We begin our profile of the task of the Jewish historian in the modern age with an important, if at some level counterintuitive, goal: history as liberation. On the face of it, and at the most latent level, history is about the past. Historians use an array of sources and methods to immerse themselves in it. Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century Prussian historian, notably, though not uncontroversially, expressed the belief that the historian should “extinguish” himself in order to gain access to the past.1
The attempt to understand and even enter the past would seem to be a necessarily preservative act. In fact, historians relish the prospect of settling into an archive and being transported back to a world which they happily and painstakingly reconstruct. But this impulse toward reconstruction is but one facet of the historian’s vocation. We need only recall the specter of presentism of which historians have periodically accused one another—that is, the tendency to read, and even bend, the past through the lens of the current moment. This impulse is misguided, critics say, because history “is not a redeemer, promising to solve all human problems in time.” Indeed, its focus, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once observed, is “anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfillment.”2
But mustn’t we ask, Are we not all, at some level, presentists, as even Herbert Butterfield, the author (and erstwhile critic) of The Whig Interpretation of History, came to realize?3 Not only are historians undeniably products of their time and place, but they have consistently applied the results of their research to present and future concerns—wittingly and unwittingly. Indeed, we have been extracting meaning, guidance, and direction from the past for as long as we have been recording it. And at times, we summon up the past in order to liberate or be liberated. The political theorist Michael Walzer has chronicled how the repeated invocation of the biblical story of Exodus served, in a wide variety of times and settings, as inspiration for movements of liberation. In many of the cases he observed in Exodus and Revolution, a persistent companion of the theme of liberation was religion, natural enough given the centrality of the Exodus story in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.4
To our modern, secular minds, the relationship between religion and liberation seems oppositional rather than complementary. Religion often appears to be a conservative, even reactionary, force. And in fact, we will explore in this chapter how numerous modern scholars imagined history as a medium to liberate themselves and others from ossified forms of Jewish religion. But we shall also take stock of the obverse—a number of cases in which history has been utilized as a force of liberation on behalf of religion.
There are, of course, multiple catalysts for historiographical liberation. And thus, we will move from our initial discussion of religion to consider other instances in which history was mobilized to the task of liberation: for example, when history was called on to promote national liberation or women’s liberation. This will afford us the opportunity not only to reread the course of modern Jewish historiography, a story that has been told more than a few times. It will also allow us to explore the motif of liberation through the lens of its political utility, in the expansive sense of promoting a goal that extends beyond the realm of scholarship itself.
To gain a sense of what this kind of mobilization looks like, we recall two prominent American historians of recent years. While neither was a specialist in Jewish history, both came from distinctive Jewish backgrounds that played a consequential role in their formations: Gerda Lerner and Howard Zinn. Lerner was born in Vienna, from which she took flight just before Kristallnacht, coming to the United States alone at age nineteen; Zinn was born to a poor immigrant family in Brooklyn. Coming of intellectual age in the charged environment of New York in the thirties and forties, the two followed a familiar Jewish path by embracing Marxism as young adults before turning away from it later in life. Throughout they remained unwavering in their commitment to social justice—and more to the point, to the use of history as a key agent of change. Lerner, who titled an autobiographical volume Living with History/Making Social Change, utilized her professional training to overcome the exclusion or marginalization of women from received accounts of the past, and in the process to become one of this country’s pioneers of women’s history. Zinn, for his part, combined huge scholarly and political passions to rewrite the history of the United States by focusing on the forgotten voices—Native Americans, slaves, unionists, and others. His labors, most significantly in A People’s History of the United States (1980), won him a wide audience, ample praise, and fierce denunciation for subjecting history to his ideological precepts.5 We could easily find fault with Zinn’s predictability and a priori preferences, but we ignore his insistence on listening to the voices of the suppressed at considerable risk.
These two scholars do not represent, to be sure, all historians.6 But they do stand as exemplars of the urgency of history, as well as of the way history has been used as a tool of liberation. The two manifested in their work a powerful tendency to recover and reveal, “by exposing,” as Zinn put it, “those facts that any society tends to hide about itself.”7 At the same time, there is in their work, and in the work of many others, an impulse to study the past precisely in order to be freed from it. This principle allows us to propose an addendum to George Santayana’s famous aphorism that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That is, those who can remember the past are perhaps best able to move beyond it. Far from being a rare occurrence, this has been a guiding principle for historians, particularly for modern Jewish historians, as we shall now examine in closer detail.
Our story begins with the first major chronicler of the Jews in the modern age, Jacques Basnage, the early-eighteenth-century French Huguenot scholar who wrote the first major postbiblical history of the Jews, beginning with a six-volume version in French (1706–7) and concluding with a fifteen-volume edition in Dutch (1716).8 Basnage took flight from his native France for the Netherlands in search of religious freedom for Protestants. He saw himself as picking up the account where the first-century C.E. historian Flavius Josephus had left off more than sixteen centuries earlier. Akin to Josephus, who chronicled the devastating military defeat of his own people, Basnage fashioned himself as a scholar who transcended partisanship—and especially the narrow perspective of the rabbis, who, he lamented, “are but little acquainted with their History.”9 At the same time, he was fueled by a missionary zeal and polemical energy born of his day. Thus, he was desirous of proving, in tones reminiscent of Spinoza some three decades earlier, that the election of the Jews was time bound and that, in their postbiblical life, they “had nothing remarkable to distinguish themselves from other Nations.”10 On the contrary, their many dispersions stood as territorial evidence of a basic theological claim: namely, that “the present Calamity of the Jews is enough to convince us, that God is exasperated against them, and that their Sins deserve that Blindness, which made God reject them.” And yet, his history would have been far shorter were Basnage not committed to revealing the kind of meticulous detail—and not just of the biblical text—that one might expect of an incipient modern historian (without access to archival sources). It might also have been shorter had Basnage not sought to disparage living Jews by associating them with a group he reviled even more, Catholics, whom he held responsible for his own departure from France. What becomes clear is that the rationale for this expansive history lay not in Basnage’s intrinsic interest in the history of the Jews. The aim, he explained, was unmistakable: “We ought to have a clearer Knowledge of a Nation, to whom we have succeeded, and that shall be one day united with the Christian Church.”11 In other words, he wrote his history of the Jews as a means of demonstrating that Christianity had superseded Judaism and thus could liberate Christians—and, he hoped, Jews as well—from the ignominious Jewish past of theological error, ritual excess, and moral corruption to a state of salvation.
