Two years after the publication of Zakhor, Yosef Yerushalmi delivered a lecture at the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française in Paris titled “Vers une histoire de l’espoir juif.” In this 1984 talk, he drew up a blueprint for a future project in the mode of the French Annales school that would explore the long “history of Jewish hope.” He was interested in examining the various modes by which Jews contended with the challenges, disappointments, and persecution that accompanied their long historical journey. While outbreaks of active messianism were fueled by the hope of immediate liberation, it was not that explosive form of hope that interested him. Rather, he called attention to the more routine, even daily practices, what he called the “interim Jewish hopes for the times before the end of Time.” These embodied a certain elasticity that permitted Jews to see themselves as part of an inextinguishable heritage. Hope, in this sense, grew out of despair, a despair born of frequent travails. Indeed, the longue durée of Jewish suffering yielded a history of hope. Yerushalmi concluded his lecture by offering his own rationale for undertaking a history of hope: “To assuage our loneliness. To realize that we are not the first to whom despair was not alien, nor hope a gratuitous gift, and that by the same token we are not necessarily the last. And that, perhaps, may be a small and modest step toward hope itself.”1 Yerushalmi made passing reference to historical writing as a vehicle of hope, though he did not fully assess its role. He did consider, however, the idea that Jews had developed a technique over time, a “midrash of history,” that allowed past traumas to be interpreted in such a way as to “endure and overcome them.” The midrash of history could offer a measure of consolation based on the faith and staying power of the Jews.2
In general, when people have sought consolation for their predicament or fate, they have relied on forms of writing other than history, such as liturgy, poetry, belles lettres and even philosophy, which the sixth-century Roman Boethius used to assuage his despair as he awaited imminent capital punishment.3 In fact, in investigating the place of history as a source of consolation, I found only a single entry in the catalogue of the Library of Congress. An early-twentieth-century literary scholar by the name of Frederick Tupper delivered an after-dinner toast at the annual banquet of the Vermont Commandery of the Loyal Legion of the United States on 11 May 1920 that was published as “The Consolation of History.” Drawing on the relatively recent experience of the Civil War and the immediately concluded Great War, Tupper noted the mix of destruction, woe, and dysfunction that followed serious military conflict. Why recount this misery? Tupper responded to his own question: “We should find small comfort in the thought that other men and other times had suffered like ourselves, save for the ensuing reflection that, in each period, the darkness is followed by a golden dawn and a blue day.”4
It is this very sentiment that surfaces frequently in Jewish historical writing, forming a unit of the history of hope that Yerushalmi imagined. In this chapter I shall examine how Jewish chroniclers and historians have used the historical medium to console, extending from the biblical era and late antiquity through the Middle Ages to the modern era. This longer-term angle will grant us greater perspective on the function of the Jewish historical writer in the transition from amateur chronicler to professional historian. It will also lend perspective on my opening claim that history, even in its modern guise, should not be seen in opposition to memory. Indeed, both modern and premodern recorders have committed to recalling episodes of past despair and hope as a means of institutionalizing memory. In this way, historically informed memory became a prime repository of consolation in its various guises, which range from the life-affirming to the lachrymose, from the self-effacing to the mocking, from the cyclical to the linear, and from the therapeutic to the obsessive.
In a series of books published in the 1980s, two important American scholars of Jewish literature, David Roskies and Alan Mintz, collected and studied the abundant texts produced in the wake of tragedies that have befallen the Jews. Roskies observed that these texts permitted Jews to “perceive the cyclical nature of violence and find some measure of comfort in the repeatability of the unprecedented.” Whereas traditional religious sources performed these functions throughout much of Jewish history, in the modern age, Roskies adverts, “history itself became a moral reference point for secular Jews who no longer attended synagogue or accepted the claims of Jewish sacred chronology.”5
Roskies follows the work of previous scholars, particularly Nathan Wachtel and Paul Fussell, in suggesting that “the response of individuals and collectives to crisis situations is governed by preexisting patterns.” Of particular relevance is Fussell, whose 1975 The Great War and Modern Memory was a signal achievement in efforts to understand the vast impact of the First World War, including its reshaping of the very category and parameters of memory. The recurrence of certain flora and fauna in writing of the era prompted Fussell to observe that “one notices and remembers what one has been ‘coded’—usually by literature or its popular equivalent—to notice and remember.”6
In the forty years since Fussell offered his insight about the coded nature of our memories, there has been a veritable revolution in our understanding of how memory follows preexisting patterns.7 Neuroscientists have been working to piece together the ways neurons contain and store memory. The physical process of recollecting, they believe, actually carves out neural pathways that “become stronger the more they are used, causing the likelihood of new long-term connections and memories.”8 The more we recall a certain event or personality, the more well-trodden become the pathways.
