Szymon Askenazy

Origins and early life

Szymon Askenazy was born on 24 December 1866 at Zawichost in Russian Poland into a well-off Orthodox Jewish family, and he never converted, though he was a leading figure of Polish assimilationism, holding that Jews should integrate into the Polish nation rather than form a separate political bloc. He studied at Warsaw and took his doctorate at Göttingen, and he became the founder of the modern Polish school of diplomatic history, insisting that the partitions and the Napoleonic period be studied from the archives of all the powers rather than from Polish sources alone.

Work and career

His books on Prince Józef Poniatowski, on Napoleon and Poland, and on the Kingdom of Poland made him the most widely read Polish historian of his generation, and the school he formed at Lwów produced much of the next generation of Polish historians. His appointment to the chair of Polish history at Lwów in 1902 provoked a campaign of antisemitic attacks that pursued him for years and eventually cost him a chair at Warsaw after independence, a rejection this fiche records plainly.

He nevertheless served the restored Polish state as its delegate to the League of Nations from 1920 to 1923, defending Poland's case in the disputes over Vilnius and Upper Silesia. He argued for the civic equality of Jews within Poland and against both antisemitism and Jewish political separatism. He died in Warsaw on 22 June 1935.