A similar impulse guided a chronicler of the Jews a century later in the newly established United States, the intrepid amateur scholar of religion Hannah Adams. Operating in a Protestant New England ambience permeated with intense interest in the Old Testament, Hebrew, and the Jews, Adams wrote her two-volume History of the Jews from the Destruction of Jerusalem to the Present Time (1812), which drew heavily on Basnage. While evincing sympathy for the Jews and “the calamities they have endured,” she betrayed clear traces of a good Christian intent on the conversion of the Jews. Their history “exhibits a melancholy picture of human wretchedness and depravity,” which she then catalogued: “the wild fury of fanaticism, the stern cruelty of avarice, a succession of massacres; a repetition of plunders, shades without light; [and] a dreary wilderness, unenlivened with one spot of verdure.”12 Chronicling this tale of woe, though, had a clear benefit, Adams continued:
The exemption of the Jews from the common fate of nations, affords a striking proof of the truth of the sacred scriptures. They are, as was foretold, dispersed over the habitable globe, being themselves the depositories of those oracles in which their own unbelief and consequent suffering are clearly predicted. . . . One of the great designs of their being preserved and continued a distinct people appears to be, that their singular destiny might confirm the divine authority of the Gospel, which they reject; and that they might strengthen the faith of others in those sacred truths, to which they refuse to yield their own assent.13
Adams, like Basnage before her, regarded the history of the Jews as affirmation of the truth of Christianity. In this regard, her work was continuous with a long series of Christian polemicists. And yet, unlike those Christians who preceded her, she conveyed her supersessionism in a highly detailed, footnoted historical narrative in which she “spared no exertions in her power to collect authentic documents.”14 This impulse, along with an interest in the present-day story of the Jews shared by Basnage, offered up a novel template for the study of Jewish history. It entailed fealty to the emerging standards of the modern historical discipline, as well as a clear commitment to utilize history to illumine the path of liberation from the shackles of the past.
The first modern Jewish historical researchers also subscribed to this set of disciplinary norms and sense of purpose, albeit with different views of the liberatory power of history. One of the pioneering figures of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Leopold Zunz, made this abundantly clear in his bold programmatic essay “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur” (On Rabbinic Literature), published six years after Adams’s book. The twenty-three-year-old Zunz surveyed the decrepit state of Jewish studies in 1818 with preternatural wisdom and maturity. “Unsere Wissenschaft,” as he termed it—“our science”—had come, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, to take stock of a wide body of postbiblical Jewish literature out of which “no new significant development” was to be expected.15 In fact, Zunz notably, though inaccurately, predicted that “Hebrew books are more readily available than they will likely be in 1919.” At the same time, he believed that a serious assessment of the breadth and depth of postbiblical literature must overcome the stranglehold of modern Christian scholars, who distorted the visage of Judaism for their own religious purposes. Motivated by a desire to disparage rather than respect, they tended to regard anything that “can be used against the Jews or Judaism . . . [as] a welcome find.”16
At this point, we encounter a seeming paradox. History, or at least a scholarly perspective deeply informed by history, was being called upon to liberate the study of Jewish sources from history—namely, a history laden by Christian bias. Indeed, history served not only as a series of events and a narrative account of those events but as a liberatory and an oppressive force. This Janus-faced quality opened history up to various angles of criticism, which gained momentum in the nineteenth century.17 But it also pointed to a new public utility—and urgency—for historically based scholarship such as Wissenschaft des Judentums. Leopold Zunz understood this well when he declared in 1845 that “the equal status of the Jews in ethics and life will emerge with the equal status of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.” That is, when the day arrived that the study of Jewish religion and history was validated through recognition as a legitimate field in the university, then it would both enable and be a short path to the recognition of Jews as worthy members of European and German society.18
Meanwhile, the spirit of historical scholarship as liberation animated not only the younger generation of Jewish intellectuals of which Zunz was an exemplar but a more elderly Bohemian Jew by the name of Peter Beer who lived in Prague.19 A few years after Zunz produced his programmatic essay, Beer published another contribution to a long row of works that he had written about Jewish history. Distinct from his previous surveys in Hebrew, this new two-volume German study, published in 1822–1823, was devoted to a very particular theme: Jewish sectarian movements throughout the ages. Beer laid claim to the spirit of nonpartisanship that historians of his generation were proudly announcing. The goal of the self-respecting historian, he announced at the outset, was to present the past without celebrating or distorting it. At the same time, the value of studying the past rested on its ability to provide guidance for the present.