Neuroscience helps us understand this process of memory formation in the individual brain. But it cannot unpack the mysteries of collective memory, since groups do not possess a single set of neurons, cortices, and synapses. How then to speak of collective memory? Maurice Halbwachs observed that “while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember.”9 But they do so as part of a social network such that “collective memory is more than just an aggregate of individuals’ personal memories.”10
Although not possessed of a single brain, groups do forge memories based on the performance of shared rituals of commemoration, exposure to common education, and family storytelling. And metaphorically, we might say that the recurrence of these recollections carves out pathways of what we might call collective memory.11 To be sure, this ever-swirling mix of memory acts is not fixed in stone; it is subject to what Ernest Renan called a “daily plebiscite,” a shifting constellation of opinion, sentiment, and disposition.
And yet, while shifting, this constellation is not altogether evanescent. It represents the shared memory of the nation at a given point of time. In the case of a group such as the Jews, the pathways of their socially constructed memory have been repeatedly paved by ritualized recollection that has fallen into certain archetypal patterns: covenantal relationship with God, tragedy, redemption.
To capture the depth of the tracks of Jewish memory, we extend back to antiquity to notice the role that biblical prophets played as both admonishers and consolers. As an archetype, the prophet Jeremiah, witness to the destruction of the First Temple, excelled in warning of the consequences of recalcitrance and misdeeds. By disobeying the Lord, he admonished the Judeans, “you shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by pestilence in the place where you want to go and sojourn” (Jer. 42:22). By contrast, Isaiah, or rather the array of authors presumed to have written under that name, offered assurance that the Jews, by virtue of their chosenness, would not be abandoned in times of need. God’s message, as conveyed through Isaiah, was unmistakable: “They who strive with you shall become as naught and shall perish.” To leave little doubt, Isaiah records these consoling words: “For I the LORD am your God, Who grasped your right hand, Who say to you: Have no fear; I will be your help” (Isa. 41:11, 13).12
Consolation was inextricably linked to recollection of past travails in biblical sources. The relentless tide of misfortune that befell the once wealthy Job could not destroy his sense of appreciation at surviving. As Paul Ricouer observed in his powerfully Christian reading of the concept, consolation resulted from Job’s recognition that our existence is a function of God’s majestic power to which all must submit.13 That quality of submission figured in some, but not all, subsequent forms of Jewish consolation. Anger, revenge, and pride were also common motifs in the consolatory literature of the Jews, which surfaced in the wake of the frequent crises they faced.
One such case is Josephus, the first-century general and historian mentioned in the previous chapter as the source of inspiration for Jacques Basnage and Hannah Adams. Josephus, who switched loyalties from the Jewish to the Roman side during the Great Revolt, wrote a seminal historical account of it, The Jewish War, that included a fair measure of self-consolation. Through his unsparing condemnation of the fanaticism of some Jewish contemporaries, he could rationalize his own decision to shift loyalties in the late stages of the conflict in the year 70.
