Conceptualization of the History of the Jews in the Historiographic Process of Southern Ukraine at the End of the 19th - Beginning of the 20th Century

The purpose of this article is to study the process of conceptualizing the history of Jews in the historiographical process of southern Ukraine at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The use of these principles is complemented by a number of special historical methods, in particular: search-specific, cognitive, prosopographic, historical-geographical, problem-chronological, historical-statistical, historical-systemic, structural-functional, comparative and descriptive. Within the framework of the basic methodological principles, such scientific principles as analysis, synthesis, analogy, abstraction and others were applied in the work, which made it possible to fully disclose the chosen topic in a consistent, logical and complete form. To establish the peculiarities of historical views, the works of historians are traditionally an irreplaceable source. They have all the characteristics of a historiographical source: subjectivity, specificity of the author’s style, determined by the circumstances of the time and place of writing and publication, etc. Another group of sources are reviews of these works by contemporaries, which allow them to be included in the historiographical context. Memoir sources, and these are primarily the well-known memories of S. M. Dubnov, in which an introspection of his residence in Odessa is separately carried out, allow one to delve deeper into the circumstances that led to the genesis of the conceptual views of Jewish historians on the past of their people. At the end of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th century, in the territory of southern Ukraine, the works of several Jewish historians were published. The purpose of these works was to outline the main conceptual foundations of Jewish history. Although these works were not perfect from the point of view of modern historiography, they laid the foundation for the formation of Judaism as a scientific discipline in Eastern Europe, and, in particular, in Ukraine. The appearance of these works was determined by the general development of national movements in the world at that time, in particular, the movement of the Jewish people for self-assertion in the unfavorable conditions of the Russian-imperial policy. The main merit of the authors was that they gave Jewish history and historiography a secular, analytical, and scientific context. The process of conceptualization led to a clearer formulation of the conceptual apparatus, goal and tasks of Jewish historiography and brought it to the level of Judaica as a scientific discipline.