Beer proved more adept at the latter task than the former—that is, at using history to provide guidance for the present than at avoiding his own clear bias. Although he was hardly a lover of some of the sectarian movements he studied—he had particular disdain for Hasidism—he nonetheless elaborated on their history and doctrines in order to challenge the hegemony of Rabbinismus, “rabbinism,” as normative Judaism. His account of the various “sects” he studied, tendentious as it was, was designed to topple rabbinism from its primacy within Judaism, to be replaced by what Beer called “pure Mosaism.”20 What exactly was that?
“Pure Mosaism,” according to Beer, was primal Judaism stripped of the layers of interpretive and ritual accretion that rabbis had placed on the biblical foundation. Beer’s notion of a pristine Judaism readily calls to mind the sixteenth-century Portuguese converso turned Jew turned heretic Uriel da Costa, who inveighed against the “Pharisees” of his day in order to reveal a deeply submerged Mosaism.
Whereas da Costa used the language of religious polemics, familiar to him from Portugal and Amsterdam, to wage his battle, Beer prosecuted his case in a nineteenth-century idiom, history, which was endowed with a distinctly utilitarian function. Both, however, were animated by the same goal of liberation from the crushing burden of rabbinic authority. Both were mindful of past examples of attempted liberators, especially the medieval Karaites, with whom Beer in particular identified.21
Karaism was, as many have observed (beginning with Richard Simon in the seventeenth century) , a sort of Protestantism avant la lettre, sharing with the later and more powerful movement a commitment to bore through the bedrock of clerical obfuscation to the ancient font of scriptural faith.22 The association here is not accidental. Although Peter Beer was raised in Catholic Prague, his interest in Karaism reflects a Protestant theological and historicist arc that covered much of central Europe in the nineteenth century.23 That is, his impulse to use history to chisel away at rabbinic ossification was, in a sense, a Protestant move. And it was hardly unique to him. He was preceded by Jacques Basnage and Hannah Adams, and he was followed by a number of nineteenth-century Jewish scholars intent on liberating a long suppressed and pure version of their religion.
One thinks in this context of the greatest of German Reform rabbis and scholars in the nineteenth century, Abraham Geiger. Scholars have long noted that Geiger consciously swam against the current of Protestant scholarship in his day; among the more recent, Susannah Heschel argues that his main motive was not to Christianize Judaism but rather, in a precocious postcolonial move, to Judaize Christianity (and particularly Christ).24 To be sure, that was a key part of Geiger’s mission. But we must also recall his deep sense of malaise, especially as a young man, over Judaism’s condition. His letters to his friend, the Franco-German scholar Joseph Derenbourg, abound with references to Judaism as ossified, fossilized, and diseased. Geiger confided to Derenbourg in 1841 that he lacked faith that “a truly living force . . . may yet well up from Judaism.”25 If hope were to be found for some form of revival, it might issue from a historically grounded Wissenschaft. For that scholarly force, Geiger asserted, “is the sum total of the entire intellectual development of mankind, constantly striving for liberation from the limiting one-sided effects of transitory and strictly national phenomena.”26 History was the methodological tool to record, register, and, in some sense, promote that liberation. Geiger found a good model in his day in David Friedrich Strauss’s pathbreaking and controversial book of 1835, Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), whose searching and provocative nature was “of sufficient significance to be used as a source of support.”27
Interestingly, Geiger drew methodological inspiration and a measure of courage from Strauss in offering up his own un-Protestant view of Jesus as a Jew. At the same time, there were more than glimmers of a Protestant narrative arc in his thought. We gain a glimpse of this in the lectures that Geiger delivered as a kind of career summation between 1872 and 1874 as a professor at the newly created rabbinical seminary in Berlin, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. There, Geiger laid out a sweeping periodization of the evolution of Judaism that focused on four stages. The first three were Revelation, an age of “vigorous creation”; Tradition, in which “biblical material was processed, shaped and molded for life”; and Legalism, marked by “toilsome preoccupation with the heritage” and casuistry. Of the last period, Geiger wrote: “The fourth period, the era of liberation has been marked by an effort to loosen the fetters of the previous era by means of the use of reason and historical research. However, the bond with the past has not been severed. What is being attempted is solely to revitalize Judaism and to cause the stream of history to flow forth once again. This is the era of Critical Study, our own modern era.”28
The aim of Geiger’s periodization scheme was twofold: first, to reconnect contemporary Judaism to the living current of its glorious past, from which it had been severed; and second, to do so by adopting a dynamic view of historical development to be liberated from a burdensome past, especially from the age of “rigid legalism,” which was marked by “petrification” and “paralysis of thought” in Jewish culture (through active engagement by Jews with the broader host society).29 The coexistence of moribund and vibrant cultural forces, even in the same period, points to the dialectical view of history that Geiger favored. According to his expansive historicist vision, “every development is possible only within the framework of history.”30 And as he clarified, later developments were “already inherent in the growth and flowering process of the original seeds.” Wissenschaft’s liberatory role, then, was to retrieve the original seeds by clearing away the crowded undergrowth, revealing what was still vibrant in Judaism.31
This vision of history, which was intended to reshape the way Jews remembered the past, went hand in hand with Geiger’s project to reform Judaism. He and other nineteenth-century religious reformers sought to discard that which was moribund in favor of what was still vital. They applied their historical research directly to the battles they were waging within the German-Jewish community over whether it was permissible to make changes to Jewish liturgy and ritual. Geiger, for example, played a prominent role at the second conference of reform rabbis in 1845, advocating for the use of German in prayer since Hebrew “has ceased to be alive for the people” and “a German prayer strikes a deeper chord than a Hebrew prayer.”32
But it was not only Geiger and his liberal colleagues who availed themselves of historical tools in order to revive, rehabilitate, or liberate memory of the past. Jews at the other end of the emerging denominational spectrum in the nineteenth century also made use of history for their own liberatory purposes, though a bit later in the century. We know of the work of Wissenschaft scholars of the Orthodox persuasion such as Jakob Barth, Abraham Berliner, and David Zvi Hoffmann, who introduced historical methods to their students at the Orthodox seminary founded by Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer in 1873 in Berlin. More recently, scholars have devoted new attention to the largely neglected substratum of writing called Orthodox or Haredi historiography issuing largely from eastern Europe.33
In this body of work, we can see the other side of the coin of the liberating effects of history with respect to religion—that is, liberation from the deleterious effects of secularism. I would like to illustrate this tendency by focusing on two exemplars, separated by a century or so but joined in their commitment to free the past from the biases of secular historians. The first is Zeev Jawitz, the least recognizable of an august and well-known group of Jewish scholars from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the authors of major, multivolume histories of the Jews, of whom we think principally of Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, and Salo W. Baron.