But more germane to our concerns might be a later book that Josephus wrote (perhaps by borrowing heavily from another author), Against Apion, aimed at the anti-Jewish agitator of that name who sought to persuade the emperor Caligula of Jewish perfidy and disloyalty in the year 40. More than a half-century after the event, Josephus penned a response, a work of polemics and apologetics, and a clear instance of history as consolation—and by extension, hope. Josephus began by challenging a rather commonplace assumption in his day that it was the Greeks, not the Jews, who were possessed of a long and noble history. Josephus states simply that “their nation was not ancient,” referring to the Greeks, who, he reminded readers, were conspicuously absent from any biblical sources. By contrast, he avails himself of Egyptian, Phoenician, and, compellingly, Greek accounts to demonstrate the antiquity of the Jews. He does so not only to disabuse Greeks of their mistaken sense of superiority but also to remind Jews of the antiquity and dignity of their own past in the wake of calumnious accusations against them.14
Notwithstanding the ongoing inner conflict between his Jewish and Roman selves, Josephus seeks here to console. Like earlier and later Jewish historical consolers, he is moved to take up the writing of history after a major crisis—in this case, the destruction of the Second Temple. That said, his sober tone is very different in tenor from the previous prophetic model, which relied on the active presence of God, or from the exhortatory examples that begin to appear a millennium later.
One of the most notable cases in this regard is the spate of Hebrew chronicles written in the wake of the Crusader violence directed against Ashkenazic Jewish communities that began in 1096. It should be noted that there has been a long and intense debate over the veracity of the chronicles, particularly over whether they are an accurate reflection of the sentiments of the day or a projection of later sensibilities onto the events themselves.15 The task here is not to engage this theoretical and historical question but rather to grasp the consolatory character of the medieval Hebrew chronicles, whose expressive mode of writing differs markedly from Josephus’s Against Apion. There is no pretense here of a careful sifting of evidence, such as the ancient historian offered. Rather, the medieval Hebrew chronicles convey an unmistakable sense of the election of the Jews, as well as the unique travails to which they were subjected. They also articulate in ways familiar to the midrashic imagination of late antiquity an uncommon range of emotions, including bewilderment and even anger at God: “God, the maker of peace, turned aside and averted His eyes from His people, and consigned them to the sword,” declared the twelfth-century chronicle of Solomon bar Shimson. The chronicler continued with evident consternation: “No prophet, seer, or man of wise heart was able to comprehend how the sin of the people infinite in number was deemed so great as to cause the destruction of so many lives in the various Jewish communities.”16
Not content to leave the final verdict to God, the chronicler audaciously compared the mass murder of Jews by Crusaders to the binding of Isaac, except that in the later case there were “one thousand one hundred offerings in one single day.” Of course, in bloody contrast to the biblical Isaac, the father’s knife did fall on the neck of a large number of Rhineland Jews. As martyrs or, as the Hebrew term kidush ha-Shem connotes, as sanctifiers of the name of God, though, they did not die in vain. The chronicler summons forth the hope and expectation, echoed in the companion account of Rabbi Eliezer bar Nathan, that “their merit, their righteousness, their piety, their whole-heartedness, and their sacrifice be a good advocate for us before the Most High” so as to “deliver us from the exile of wicked Edom speedily in our Day.”17
At one level, this salvific postmortem follows a well-carved pathway of Jewish memory: tragedy is followed by introspection, internalization of guilt, and then renewed faith in divine munificence. In adhering to the general contours of this script, the chronicler’s account of martyrdom, Ivan Marcus observes, “is legitimated by being masked in archetypal symbolism” culled from the Bible.18 And yet, the Hebrew Crusade chroniclers invest their protagonists with a degree of courage and virtue surpassing that even of revered ancient heroes such as Isaac or Rabbi Akiba. The usual self-chastisement is conveyed with a measure of disbelief, and indeed is subordinate to the bold claim that those killed were worthy martyrs. For the chroniclers, martyrdom of this sort mandates vengeance, which is a prelude to and companion of redemption. In proposing this causal chain of martyrdom-vengeance-redemption, the chronicle is intended to reassure, model ideal behavior for, and console the survivors of the Crusader violence.19
We do not have, it must be said, a clear sense of the nature or scale of the audience of these chronicles, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is highly improbable that manuscript copies of the chronicles made their way to the homes of many Jews of the era. And yet, over time, the chronicles did become—along with other rituals, liturgical forms, fast and feast days, and memorial books—an important pillar of the historical memory of Ashkenazic Jewry.20 This memory was laced with examples of death and destruction, such that martyrdom became a recurrent and even cherished ideal for generations of Ashkenazim. Indeed, subsequent tragedies that befell them—the mass murders in Chmielnicki of 1648–1649, the massacre of Human´ (Uman) of 1768, the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918–1919—were seen as part of a continuous historical tradition.21
