Our Notes & References

The three booklets are:

1917. Lenin and the Jews; printed by Narod Press Ltd. for The World Jewish Congress, British Section, 1969. This is the ‘Noah Barou Memorial Lecture 1969’ which Abramsky gave at the University College London on December 30 that year.

The Biro-Bidzhan Project, 1927–1959, a historical article detailing this famous Soviet Jewish project in far-eastern Siberia, here in an offprint from Kochan (ed.), The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917, published by Oxford University Press for the Institute of Jewoish Affairs, London, 1970.

List No. 2, a bookseller catalogue published by G. J. George & Co. Ltd, London, for C. Abramsky Ltd. in March 1963, possibly after having left his post in London’s oldest Jewish bookshop, Shapiro, Vallentine & Co. – in any case “exactly two years [after having] issued our first list” (Introduction). The 792-item strong list is remarkable for some rarities it contains, mostly related to Judaica and Russian books (mainly Communism and Revolution). We note:

– the “first Hebrew manuscript known from the New World […] the Book of Psalms written in Barbados in 1742” (item 6, £800, now in Yeshiva University Museum, New York)

– a jewel of a Hebrew manuscript from the famous Portuguese-Spanish Jewish community in Amsterdam, Sefer Chinuch Sefer Torah, 1759 (item 7, £190)

– “the rarest Hebrew book printed in Russia and Poland”, the Sefer Hakundes printed in Vilnius in 1824 (item 12, £250)

– Marx’ Kapital “first edition three volumes bound in four, all in original bindings and two volumes uncut and unopened” (item 188, £375)

– and the last item, a volume of 1860s-70s pamphlets, headlined “Woman’s Emancipation” (item 792, £20).

Chimen Abramsky (1916–2010) was a Jewish historian and bibliophile, and a noted scholar of Jewish history.

He was born in Minsk to a family of the prominent Orthodox Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky, later the head of the London rabbinical court. In 1931, Yehezkel Abramsky emigrated from the Soviet Union after a few years of detention in a labour camp in Siberia because of his opposition to Stalin, and the family moved to London. After studies in Jerusalem and Oxford, Chimen became professor and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London (UCL), a Senior Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a visiting professor at Brandeis and Stanford. Chimen Abramsky took part in research, conferences, and published many articles.

At the beginning of World War 2, Abramsky was residing in London and started there a career as rare books expert on Hebrew editions and manuscripts, first working at Shapiro, Vallentine & Co., London’s oldest Jewish bookshop. For several decades and in parallel to his scholarly career, he professionally consulted the auction house Sotheby’s for the yearly ran Hebraica and Judaica auction. He was also a private bookdealer and a book collector himself.

Chimen Abramsky’s daughter Jenny Abramsky was one of the BBC’s longest-serving senior executives and most senior woman employee, and his grandson is Sasha Abramsky, a well-known political journalist living in the United States and the author of “The House of Twenty Thousand Books” (2014), which he dedicated to the story of his celebrated grandfather. In 2012, the Professor Chimen Abramsky Scholarship was established for undergraduate students at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UCL.