Thursday, June 4, 2015

358 Susan Campbell

12:00pm-1:30pm

Light lunch will be served

Open to the public; limited seating

Please RSVP to: heidi@uoregon.edu or 541-346-5288

…Have you heard

About the Historian who became an International Banker?

He spent the last years of his life in jail.

It’s All in the Numbers (and the Stories).

In 1764 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took a census of the Jews of Lithuania, and it was the best demographic source that exists for the eighteenth century. A parallel count of the Jews of Poland was published over one hundred years ago, but the full data of the Lithuanian count has never appeared until now. This delay in publication is the product of the ‘sociology of science,’ but it was worth waiting for. Study of this census teaches us a great deal about East European Jews 250 years ago—and about how they were studied over the years.

Shaul Stampfer is the Rabbi Edward Sandrow Professor of Soviet and East European Jewry and Chair of the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also taught at Harvard University and elsewhere, including Moscow (1989 – 91), where he helped establish the Jewish University. Through his many published articles he has made a seminal contribution to the Jewish social history of eastern Europe, opening up new areas of research in the history of Jewish education, Jewish demography and family life, community organization and leadership, and related topics.