Aron Yakovlevich Gurevich (also spelled Aaron Gurevich, Russian: Арон Яковлевич Гуревич, May 12, 1924, Moscow – August 5, 2006, Moscow) was a Russian medievalist historian, working on the European culture of the Middle Ages.
Gurevich's work was informed by Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby, and he considered himself a member of their Annales School. He was also influenced by ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, challenging some of them at the same time. Gurevich's work was considered anti-Marxist and met with hostility in the Soviet Union, but enjoyed support abroad among the Annales School, although he was not allowed to travel abroad before Perestroika.
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Aron Gurevich was born in Moscow on May 12, 1924 to a secular Jewish family[1]. In 1946 he graduated from the Moscow State University.[2]. In 1950 after defending his dissertation Peasantry of South-Eastern England during the pre-Norman period he became a Candidate of Sciences[2] and a lecturer of Kalinin State Pedagogical Institute (now Tver State University)[2]. In 1962 Gurevich received a Doktor nauk degree at Leningrad University.[2] His doctoral thesis was Overview of Norway's social history in IX–XII centuries. It was the first doctoral thesis in Soviet Union completely dedicated to Viking history [2].
Aron Gurevich returned to Kalinin and became a professor in 1963 [2].
In 1966 Gurevich joined Moscow Institute of Philosophy, but he was fired in 1969 after publishing Problems in the Origins of Feudalism in Western Europe, where he contested the theory on origins of feudalism adopted in Marxist historiography.[2]
Until 1992 Aron Gurevich was working at the Institute of the Common History in Moscow.[2]
In 1989 during Perestroika Gurevich was allowed to exit the country for the first time, and he lectured abroad in 1989–1991.
In 1993 he became a head of the Institute of the World History at the Moscow State University.[2]