Curiously then, the knowledge that other members of the group have suffered before, coupled with the realization that Jews as a collective have survived, has served as consolation to survivors and their descendants. Indeed, this mix of the mournful and the triumphalist is characteristic of Ashkenazic historical memory, but it is not unique to it.22
Several hundred years later, in a different milieu and responsive to a different set of historical circumstances, the enigmatic Sephardic savant Samuel Usque wrote a work in Portuguese titled Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel (1553).23 We know very little about the sixteenth-century author, but it is clear that he intended his Consolation for those, like himself, who were forcibly converted, or whose forbears had been forcibly converted, to Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula. Like many of his fellow conversos, Usque was worldly and at home in languages and literatures of the world. But in contrast to most, he had an uncommonly good grasp of Hebrew and postbiblical Jewish literature, as well as a masterful command of the Bible. He used this unique blend of knowledge to construct a sweeping history of Jewish travails, from ancient times to his own day, cast in a pastoral trialogue typical of the Renaissance era. His main protagonists were three shepherds, Ycabo, Zicareo, and Numeo, whose names harked back to biblical heroes. As Martin Cohen has examined in his meticulous edition of the Consolation, Ycabo, or Jacob, narrates the long and sad series of disasters to befall the Jews.24 Zicareo, whose name recalls the prophet Zechariah and gestures to the Hebrew verb “to remember” (z-kh-r), summons up past examples of God’s ongoing devotion to the Jewish people. And Numeo, whose Hebrew name comes from the root for “consolation” and evokes the scribe Nehemiah, delivers precisely that in response to Ycabo. The final section of the book, which details the medieval and early modern tribulations of the Jews from Persia to Germany, concludes with a long soliloquy by Numeo that enumerates eight sources of consolation. Among them was the patronage of Doña Gracia Nasi (Mendes), the wealthy Portuguese-born conversa who immigrated to Italy via Antwerp and then, with the Inquisition on her heels, to Constantinople. Wherever she settled, she provided her generous material support to Jews, especially former conversos seeking to return to an open Jewish life. Usque, who referred to Doña Gracia as “the very illustrious lady,” dedicated his book to her.25
Just as with the Crusade chronicles, we do not know how widely read or distributed the Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel was. One might speculate that the text was passed around in samizdat fashion in communities where former Portuguese-speaking conversos were to be found throughout Europe, the Mediterranean region, and later the Americas. What we do know is that Usque employed the multitudinous woes of the past to point up the survival of the Jews and thereby affirm the election of Israel. As a reflection of his hope for the future, he took the next logical step by framing the persecution-laden history of the Jews as an extended prelude to the imminent coming of the Messiah. Indeed, the redemptive passion of his shepherd-narrators courses powerfully through the entire book.
Unlike other contemporaneous books of historical content such as Solomon ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah or Azariah de’ Rossi’s Me’or ‘eynayim, Usque’s Consolation did not presage an incipient modern historicism in terms of mundane causality. Its pastoral frame and unabashedly didactic quality are strikingly different from the form and content of modern historiography.26 Or so it would seem based on the assumption of a deep chasm between the rich fabric of premodern collective memory and the sober quality of modern critical history.
In his iconic article of 1928, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” Salo W. Baron introduced the memorable notion of a long-regnant “lachrymose theory” informing Jewish history, according to which modern scholars were drawn to the tragedies of the Jews like flies to light. The historian David Engel has recently reminded us that Baron directed his critique of the lachrymose theory at overly dark renderings of the period prior to the modern age. Baron in fact believed that Jews had a relatively good life in medieval times, certainly better than the average peasant or serf, since they were afforded protection by sovereigns who valued their presence as economic assets and permitted them to dwell safely within their own religious communities.27
By contrast, modernity exposed Jews, Baron continued, to many more challenges and obstacles than cheery champions of the Enlightenment were willing to admit. He was attentive to the manifold threats—the surprising persistence of physical violence and the unraveling of communal ties at the hands of liberal individualism—that undermined Jewish life in the modern age. Baron’s reversal of the commonplace historical assumption of the darkness of the Middle Ages and the lightness of the Enlightenment helps us understand why consolation and its partner, lachrymosity, persisted as themes in modern Jewish history and historical thought. While we might have expected them to disappear, at least until the Holocaust, both surfaced frequently in modern times. Accordingly, the boundary between early modern chroniclers and modern historians becomes more porous than we might otherwise imagine.
