HESSEN, JOSEPH VLADIMIROVICH

HESSEN, JOSEPH VLADIMIROVICH (1866–1943), Russian lawyer and politician. Born in Odessa, Hessen graduated in law from the University of Petersburg in 1889 but was banned from practicing on the grounds that he was politically unreliable. In 1891 he converted to Christianity, which opened for him government service. In 1898 he founded the law journal Pravo in which he wrote several important articles on law including Uzakoneniye, usyneniye i vnebrachnya deti ("Legitimation, Adoption, and Children Born Out of Wedlock," 19163) and Sudebnaya reforma ("Court Reform," 1904). Hessen joined the Constitutional-Democrat (Kadet) Party in 1905, and from 1906 was coeditor of their newspaper. In 1907 he was elected on their list to the Second Duma (Russian parliament), where he represented himself as a Jew of Russian Orthodox faith. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Hessen left Russia and lived in Helsinki and later in Berlin where he edited the Arkhiv Russkoy Revolyutsii ("Archive of the Russian Revolution," 22 vols., 1921–37). His other writings include Istoriya russkoy advokatury ("History of the Legal Profession in Russia," 1914), two works of Jewish legal interest, and an autobiography V dvukh vekakh ("In two centuries," 1937). He also wrote an article on the position of the Jews following the antisemitic May Laws in 1882 in Yevreyskaya Biblioteka (vol. 10 (1903), 318–38), and was coeditor of Sbornik zakonov o yevreyakh … (1904), a collation of laws affecting the Jews. In 1933 he moved to Paris, and in 1940 to Limouge in southern France, where he died. HESSEN, JULIUS ISIDOROVICH HESSEN, JULIUS ISIDOROVICH (1871–1939), historian of Russian Jewry. Hessen was born in Odessa. He was the author of more than 300 historical works. His first published work was a biography of osip rabinovich and a Russian translation of pinsker 's Autoemanzipation (1898). Both his scholarly and communal activities revolved around the quest for the emancipation of Russian Jewry. In 1905–06 he served as secretary of the short-lived Union for Full Equality of the Jewish People in Russia; he prepared the memorandum on the life of the Jews in Russia and the history of Russian legislation on the Jews which was sent to the members of the Duma and the state council. Hessen's mature historical work began with studies of aspects of Russian Jewish history, including Yevreiv masonstve ("Jews in Freemasonry," 1903) and Velizhskaya drama ("The Velizh (Blood-Libel) Drama," 1905), collected in his Yevrei v Rossii (1906; Heb. Ha-Yehudim be-Rusyah, 1913); Zakon i zhizn ("Law and Life," 1911), on the history of the Pale of Settlement; and Gallereya yevreyskikh deyateley ("A Gallery of Outstanding Jewish Figures," 2 vols., 1898–1900). He initiated the publication of the Russian-Jewish encyclopedia Yevreyskaya Entsiklopediya (16 vols., 1908–13), served as its general secretary and its editor for modern Russian-Jewish history, and contributed many important articles to it. Hessen summed up his research in Istoriya yevreyev v Rossii ("History of the Jews in Russia," 1914), later extending the history to 1882 in Istoriya yevreyskogo naroda v Rossii ("History of the Jewish People in Russia," 2 vols., 1916–27; vol. 1 rev., 1925. These standard works deal with the history of Russian Jewry from its early beginnings in the period of the grand duchy of Kiev, but are of particular importance for the position of the Jews in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, drawing on archival   material from the many commissions appointed to inquire into the Jewish problem and on the reports of provincial governors. After the 1917 Revolution Hessen was employed, with others, on a history of the labor movement in Russia and on a history of antisemitism in Russia. In the years 1930–35 he was editor of the Vestnik an S.S.S.R. (Journal of the Academy of Sciences). From 1935 he prepared the publication of the archives of the Arctic explorations. The exact circumstances of his death are not known. (Abraham N. Poliak)