Far less known, Jawitz, a Polish-born Orthodox scholar and Zionist, wrote a fourteen-volume history of the Jews called Toldot Yisra’el (History of Israel). Grounded in traditional rabbinic reverence and learning, Jawitz also read widely in modern scholarship, which provided him with the confidence to address a deficiency that troubled him. On the face of it, the problem was simple: “Most Gentile scholars of Jewish history and thought distort it or are deficient, to a lesser or greater extent, both in terms of their knowledge base and their biases, which prevent them from accumulating adequate knowledge of the Jews.”34
But in fact, the problem was deeper than Gentile bias. Many notable Jewish scholars of Jewish history in Germany had fallen under the sway of Gentile contemporaries in writing the history of their own people. Jawitz lamented in eerily prescient language in 1895 that they “were unable to liberate themselves from the burden of the teachings of their Aryan professors.” He sought to undertake a corrective. In the first instance, he wrote his volumes not in German, the dominant language of modern Jewish scholarship to that point, but in Hebrew, which was in the early stages of development as a modern scholarly language. His use of Hebrew reflected a more intimate and unabashed connection to his historical objects than the German used by his colleagues. In fact, his history was extraordinarily deferential to the chronology and sources of traditional rabbinic Judaism, with a majority of his volumes (nine of fourteen) treating the biblical and Talmudic periods. Animating his work was the desire to reclaim the history of his people from subservient, largely German Jewish, scholars. In an ironic echo of Heinrich Graetz’s brash assertion to Leopold Zunz, Jawitz made clear that he was not seeking to replicate the old tendencies of Wissenschaft des Judentums but rather intended to write “a Jewish history that revealed an inner richness like no other, that would be a fount of life that would never lead astray.”35
Jawitz’s work did not reach a wide audience with his first volumes. On one hand, a series of negative reviews from scholars such as Simon Dubnow and Yosef Klausner probably turned away the growing audience of secular Hebrew readers in eastern Europe. On the other, the appetite among Orthodox Jews for a history of the Jews in Hebrew was not especially deep at the fin de siècle. As a result, the book, as the historian Michael Brenner has noted, fell between the cracks of religious traditionalism and secular Zionism.36
Notwithstanding this predicament, Jawitz’s series had gone through five editions by the 1950s, suggesting that history was gaining traction as a genre worth reading for Orthodox Jews. And since that time there has been an appreciable increase in works of history and biography in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English intended specifically for an Orthodox audience. Perhaps most illustrative of this trend is the popularity of the ArtScroll imprint of the Mesorah Publishing Company in Brooklyn, New York, which since 1975 has published a wide array of books intended for a traditionally observant clientele, especially easily accessible versions of sacred texts (such as the Bible and the Talmud) in English translation. ArtScroll also puts out a range of books on food, psychology, and history, which share the goal with the reproduced holy works of upending “inadequate, distorted, or otherwise illegitimate representations of Jewish knowledge, ritual practice, and historical imagination” and replacing them with “corrected, more authentic, more reliable, and better organized” versions.37
One of the most prolific authors in the ArtScroll stable is the second Orthodox exemplar, the Israeli-American writer Rabbi Berel Wein. Rabbi Wein has produced a vast corpus of work in multiple fields. He is especially known as the author of biographical and historical books that present a traditional Orthodox rendering notable for its reverential quality, especially his four-volume history of the Jews that extends from antiquity to 1990. Although he was writing a century after Zeev Jawitz, Rabbi Wein shared the impulse to use a particular kind of historical narrative to free readers from what both regarded as the dangerous hold of secularism. Wein made this clear in his five-hundred-page modern Jewish history The Triumph of Survival, which he opened by insisting that “history is too important to be left to the historians,” all the more so when it is a matter of Jewish history. Insofar as previous accounts have been “almost exclusively the product of secular Jews,” it was time to reclaim the past. To do so required a profession of faith that is foreign to most professional historians today, though far less uncommon in the age of Ranke.38 Wein declared, “I am an Orthodox Jew who believes in the divinity of Jewish tradition and in the uniqueness of the people of Israel.” He continued by admitting that “there is an Author and Planner, Who guides Israel to its destiny.” Interestingly, Wein had absorbed enough of the ethos of the modern historian to aver that one must “accept truth from whoever says it,” whether it comes from Jewish sources or no. And yet, the goal was unmistakable: it was to write, in the tradition of Graetz and Jawitz, not just another history of the Jews but an unapologetically Jewish history.39 This meant liberating Jewish history from the assimilatory biases of modern Jewish historiography, including those of Graetz himself. No longer, for example, was Moses Mendelssohn, the late-eighteenth-century German-Jewish philosopher, considered—even by prominent Orthodox figures such as S. R. Hirsch and Jawitz—the great hero who revitalized Jewish life and culture.40 On Wein’s reading, Mendelssohn, notwithstanding his commitment to Jewish ritual observance, “loosed forces that would be destructive to myriads of Jews individually and to the Jewish people as a whole.” His philosophy was but “a reflection of the incipient disaster that he was so prominent in fashioning.”41
