ARTUR (AHARON) EISENBACH, who died in November 1992, was one of the last surviving representatives of that distinguished group of Polish Jewish historians who, in the years before the First World War and in independent Poland between 1918 and 1939, laid the foundation for the scholarly investigation of the Polish Jewish past. He was very conscious that he was a survivor from a lost world. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1986, he reflected: ‘my life's path has followed a course completely different from that of my colleagues … except for a few members of the older generation.'

Eisenbach was born in Nowy Sącz in Galicia (Austrian Poland) in 1906 into what he described as ‘a petty bourgeois family without any Haskalah traditions'. An unsuccessful attempt to make himself ‘productive’ by apprenticing himself to a locksmith led him to the conclusion that the only way to escape from ‘provincial backwardness’ was ‘study'. Lack of funds forced him to drop out of the teachers’ course at the Jewish Educational Seminary in Vilna, but he was eventually able to take his matura (secondary-school examination) in 1930 and enrol as a student at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in October 1931. The following year he moved to Warsaw, where he managed to be accepted into the seminar of Professor Marceli Handelsman, himself of Jewish origin and the doyen of Polish nineteenth-century historians. The seminar had an enormous impact on the young Eisenbach: ‘The meetings, discussions, and especially the methodological observations of Professor Handelsman were for me a revelation.'

He completed his MA (in Poland as in Scotland, a first degree) in 1935, with the highest grade. For his qualifying thesis he submitted an essay on ‘The Legal and Political Position of Jews in the Duchy of Warsaw'. Unable to find a job in a university, he took employment in the offices of the Jewish Society for the Protection of Health (TOZ), where he soon became head of the statistical office, a position he held until the outbreak of the war. He continued to undertake historical research, influenced primarily by the Marxist school of Jewish historians, above all Raphael Mahler and Emanuel Ringelblum, whose sister he married.