ABSTRACT
Sixty-nine-year-old historian Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973) was serving as the Minister of Education and Culture when Yad Vashem Law was enacted. He was chosen for this task after teaching for years at the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he was one of its pillars. Together with Yitzhak Baer, Dinur founded the Historical Society in the 1930s and started publishing its periodical Zion (1937). Later on he established “the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People”. He dedicated his life to the research of the history of the Jewish people, published essays and several documentary collections, and headed the Israeli Historical Society. Later on researchers labeled him as “a Zionist historian” 1 and as a “national historian”. 2 Dinur’s major role in the enactment of Yad Vashem Law and his heading of the institution during its first years ensured that his professional approach and ideological views were a major influence on the shaping of the budding institution. Dinur came from a Chasidic (Chabad) family in Khorol, the Ukraine. At the age of 14 he decided to leave the traditional religious study and went to Vilna. There he met the religious Zionist historian Ze’ev Yavetz, who introduced him to the world of Jewish enlightenment. In Vilna Dinur combined Zionist activities with autodidactic learning of European history, German, Latin and French. Dinur did not succeed in getting into a Russian university, and like many young Jews he traveled to Germany to complete his studies. In Berlin he met the historian Eugen Taubler, remembered by him with admiration as “my teacher, my master … a good companion and a close friend”. 3 Taubler was a German Jew, and a scholar teaching at the Institute of Jewish Studies in Berlin. He was known for his expertise in the meticulous analysis of primary sources and in historical research based on rigid scientific standards, according to the best tradition of German Jewish scholarship.