Wein’s self-described “traditional Jewish perspective of history” sought to reorient the lens onto the past toward a narrative that was affirming, not corrosive, of religious faith. Like Jawitz, he aimed to craft a reverential collective memory, albeit in an uncommon medium, history. Wein’s use of history, and his goal to herald “the triumph of survival,” is its own form of assimilation to a modern mode of thought even though it was intended to safeguard against its most deleterious effects. This “assimilation” raises the question of how Wein’s form of historiographical liberation differs from or resembles that of contemporary professional scholars from whom he seeks a measure of distance. In his recent history of Jewish historiography, Michael Brenner compares Wein to the renowned Berkeley rabbinicist Daniel Boyarin on the basis of their shared willingness to identify with the objects of their research, as well as to acknowledge heroes and villains in their accounts.42 This is an interesting comparison, but it should not obscure the fact that not all forms of historiographical liberation—nor all identitarian projects—are identical. Boyarin’s balance of aims and practices is different from Wein’s, and the two write different kinds of books, one marked by cutting-edge theoretical insights, critical apparatus, and radical politics, and the other by an unadorned storyline without any gesture to theory or the professional scholarly guild that aims to convey unquestioned fealty to traditional rabbinic authority. The two not only appeal to vastly different audiences; they mix scholarly and ideological proclivities in different balances. We thus can speak of a spectrum along which historians and other scholarly writers dwell, with one pole marking out the criterion of sharp criticism and the other unalloyed reverence.
Up to this point, we have focused on a range of authors from Jacques Basnage to Berel Wein who believed that history not only emancipates from the shackles of past bias but pushes toward a new form of religious enlightenment. History can also be and has been mobilized for other kinds of liberations, including release from ignorance, bias, and discrimination. Whereas some seek epistemological clarity, others seek a measure of political freedom through study of the past.43 One of the clearest cases among modern Jewish scholars was one of the earliest: Leopold Zunz, whom we remember as a founding father of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Born in 1794, Zunz was a child of the French Revolution and remained throughout his life fired with enthusiasm for the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. He brought these values to bear on a number of influential studies of the 1830s, which represented examples of what we might call “applied history.” For instance, Zunz declared in a hard-hitting introduction to his 1832 history of the sermon (excised by Prussian censors in the first edition) that “it is finally time that Jews in Europe, especially in Germany, be granted the Right and Freedom, not rights and freedoms.” An important way forward was to examine the past in order to illuminate and liberate it from darkness. In the case of this particular book, Zunz sought to show not only the edificatory value of the sermonic form in general but that Jews had used this form throughout their history, frequently in the vernacular tongue of the day. He thus argued strenuously against the effort by the conservative Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia, to ban Jewish sermonizing in German. The ultimate goal was to uproot “clericalism and inquisition, despotism and slavery, torture and censorship” in favor of “Freedom, Wissenschaft, and Civilization.”44
Zunz’s commitment to use historical scholarship to promote Jewish political rights continued in his 1837 study, Namen der Juden: Eine geschictliche Untersuchung (Names of the Jews: A Historical Investigation). Here, too, Zunz sought to battle the forces of reaction in Prussia that sought to limit Jews to biblical names so as to ensure their ongoing segregation. His historical brief argued that Jews had been adopting non-Jewish names for millennia, extending back to the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E., and thus should be permitted to continue this practice.45
Zunz sought to maximize the potential of history to effect change in the present age, whose conservative character he saw as a sign of messianic birth pangs. To be sure, his efforts were not limited to research. He became a fervent political activist in the 1840s, marching, demonstrating, and agitating—all in the belief that the “bloody Day of Judgment is at hand for the oppressors of so many nations.”46 So too, he was convinced, was the age of emancipation.
The oft-invoked image of the cloistered and disengaged scholar held little water in this period, with reference to neither Zunz nor to his contemporaries. The twentieth-century historian Salo W. Baron undertook a wide-ranging survey of the involvement of Jewish studies scholars in the struggle for emancipation in 1848 in Europe and concluded that “the accusation frequently leveled against the science of Judaism that it had isolated itself from the mainstream of Jewish life and, hence, tended to become petrified had no foundations at all during the Revolutionary period, and for many years thereafter.” Indeed, scholars in Prussia, France, Italy, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Galicia, and even the United States—a veritable Who’s Who of Jewish studies in mid-century—readily joined in the springtime revolutionary fervor.47
In that era, history was mobilized to the task of emancipation, reflecting the quest of Jews for full civic rights in Europe. A half-century later, history was mobilized to the task of auto-emancipation, the phrase made famous by the Russian-Jewish doctor Leon Pinsker in his 1882 pamphlet of that name.48 No longer content to rely on the beneficence of Gentile hosts in Europe, Pinsker and those who followed in his wake sought to transform the Jews from a collection of enlightened individuals into a proud and self-sustaining nation. This early generation of Jewish nationalists established an oft-repeated pattern by making recourse to history as a tool of liberation.
