Nachman Blumental

Nachman Blumental (; born 1902 in Borszczów, died 8 November 1983 in Tel Aviv) was a Polish-Jewish and Israeli historian who served as the head of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw between 1947 and 1949.

Blumental studied literature at the University of Warsaw, where he received a master's degree with a thesis called “On Metaphor.” He is reputed to have known nearly a dozen languages, including Hebrew, Yiddish, French, Polish, and Ukrainian. After graduating college he worked as a teacher in Lublin. His essays and literary criticism appeared before the Second World War in Yiddish newspapers and magazines in Poland, including Literarishe Bleter, Vokhnblat, Arbeter-tsaytung, and Foroys in Warsaw; Lubliner Togblat in Lublin; and Dos naye lebn in Łódź. He translated an abridged version of the novel The Peasants (Chłopi) by Nobel laureate Władysław Stanisław Reymont into Yiddish.

During the German occupation of Poland, Blumental was able to escape to the Soviet Union and survived the Holocaust. His first wife Maria and son Ariel, who had stayed in Poland, tried to pass as Catholics but were betrayed to the Nazis and murdered in 1943.

In 1944 Blumental returned to Poland, where he, along with an assortment of historians, ethnographers and linguists, established the Central Jewish Historical Commission. They transcribed 3,000 survivor testimonies between 1944 and 1947, scavenged for Nazi paperwork in abandoned Gestapo offices and meticulously preserved documentary fragments of day-to-day ghetto life. The Central Jewish Historical Commission was reorganized into the Jewish Historical Institute in 1947, and Blumental became its first director. In the late 1940s, Blumental also attended three war-crime tribunals as an expert witness, including the trial of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz camp commandant.