Henri Minczeles

Origins and early life

Henri Minczeles was born in the tenth arrondissement of Paris on 10 June 1926, into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants: his father Szepsel Minczeles, born at Warsaw in 1906, was a pattern cutter, his mother Ruchla Zlata, born Pinkwaszewska, a seamstress.

Work and career

They had left Poland in the early 1920s for want of security and of work and settled around Montmartre, in the garment trade, which was the ordinary condition of the Yiddish-speaking Paris he came from. He became the historian of that world after it had been destroyed: his doctorate was on Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, from 1918 to 1940, and he wrote the standard French account of the Bund, the Jewish socialist workers' movement, along with books on Yiddish culture and on the Jewish heritage of Poland and Lithuania.

His conception of Jewish history owed much to Simon Dubnow, who held that a people can carry its national life in its institutions and its language rather than in a state. He died in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris on 10 March 2017, at ninety, and is buried at Bagneux.