This is not to suggest a complete identity between them, for there are fundamental differences in the use of sources and causal logic. But when meditating on the task of history, or of the historian, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the wheel was not invented in modernity. This recalls the view articulated by Karl Löwith in his 1949 Meaning in History. There he asserted that modern philosophies of history, from the Enlightenment to Marxism, draw upon and seek to secularize traditional Christian Heilsgeschichte (sacred history).28 It may be possible to take an additional step beyond Löwith and his identification of a shared teleological structure to past and present historical perspectives. Behind its dispassionate modern facade, history has an emotional register and affective presence that moves, urges to action, and consoles, much as did medieval and early modern historical writing (though at times with a different sense of causal agency).
One of the key issues that purveyors of Jewish history, modern and premodern, had to contend with was the seemingly cyclical nature of the past: historical organisms that rose up before falling into decline. Cyclical approaches to the past often portended a pessimistic view of history; a long line of thinkers, from the ancient Greeks to moderns such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, concluded that the arc of history—and in some specific cases, of Jewish history—moved toward decline.
There were scholars of the Jewish past, principally, Christian supersessionists such as Basnage and Hannah Adams, who believed that the arc of Jewish history did indeed head downward after the destruction of the Second Temple. A competing group of modern Jewish scholars, while mindful of the momentous nature of the events of 70 C.E., argued otherwise by juxtaposing the disappearance of other groups from the stage of history to the unlikely durability of the Jews. In this sense, they embraced a consolatory role for history, as had their precursors.
Among them was the intriguing nineteenth-century Jewish thinker, less a historian than a philosopher of history, Nachman Krochmal. Krochmal was a Galician-born scholar whose Hebrew magnum opus was A Guide for the Perplexed of the Time (More nevukhe ha-zeman). He suffered the fate of many of his fellow yeshiva students who were all too aware of the finitude of their Talmudic erudition; that is, he excelled in the oral arts but left little in written or published form. Fortunately, he entrusted to his colleague and friend Leopold Zunz the task of producing a posthumous edition of the sprawling Guide.
Over the course of his lifetime, Krochmal read widely and deeply in European philosophy, though he never attended university. Especially notable in his Guide was the prevalence of two core concepts embedded in modern European thought: the idea of a guiding “spirit” of history and the notion of cycles in history. The two ideas were central to the work of prominent European philosophers—Giambattista Vico, J. G. Herder, G. W. F. Hegel—who were among the key sources in framing his thinking.29 In particular, the cyclical scheme of history was important to his larger mission in the Guide. It was a weapon in the debate among Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries over whether Judaism was dead or alive, “fossil or phoenix,” to borrow Shlomo Avineri’s phrase.30
In contrast to his philosophical foil, Hegel, for instance, Krochmal did not hold to a declensionist view of Jewish history. Rather, he employed the concept of a guiding spirit, akin to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, to combat the view that Jews would rise or fall—or indeed, had already risen or fallen—like other nations. The nations of the world, he explained in the eighth chapter of his Guide, passed through the same three phases of growth, maturation, and decline. But “regarding our nation,” he continued, “both in relation to the material dimension and to the externality of the senses, we have submitted to the natural order mentioned above [the cycles of history]. At the same time, it is as the Sages of blessed memory said: ‘When they were exiled in Babylon, the Shekhinah went with them (b. Meg. 29a); when they were exiled in Elam, the Shekhinah went with them.’ Thus, the general Spirit within us will protect us and save us from the fate of other passing nations” (emphasis added). Whereas other nations rose and fell, the Jews were different: “If we fall, we arise anew and are fortified, for the Lord our God never leaves us.”31 In his abstruse philosophical style, Krochmal provided a measure of hope by lifting the Jewish people above the gravitational pull of time-bound history into a realm of transcendence guarded over by the God of Israel.
