Zwischen Ablehnung und Anerkennung: Simon Dubnow als Literaturkritiker

Before Simon Dubnow decided to devote greater attention to his historical works, he was active as a literary critic for the Russian Jewish newspaper Voskhod from 1883 to 1893. During this period, which has to date received less attention from scholars, Dubnow wrote reviews on Hebrew and Yiddish literature as well as portraits of writers. The realism of Russian literature provided him with the interpretative framework for his literary criticism, which was interwoven with parallel tendencies in Jewish literature. At the same time, he integrated elements from Jewish discourse and the literary discourse of the Haskala into his critique and articulated a national program. His reviews of Yiddish literature further show that, contrary to the usual hierarchization, he advocated a pluralistic conception of Jewish literature consisting of three languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.