Basic Information
Name: Shimon Meyerovich Dubnov
Nickname: Shimon Says
Born: September 10, 1860
Died: December 8, 1941
Nationality: Belorussian
Hometown: Mstislaw, Belarus
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Historian, writer, and activist
Education: Self-taught, including a half-stint at a state Jewish school
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Parents: Meir Jacob
Siblings: A good few apparently, but their names are incredibly hard to track down
Spouse: Ida Dubnovy
Children: N/A
Friends: Tons of 'em
Foes: Anti-Semites, who unfortunately got the upper-hand on him
Analysis
We're pretty wary of people who don't practice what they preach. If you're a couch potato, you don't get to tell us that we should go out in the fresh air more. If you're a chocoholic, don't harp on us for chowing down on our fifth churro. If you're a gamer, you don't get to tell us we should spend less time checking Twitter.
…and that's exactly why we think Simon Dubnov's urging victims of the Holocaust to write it all down was especially amazing. Because writing it all down was pretty much his life's work.
The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword
While he wasn't particularly religious himself, Dubnov thought that the foundation of all Jewish identity wasn't so much their faith as it was their shared history, their long chronicles of hardship and adversity and the culture that was created over the millennia as a result of it.
He was born in Belarus to a large and not-so-well-off family. Inspired by enlightenment thinkers, he was never very drawn to religion. He did, however, go to a state Jewish school, up until Russia passed laws banning them outright. Since you can't get a diploma from a school that no longer exists, Dubnov pursued his education on his own.
Eventually in 1880 he forged some documents to move to St. Petersburg, a distinctly no-Jews-allowed kind of town, where he became a newspaper writer. Ten years later, however, he and the rest of the remaining Jewish population were kicked right out.
After being shown the door, so to speak, Simon became a social activist, speaking out against Russia's heavy anti-Semitic policies. The year 1905 brought with it the Russian Revolution, and in the following years Dubnov got to return to St. Petersburg, where he founded a Jewish political party and became a professor of Jewish history.
He wrote a ton of books and moved all across Europe, eventually ending up in Riga, Latvia. It was there that his wife died, and he continued his work, publishing his autobiography there. He had a visa to move to Sweden in 1940, which would have been prudent considering Hitler's rise to power was pretty solid at that point, but chose not to for unknown reasons.
In 1941, the Nazis invaded Latvia, and Dubnov was carted into the Riga ghetto. It was there, at the ripe age of 80, he made his famous pronunciation, "Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt," or "Jews, write it all down." He was rounded up with thousands of Jews to be executed in the Rumbala massacre, but was too sick to make it to his place of execution and was killed in the city instead.
As a historian, his ultimate message was history's power to shape a people, and the power of memory to define who we are.