Gershon Hundert

Talk: Record of Jewish Merchant from the 18th Century, the Newest Materials.

Interview after the FRSC Election: https://blogs.mcgill.ca/jewishstudies/2011/11/22/interview-with-professor-gershon-hundert/

Another achievement is the groundbreaking The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe published in 2008. 450 leading scholars from the world have contributed to this decade-long project, of which Hundert served as the editor-in-chief. The work includes more than 1,800 entries and covers all aspects of Eastern European Jewish experiences from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. The searchable version of the encyclopedia was launched in 2010.

His more renowned second monograph, Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (2004), is an essential revisionist work in early modern European Jewish historiography. It examines the life of the understudied, but extremely important, East Central European Jewry—world's largest Jewish community at the time, and argues for their mentalité of chosenness and their particularities on the path towards modernity.

His first monograph, The Jews in a Polish Private Town (1992), studies social and economic history of Opatów Jewry in the eighteenth century, exemplifying Jewish autonomy and identity and their crucial commercial roles in the later period of the Commonwealth. The work also sheds new light on Polish local history and Jewish microhistory.

Besides, he edited an essay collection on the development of scholarship on Hasidism in 1991 and co-compiled a bibliography on Eastern European Jewish historiography in 1984.

In 1975, Hundert came back to Canada and taught at McGill University ever since. He was appointed as lecturer (1975–1978), assistant professor (1978–1983), associate professor (1983–1992), Montreal Jewish Community Professor of Jewish Studies (1993–2002), and currently Leanor Segal Professor of Jewish Studies (since 2002). He has served as Department Chair of Jewish Studies twice (1984–1988 and 1998–2007). He also held visiting professorships at Harvard, Yale and the Hebrew University. He was the editor-in-chief of The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2008) and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2011- ).

Hundert received his B.A. from Jewish Theological Seminary and School of General Studies at Columbia University (1968) and M.A. from Ohio State University (1971), where he wrote a thesis on 18th-Century Hasidic Rabbi Abraham Kalisker under the supervision of Zvi Ankori (1920–2012), a specialist of Byzantine Karaites and a student of Salo Baron.

Gershon David Hundert FRSC (born 1946) is a Canadian historian of Early Modern Polish Jewry and Leanor Segal Professor at McGill University.

Following Ankori, Hundert returned to Columbia to pursue a doctorate degree in history. He primarily studied with Andrzej Kaminski [pl] (born 1935), political and diplomatic historian of early modern Poland–Lithuania, and completed his dissertation in 1978 titled “Security and Dependence: Perspectives on Seventeenth-century Polish-Jewish Society Gained Through a Study of Jewish Merchants in Little Poland.” He was also deeply influenced and mentored by Israel historian Jacob Goldberg [de] (1924–2011), the pioneer scholar of Polish-Jewish relations.

Born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Hundert is one of the three sons of Charles and Norma Hundert and a third generation immigrant from Eastern Europe. His paternal grandparents arrived in Canada in the early 1910s from Obertyn (part of the Ruthenian Voivodeship in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before the Second Partition in 1792, western Ukraine today) and maternal grandparents from Łódź.