20. dead.
19. Web site: J.I. Segel Awards Announced. 6 December 2010.
20. Web site: Annual Awards Ceremony. www.piasa.org.
21. Web site: katzcenterupenn. Gershon Hundert. 2020-07-29. Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. en.