Perhaps most significant in this regard was the prototypical Jewish nationalist historian Simon Dubnow, who will make frequent appearances in the remainder of this book. Dubnow was equally well known for his comprehensive historical purview, spanning the entirety of the Jewish past, and his commitment as a leading advocate of diaspora nationalism. At the outset of his career, Dubnow crafted a sweeping vision for the role of Jewish history, initially published in Russian in 1891 and then in revised form a year later in Hebrew.49 The essay’s title—“Let Us Seek and Investigate” —reveals its programmatic qualities, akin in scale and ambition to the manifesto produced seventy-four years earlier by Leopold Zunz. Dubnow combined in the essay a set of philosophical reflections, principles of periodization, and research objectives. He started off by averring that one of the three main sources of Jewish unity was the sense of a shared historical destiny. And yet Jews over the ages were surprisingly bad at committing their history to written records. “Why is it,” Dubnow asked, that “knights of the Torah . . . have left us thousands of responsa, books of casuistry, collections of laws, commentaries on the Bible and its exegetes as well as scientific and philosophical studies, and yet have not bequeathed us an historical literature?” Longingly, Dubnow held that those who sought to reverse this neglect in the modern age—indeed, who understood history’s “great value for the future of our people”—were the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Conversely, those who perpetuated the neglect of history were Dubnow’s fellow eastern European Jews, whom he excoriated for failing to collect, organize, and analyze the rich sources their ancestors had left behind. The stakes were high, as Dubnow acknowledged: “We have sinned against history. The time has come to release it and to reconstruct the remains of its ruins.”50
Over the next half-century, until his tragic death in 1941, Dubnow would shift the focus of his critique. As he refined his own historical method, he increasingly sought to escape the emphases of German-Jewish scholarship, and especially those of the influential macrohistorian who preceded him, Heinrich Graetz. In introducing his own multivolume history in 1925, Dubnow heralded the advent of a secular nationalist movement which would have a profound effect on historiography, “liberating it from the shackles of theology and, subsequently, of spiritualism or scholasticism.”51
This impulse to unhinge Jewish scholarship from its dependence on Wissenschaft des Judentums extended well beyond Dubnow and his form of nationalism. His friend and polemical partner, the prominent Zionist and Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha-am, who was not a professional scholar but rather a highly informed consumer of scholarship, set the stage for the Zionist drive for historiographical liberation. He declared in the journal Ha-Shiloah in 1902 that “the most diligent and original workers in this field [Jewish studies] are Gentile scholars, from whose wells Jewish scholars drink and in whose footsteps they walk.” He went on to lament, in terms that evoke the traditionalist Zeev Jawitz, that Wissenschaft des Judentums is “beholden to the reign of aliens,” which prevents “the original Jewish spirit from being revealed in all its originality, as we are entitled to hope for.”52
Ahad Ha-am’s successor as editor of the Odessa-based Ha-Shiloah, Yosef Klausner, who was a Heidelberg-trained professional scholar, sought to overcome this deficiency. He announced a call in Ha-Shiloah’s pages to create a mada ‘ivri, a scientific scholarship in Hebrew that would be free of both foreign influence and dilettantish poseurs, while attaining a high standard of research excellence.53 In 1919, Klausner emigrated from Odessa to Palestine, where he became a founding member of the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when it opened in 1925.
Klausner and his new colleagues were confident that the move to Jerusalem from Europe, from which almost all of them came, would free scholarship from slavish dependence and bias. They were hardly a uniform lot. They came from different parts of the Continent. They included piously observant and proudly secular figures. They disagreed passionately with one another about politics. And they represented a wide range of disciplinary interests. But they shared the conviction that Jerusalem had the potential to alter the way in which the past was understood. The most renowned member of this founding generation of “Jerusalem scholars,” Gershom Scholem, insisted that the “return” of Jewish scholars to Jerusalem afforded an altogether novel “historic perspective from within.” For his own field of research, Jewish mysticism, this new perspective provided an opportunity “to create something out of nothing . . . to estimate the true value of the religious movement known as Kabbala, and to assess the correct position to be assigned to it in the life and history of our people.”54 Meanwhile, the historians Yitzhak Baer and Ben Zion Dinur maintained that the move to Jerusalem would liberate Jewish scholarship from the “theological-literary” orientation of Wissenschaft des Judentums. This meant a dramatic restaging of Jewish history; its main protagonist was no longer Judaism the religion. Rather, as Baer and Dinur declared in the pages of the nascent journal Zion, “Jewish history is the history of the Jewish [Israelite] nation.”55
The Jerusalem historians, separated by background and temperament, joined in the goal of identifying previously submerged nationalist currents in the Jewish past. As I noted in the introduction, Baer traced in Galut a lineage of thinkers throughout Jewish history who recognized the ignominy of exile and the concomitant virtue of return to the homeland. Meanwhile, in his last book, Yisra’el ba-‘amim (Israel Among the Nations), he uncovered a pious democratic spirit that, he believed, inspired and preserved a national sense among the Jews from the time of the Second Temple. He concluded by asserting an unbroken chain of collective identity: “In the end, several grand pillars of the mystical-historical edifice of the ancients will remain—pillars which the first Hasidim planted in the soil of Erets Yisra’el, which are rooted in the heart of every man, and through which the future place of Israel among the nations will be recorded.”56
