Elias Tcherikower Collection

Elias Tcherikower, historian of Russian Jewish life and anti-Jewish violence was born in 1881 in Poltava. He was raised in a merchant-class, Zionist household in Poltava. After gymnasium in Odessa, where he joined socialist Zionist circles, he attended university in Saint Petersburg and was active in the Russian revolutionary movement. His university studies were interrupted by his arrest at a Menshevik meeting in 1905. After the 1905 Revolution, Tcherikower devoted himself to scholarship and legal public activism, first in the Russian Jewish circles of Saint Petersburg and then in the Yiddishist movement.

Tcherikower’s career as a writer began in 1905, with his Marxist treatment of the work of Sh. Y. Abramovitsh in the Russian Jewish journal Evreiskaia zhizn’ and articles for the Russian radical press under the pseudonyms E. Mikhaelovitsh and E. Chuzhoi. In the years before World War I, Tcherikower was a major contributor to Evreiskaia entsiklopedia and the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia ; he edited the latter’s pedagogical journal Vestnik OPE and wrote its in-house history. He also contributed to the Jewish historical journal Perezhitoe and Evreiskii mir, a meeting place for moderate socialists and diaspora nationalists. The outbreak of World War I found Tcherikower outside Russia. He spent the war years in New York, writing in Yiddish and publishing articles on Jewish affairs in New York’s socialist Tsukunft, the Labor Zionist Yidisher kempfer, and the daily Tog. He also wrote to promote the establishment of a Jewish Congress. Returning to Russia after the February Revolution, he initially associated with venues identified with the reemergent Russian Zionist movement: the Petrograder togblat and the Moscow Russian-language journal Safrut. In late 1918, Tsherikover moved to Kyiv, attracted by the promise of formal Jewish national autonomy in Ukraine. There he worked for the Yiddishist, diaspora nationalist publishing venture, the Folks-Farlag, and assumed a managerial role in the last institutions of Jewish national autonomy.

The 1919 Bolshevik suppression of Jewish autonomy and the simultaneous wave of violence and mass murder against Ukrainian Jewish communities by nationalist, White, and other strongly shaped Tcherikower’s subsequent scholarly career. He helped compile an essential collection of documents and testimonies on Jewish autonomy and its dissolution (Di idishe oytonomie un der natsyonaler secretariat in Ukraine; 1920) and later edited a related volume of documents and memoirs on revolutionary-era Jewish life, In der tkufe fun revolutsye (Berlin, 1924). From 1919, Tcherikower devoted himself to gathering evidence about pogroms. By the time he left Russia for Berlin 1921, he had compiled a massive archive. Settling in Berlin, he began a scholarly project on pogroms with other Jewish scholars and activists, including Simon Dubnow, Yosef Schechtman, Nokhem Shtif, Jakob Lestschinsky, and N. Gergel. Tcherikower himself wrote two historical studies on pogroms: Antisemitizm un pogromen in Ukraine, 1917–1918 (published in Yiddish and Russian, 1923) and Di Ukrainer pogromen in 1919, published posthumously (1965). Tcherikower and his archive also played an important role in the 1926–1927 Paris trial of Shalom Schwarzbard.

Tcherikower lived in Berlin until 1933. That year, he moved to Paris, and in 1940 to New York. Throughout this period, he devoted himself primarily to research on modern Jewish history while also continuing his involvement in Jewish public affairs and playing a significant role in the political and cultural life of the Russian Jewish and Yiddishist émigré communities in these centers. In 1925, he had been a founder of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut—YIVO—and thereafter headed its Historical Section and edited the three volumes of its Historishe shriftn. He also participated in the international Yiddishist effort to create a Yiddish encyclopedia, the partially completed Algemeyne entsiklopedye in yidish. His own scholarship embraced many features of modern Jewish history in addition to the history of pogroms and antisemitism, including, most notably, the story of the Jewish labor movement and Jewish involvement in revolutionary movements in France and tsarist Russia. As a public intellectual, he played a role in interwar efforts to facilitate and direct Jewish emigration, served as an expert in trials relating to antisemitism (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion trial in Bern, 1934–1935; the trial of David Frankfurter in Davos, 1936), and coedited the 1939 Paris journal Afn sheydveg, which recorded the doubts and despair of many leading diasporist and Yiddishist figures by the late 1930s. In his last years, he was active in the American branch of YIVO.