Gershon David Hundert FRSC (1946 – October 27, 2023) was a Canadian historian of Early Modern Polish Jewry and Leanor Segal Professor at McGill University.
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.
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.”[7] He was also deeply influenced and mentored by Israel historian Jacob Goldberg [de] (1924–2011), the pioneer scholar of Polish-Jewish relations.
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.
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.