Metadata: S. Ia. Borovoi
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of the Odessa Region
- Holding institution (official language):
- Державний архів Одеської області
- Postal address:
- 18, Zhukovskogo str., Оdessa, 65026, Ukraine
- Phone number:
- 380 (48) 722-9365
- Web address:
- http://archive.odessa.gov.ua/en/
- Email:
- archive@odessa.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. R-7400
- Title:
- S. Ia. Borovoi
- Title (official language):
- Боровий С. Я.
- Creator/accumulator:
- S. Ia. Borovoi
- Date(s):
- 1927/1983
- Language:
- Russian
- Yiddish
- Ukrainian
- Extent:
- 36 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
- Materials from S. Ia. Borovoi’s personal papers housed in the fonds include documents pertaining to his biography and his work and research activities: certificates and evaluations from places of employment; and an excerpt from proceedings of the Higher Examination Board certifying his rank of professor and degree of doctor of history (1940-73); programs of scholarly conferences, congresses, and symposia he took part in; synopses of his statements and reports, and posters for his lectures (1931-84); letters and telegrams hailing the scholar in connection with his sixtieth jubilee; individual and group photographs; etc. There is also an autobiography (1973), in which among other things he touches on his work as librarian of the Mendele Moykher-Sforim Jewish Academic Library and his analysis of the collection of early printed books housed there, which became the source of several of his studies; and an appendix listing his major publications, including those in the field of Judaica, from 1924-73. There is also a selection (in the form of newspaper and journal clippings and typewritten copies) of responses to and reviews of Borovoi’s research works (1926-83), including those on Judaica; notes covering his work with the archive of the Zaporozhian Sich; his defence of his doctoral dissertation; his speech at a mass meeting held in Odessa to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mendele Moykher-Sforim (1967); etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
The historian and bibliologist Saul Iakovlevich Borovoi (1903-89) was born in Odessa into a family that was, as Borovoi put it, connected “with many representatives of culture and literature of the time, first and foremost Jewish culture” (these included Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, and S. Chernikhovskii). He was educated initially (1913-19) at the commercial school of Kh. I. Gokhman; he subsequently studied at the Odessa Public Humanities Institute (1920-21) and the law school of the Odessa Economics Institute (graduating in 1924), and simultaneously at the archival department of the Odessa Archeological Institute and in graduate studies at the Odessa Central Research Library, receiving the degree of candidate in the pedagogical sciences for his work titled “The Research Library in Contemporary Conditions” 1930). In 1938-39 he was also conferred the degrees of candidate in history and economics. He began his professional career as a staff member of the Odessa Historical Archive’s commission to concentrate and study materials on revolutionary history (1921-22); in 1923-27, he worked at Odessa’s Mendele Moykher-Sforim Jewish Academic Library; and from 1927-38 and 1953-54, at the Odessa Central Research Library. At the same time, he taught at Odessa institutes: the Pedagogical Institute, the Odessa branch of the Khar’kov Library Institute, and the Credit and Economics Institute (subsequently, the Economics Institute; 1934-52; 1954-77); as well as at institutes in Samarkand and Krasnodar (during the Second World War). His teaching career was interrupted during the “war on cosmopolitanism,” when Borovoi was unable to work and was subjected to political persecution.
The major theme of his research activity in the 1920s-30s was the history of Jews in Ukraine and Russia, the subject of several of his works that were published in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, amongst which were: “Narysy z istorії ievreis’koї knyhy na Ukraïni” [Studies in the History of the Jewish Book in Ukraine] in the journal Bibliolohichni visti (pt. 1, 1926, pt. 2); the articles “Something New on Kovner” and “Jewish Newspapers before the Court of the “Learned Jews’” in the collection Evreiskaia mysl [Jewish Thought] (Leningrad, 1926); the Yiddish-language article “Aksenfel’d’s Attempt to Establish a Printing Press in Odessa” in the collection of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Jewish Culture Bibliologisher zamlbukh (Kiev, 1930); and the monograph Jewish Colonization in Old Russia (Moscow, 1928). The article “Jews in the Zaporozhian Sich (from materials of the Sich archive)” in the USSR Academy of Sciences’ collection Istoricheskii sbornik (Leningrad, 1934, vol. 1) became part of Borovoi’s doctoral dissertation “Studies in the History of Jews in Ukraine in the 16th – 17th Centuries,” which was defended in 1940 at the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History. Soon forced to distance himself from Jewish-related research (at a time when such was for all intents and purposes banned), he took up the study of economic history, especially the history of banking in Russia, and authored the monograph Credit and Banks in Russia. Mid-17th c. – 1861 (Moscow, 1958). Upon retiring in 1978, he moved to Moscow. He died and was buried in Odessa. S. Ia. Borovoi’s scholarly legacy comprises over 200 studies in history (including economic and literary history), bibliology, and Judaica, some of which were published posthumously, including The Destruction of the Jewish Population of Odessa During the Fascist Occupation (Kiev, 1991); Memoirs (Moscow-Jerusalem, 1993); and Jewish Chronicles of the Seventeenth Century (the Era of the Khmelnytsky Uprising) (Moscow-Jerusalem, 1997).
- Access points: persons/families:
- Borovoi, S. Ia.
- Mendele Moykher-Sforim
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes two inventories systematised mainly according to the document type-chronological principle.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