Why, we might reasonably ask. If the Crusade chroniclers sought to provide solace to the heirs of the martyrs of 1096, and Usque to liberated conversos, what did Krochmal seek to offer? He was speaking to a different generation of Jews in the early nineteenth century, caught between the allure of an open and enlightened world and the stark reality of ongoing obstacles on the path toward it. In this new and charged universe, the Jews had become the subject of intense debate revolving around nothing less than the merits of their continuation. Krochmal proposed his own answer to the question of Jewish survival, availing himself of a new philosophical idiom to convey an old message: namely, that Jews soared above the plane of mundane history on which the rest of the nations rose and fell.
It would seem easy to dismiss this kind of metahistorical exceptionalism as the product of a traditionalist rabbi seeking to provide an anchor of stability in the churning waters of his day—indeed, as an adumbration of the contemporary Orthodox popularizer Rabbi Berel Wein. One could also point out that Jews of Krochmal’s own day did not derive any benefit from his attempt at historical consolation, since his Guide for the Perplexed of the Time was published eleven years after he died. But these claims do not do justice to Krochmal’s wide-ranging knowledge, sophistication, and prominence, at least among the scholarly elite of central and east central European Jewry. Nor, more importantly for our purposes, do they take stock of the recurrent appeals to the transcendence of Jewish history—not by traditionalist rabbis, of whom Krochmal was not really an example, but by their presumed opposites, avowed secularists, who adopted the consoling function of earlier chroniclers.
The received wisdom, anchored by Yerushalmi’s claims in Zakhor, is that the first modern Jewish historians, as a result of their new university training, cultural sensibilities, and oft-thwarted desire for integration, were increasingly detached from the currents of collective memory. Their declared loyalty was to Wissenschaft, to objectivity, and to acceptance by the broader community of scholars. Neither providing consolation nor instilling hope was the aim, as it had been for earlier chroniclers.
The story is more complicated, as Yerushalmi’s own earlier and later work demonstrates. So too, Ismar Schorsch and Michael Meyer, among the most prominent of German-Jewish historians, identify threads of continuity between previous renderings of Jewish history and those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums circle. Schorsch, for his part, insists that Jewish memory and historical consciousness were altered but not destroyed by the age of emancipation. Meyer uncovers “persistent tensions” between scholarly and existential or communal concerns in early Wissenschaft des Judentums.32 From the time of Leopold Zunz, German-Jewish scholars used the medium of history to promote, defend, and polemicize on behalf of (or, less frequently, against) their community. First-generation Wissenschaft scholars advocated in support of the emancipation of the Jews. The next generation turned the scholarly medium inward to advance an array of religious denominational agendas. The following generation utilized an array of historical tools to assert the antiquity of Jewish residence on German soil as a means of combating antisemitism.33 The relevance of history in this milieu was not simply to serve as a bulwark against the erosion of memory in the modern age, against what Pierre Nora called the “increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good.”34 It was also to provide a shield of protection to Jews in an age of forceful anti-Jewish sentiment.35
But history served not just as a cudgel of defense. It also was explicitly summoned up to fortify memory and provide consolation—and in ways that reveal the use and potential abuse of history. One of the sites of history’s consoling function in this period was the revived legacy of Crusader violence against medieval Jewry. As a general matter, leading Jewish scholars such as Zunz, Graetz, and Simon Dubnow, writing at different times and places, focused attention in their historical writings on the devastating effects of the Crusades on Ashkenazic Jewry.36 In the wake of the eight hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Crusades in 1896, the German rabbi and researcher Siegmund Salfeld edited a collection of sources relating to persecutions in German lands from 1096 to 1348, expressing the hope that it might serve as “a monument to a period of Jewish suffering, erected in piety and love.”37 Zeev Jawitz, for his part, waxed poetic in his Toldot Yisra’el about the “grandeur and heroism that shone through the darkness and destruction.”38 In assessing this impulse, Salo Baron contended that “the new generation of historians outdid one another in passionate accounts of Israel’s woes and sorrows.”39
The scholar who may have outdone all others in this regard was Shimon Bernfeld, editor of the collection Sefer ha-dema’ot (The Book of Tears). The book was devoted, as the subtitle explains, to recounting the massacres, persecutions, and apostasies that befell Jews over the course of their history, including the Crusader violence, which Bernfeld described as nothing less than “the eternal foundation of Jewish history.”40 This three-volume work began to appear in Germany in 1923; it contained primary sources drawn from Jewish historical and liturgical literature, commencing with the persecutions inflicted on Jews by the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the second century B.C.E. and extending up to the massacre in Uman in 1768.
