Lozinski, Samuel

views updated

LOZINSKI, SAMUEL

LOZINSKI, SAMUEL (1874–1945), Russian historian. Born in Bobruisk, Belarus, he studied in the universities of Berlin, Paris, and St. Petersburg. In the years 1904–06 he was redactor of the foreign department of the newspaper Kievskiye Otkliki ("Kiev Echo"). Lozinski specialized in the history of Western Europe, writing studies on the modern history of France, Austria, Holland, and Belgium. He collaborated in editing and translating standard historical works into Russian, including E. Renan's Histoire du peuple d'Israël and H.C. Lea's History of the Inquisition of Spain. He also did research in Jewish history and edited the sections on Jewish culture in Europe and the history of the Jews in France and England in the Russian-Jewish encyclopedia (Yevreyskaya Entsiklopediya). Under the Soviet regime, Lozinski lectured in history at the universities of Leningrad, Minsk, Rostov, and other cities. During the 1920s he belonged to the small circle which was active in Jewish historical research under the conditions of the new regime. He edited a collection of documents, Kazyonnye yevreyskiye uchilishcha ("Jewish Governmental Schools," 1920), and co-edited the collections Yevreyskaya Starina and Yevreyskaya Letopis. To antisemitism he dedicated the work "The social roots of antisemitism in medieval and modern times" (1929). He also engaged in research on the history of the Church. His two works Svyataya Inkvizitsiya ("The Holy Inquisition," 1927) and Istoriya Papstva ("History of the Papacy," 1934) were published by the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.