Baer can hardly be reduced to a crass ideologue masquerading as a historian. He was an eminent Hispanist with an encyclopedic grasp of the Spanish archives, as well as expertise in many other areas of history. At the same time, he was intent on using history to deepen a sense of connection to the past—indeed, to excavate pillars of memory for future generations. He highlighted the painful memory of galut, the antidote to which was the liberating act of return to the Land of Israel. This impulse was hardly his alone. It was shared by Baer’s colleague in Jerusalem, Dinur, who was the most unabashedly ideological of his cohort there. In his wide-ranging collections of sources, Dinur charted the persistent allure of the Land of Israel for Jews in the Diaspora, including in his multivolume Yisra’el ba-Golah (Israel in the Diaspora). This “Palestinocentric” tendency, in which the Land of Israel was the central axis around which Jewish history revolved, prompted Dinur to forage through the past to identify Zionists avant la lettre, Jews who left their home countries for Palestine prior to the advent of Zionism. At the same time, he also sought to chronicle the norms, habits, and practices—what he called the “socio-psychological” dimension—of Jews that preserved “common memories of the nation” in the Diaspora.57
Collecting the documentary traces of these memories and using them to foster a deeper connection to the past defined Dinur’s calling, both as a historian and as a public official. Never content to remain in the narrow corridors of the academy, he assumed a variety of official roles, including Israeli minister of education (1951–1955). In that role he was able to shape popular historical education through curriculum development, textbooks, and teacher training, in particular focusing on Palestine as the guiding axis of Jewish history. Moreover, he fostered in his work, in the tradition of historians committed to nationalist causes, a sense of the distinctive historical path of his people.58 In emphasizing this point, Dinur was not interested merely in proving the ongoing link of Jews to the Land of Israel; he also felt it imperative to contrast this to the position of Palestinian Arabs, who “have all rights [in the State of Israel], but over the Land of Israel have no right.” This distinction between the civil rights of Arabs and the historical right of Jews to the land was frequently uttered by political leaders, especially David Ben-Gurion, who affirmed as early as 1929 that “Arabs have full rights as citizens of the country, but they do not have the right of ownership over it.”59 On this view, the right of ownership belonged to the Jews, whose ancient roots in Palestine granted them primogeniture in the present. Of course, it is not only the Jews who make historical claims replete with current political consequences. Palestinians do as well, asserting their own claim to the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem—and their rights to Palestine—while denying implicitly or explicitly a Jewish connection.60
While noting the consequential and somewhat uncomfortable alliance of history and politics in and around Jerusalem, it is also worth noting that the founding “Jerusalem scholars” laid a solid institutional foundation for what has become over the course of ninety years the largest and most influential center of Jewish historical scholarship in the world. Moreover, they opened many new lines of intellectual inquiry, exploring new subject areas, sources, methods, and emphases—Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, Hebrew language and literature, archaeology and biblical studies, and the history and topography of Palestine, among others. They were inspired by the belief that the work of tapping into the wellsprings of Jewish history could feed the living currents of Jewish life in the present.
A similar sense of the vitalizing potential of scholarship was shared by the ideological rivals of the Zionists, the adepts of Yiddish who created YIVO, the main center of scholarship in Yiddish, in 1925. They held important organizing meetings in Vilna in the same period as the formal opening of the Hebrew University on 1 April 1925.61 A related and, to an extent, competing circle was also discussing the future of Yiddish-based scholarship in Berlin, where many eastern European Jews had come after the First World War. The various Yiddish activist-scholars represented a parallel universe of sorts to the scholarly and institutional activity in Jerusalem, though one in which some of the Jerusalem scholars such as Dinur had earlier dwelt but from which they had since exited. For several decades, they and their forebears had been engaged in a range of disciplinary pursuits—history, philology and literature, ethnography—under the rubric yidishe visnshaft (“Jewish scholarship” in Yiddish).62
Notwithstanding their ideological differences with the Jerusalem scholars, the Yiddish scholarly activists started from a familiar point of action; they too aspired to liberate themselves from their predecessors. Nokhem Shtif, a Ukrainian-born literary and historical scholar and the driving force behind the Berlin-based efforts, gave clear voice to this sentiment. In his lapidary manifesto of 1925, “On a Yiddish Scientific Institute,” he opened with a call reminiscent of many previous Jewish scholars: the time had come for the Jews to take part in the larger scholarly world by creating their own first-rate institutions. And yet, in a curious twist, he subverted the oft-invoked hierarchy between German and eastern European Jews—Yekkes and Ostjuden. He declared that the new Yiddish scholarship marked “an emancipation from the ghetto circle of scholarly interests that the activists of ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums’ cultivate.”63 Not only were the earlier German scholars uninterested in Yiddish itself; they were, as Shtif claimed, “fundamentally hostile to the cultural interest of the Jewish masses, their language, (and) their living social and cultural creativity.”64 What was required was a reinvigoration of Jewish scholarship, to be executed, as with the Jerusalem scholars, by a new scholarly focus not on the dead past but on the living, vibrant Jewish people. The next two decades witnessed a rich outpouring of scholarship in Yiddish, some based at YIVO in Vilna and some elsewhere. Figures such as Jacob Lestshinsky, Raphael Mahler, Emanuel Ringelblum, Ignacy Schiper, and Elias Tcherikower charted new ground both by refining a modern scholarly idiom in Yiddish and by investigating the largely unexplored social, material, and demographic history of eastern European Jewry. Like their colleagues, friends, and rivals in Jerusalem, the Yiddish scholars mobilized scholarship to craft a new image and memory of the Jewish past as a prelude to a promising future. As a rule, the two groups were far less inhibited than their Wissenschaft forebears in Germany in moving back and forth between careful monographic labor and educational, cultural, and political activities in the public domain.
We have seen how scholars of Jewish history often availed themselves of the potential to disrupt, affirm, or recraft received narratives in order to set in place a serviceable image or memory of the past. In parallel, they sought to liberate the past on behalf of a diverse range of causes: theological supersession, political emancipation, religious reform, traditionalist revival, and national awakening. While there are many engaged scholars who are not historians, and many historians who are not inclined to be engaged, the discipline of history does seem to have a special purchase on public engagement, given its ability to liberate from the prejudices of the past. Our focus to this point has been on male historians writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We now turn to two contemporary female scholars for whom history served as an instrument of liberation from past patterns of male domination and oppression. In general, scholars of women’s and gender history have been especially attuned to the potential of their discipline to identify deficiencies from the past and propose alternatives for the future.65
The first of the two is Gerda Lerner, who blazed a pioneering trail in her wide-ranging research, as well as in introducing women’s history into the curricula of university history departments across the United States. Lerner understood as well as any “why history matters,” as she framed an especially thoughtful essay from a 1997 collection of that name. One of the most intriguing features of that essay was her comparison of two groups—indeed, “the two groups,” she noted, “which have for the longest time in human history been marginalized and oppressed—women and Jews.” Significantly, this comparison yielded not merely similarities (for example, their common experience of oppression) but also key differences, one of which was that for Jews, historical memory was “a prime tool of survival.” Women, by contrast, were deprived of the capacity to “share in creating the mental constructs that explain and order the world, a world in which they lived but whose annals they were prevented from recording.66 But the historian could now play that role.
Herein lay the liberatory potential of women’s history, of which women were both its objects and, to a great extent, its ideal subjects. As Lerner explained, “When women discover their history and learn their connectedness to the past and to the human social enterprise, their consciousness is inevitably and dramatically transformed. This experience is for them transcendent, in that it enables them to perceive what they share and always have shared with other women.” Women’s history, she continued, was “the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in women.” And that consciousness was a vital link to women’s empowerment. In this way, Lerner argued, “The past becomes part of our present and thereby part of our future.” And the historian plays a crucial role as a bridge between the times. Indeed, it is the historian who has the ability to connect the recovery of a forgotten past to the realization of women’s agency in the future.67
Lerner devoted most of her important scholarly labors to women’s history. But the connection between her professional path and family origins was unmistakable: “I am a historian,” she wrote, “because of my Jewish experience.”68 It was that experience, punctuated by her own theological doubts and the deep scar of Nazism, that inculcated in her an awareness of the benefits and deficits of difference. And it led her to return periodically to a comparison of women and Jews, with both of whom she identified to varying extents and both of whose historical paths she traced in their diverging and occasionally converging routes.
The theme of comparing women’s and Jewish history brings us to our final example of historian qua liberator, the late Yale scholar Paula Hyman. Hyman was deeply committed to the study of both fields or, more particularly, to the intersection of the two. Although she roamed widely in her research, from her early studies on Jews in France to later work on the United States, Poland, and Palestine, Hyman had an increasingly strong interest over the latter half of her career in pushing to the surface the oft-marginalized experience of Jewish women. A good indication of this interest was her iconic article from 1982 on the kosher meat boycott organized by immigrant Jewish women in New York in 1902. She began the article on the boycott by declaring that “women have always participated in politics.”69 Left unsaid, but clearly intended, was the fact that their participation has not always been counted in the historical record, a deficiency she set out to repair.
Less than a decade later, when she had the opportunity to summarize her thoughts in a 1991 volume edited by Judith Baskin, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, Hyman observed that “in much of American Jewish historiography women make scarcely more than a cameo appearance.”70 Her mission thus became, as she put it in her synthesizing Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (1995), to explore and reclaim a role for women in the Jewish past, while challenging old, male-dominated historiographical conventions.71 For Hyman, as both Jewish historian and Jewish feminist, the impulse to set in place a historical memory of women and women’s agency in the narrative of Jewish history was an act of methodological and political liberation, consistent with her desire to overcome the prejudices of the past as a means of assuring a more equitable future for women.
Hyman came of age in the sixties and seventies, a time of great cultural, social, and gender upheaval in American life. Antiwar activity, social protest, Jewish renewal, and feminism were all part of her world, in which scholarly integrity and identify formation were complementary, not oppositional. In her own life, Hyman looked for inspiration to Puah Rakovsky, the radical Russian-Jewish memoirist whom she studied: that is, as “a role model, demonstrating that women could have an impact on the Jewish and general communities.”72 In noting this, we should recall that Hyman was not a unidimensional activist beholden only to one realm of activity. Nor were most of the historians we have explored in this chapter. Their commitments were multifarious and overlapping, converging in their vision of bringing scholarship to life. As a whole, these historians-cum-liberators challenge the claim that virtuous history demands scrupulous avoidance of the present or the complete extinguishing of the self. Rather, they affirm that history is a demanding practice with its own exacting protocol, but it can also be a powerful agent of change as well as of preservation. Indeed, historians call on the past to affirm or re-create webs of memory in which they themselves are enmeshed. In the next chapter, we will focus on the desire not to break free from a stubborn past but to tap into it as a source of consolation in the present.