The Galician-born Bernfeld was part of the stream of thousands of young east European Jews who made their way to Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. It was there that he lived much of his adult life, producing works on Jewish history in both German and Hebrew. And it was there, in the early years of the Weimar Republic, that he became aware of the most recent tragedy of the Jews, the shocking pogroms that broke out in eastern Europe during and after the First World War that led to tens (and perhaps hundreds) of thousands of deaths. With that experience as the latest in a long martyrological chain, Bernfeld attached himself to an ancient tradition of Jewish sages who, as the Talmud (b. Shabbat 13a) memorably captured it, “cherished their troubles” (hayu mehabevin et ha-tsarot). Bernfeld observed in Sefer ha-dema’ot that “it was said about our forefathers that they cherished their troubles and, accordingly, recorded them as a memory.” He continued, “Our predecessors wrote them down in order that the last generation should know, in order to fortify their hearts so that they could suffer and fight as the earlier generations suffered and fought. Not to strengthen the hand, but rather to strengthen the spirit of those who came after them. The stories of past woes are the future songs of consolation.”41
This was the clinical embodiment of what Baron would call five years later “the lachrymose theory” of Jewish history.42 True to form, Bernfeld completed the first volume of Sefer ha-dema’ot on Tisha b’Av, 1923, the fast day that marks the destruction of the two Holy Temples and other Jewish calamities. In opening that volume, he declared that the tales in his book “are truly the spine of Jewish history.” In the intervening three years—a period in which Hitler attempted his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, was imprisoned, and wrote Mein Kampf—Bernfeld finished two additional volumes. In the third volume, he summed up his labors by declaring that “the end of my book is not the end of the tragedy that we call Jewish history.” Bernfeld did recognize that the modern age was different from its predecessors; the ghetto walls that once confined Jews had fallen, as had other restrictions placed on them. Nevertheless, hatred of the Jews “has grown in recent years and gains strength day by day.”43 Bernfeld’s response, as a modern university-trained scholar, was strikingly similar to that of earlier chroniclers who recounted past tragedies as a means of fortification, sustenance, and consolation to Jews.
In confronting recent links in the chain of violence, modern Jewish historians have consoled their readers by pointing out that despite the ravages visited upon Jews, they were still standing after all was said and done. This record of endurance reduced even the most secular of historians to mystics of sorts. Simon Dubnow, who had already turned away from traditional observance by his bar mitzvah, became rhapsodic when discussing the survival of the Jews. Dubnow participated in a symposium on the topic in 1911 sponsored by the Hebrew journal He-‘atid (The Future). On that occasion, he felt obliged to explain to fellow Jews how they would weather the storm of assimilation now confronting them. In an essay titled “The Secret of Survival—and the Law of Survival—of the Jewish People,” he declared: “You imagine that there was never a period like this in Jewish history, a period of assimilation and apostasy. You’re wrong. On many occasions, the destructiveness of Exile was felt—in Alexandria and Syria in the time of the Temple (despite the influence of the Judean center), in countries under the control of the Eastern Caliphate, in Arab [sic] and Christian Spain. None of this prevented the law of survival [of the Jews] from doing its work.”44
Dubnow here consoled Jews through recourse to the lessons of the past, while at the same time cajoling them to recognize the secret of survival: acknowledgment of the national character of Jewry. It is instructive to juxtapose that message with Dubnow’s words twelve years later, when he joined with the Russian-Jewish historian Elias Tcherikower to produce a collection of sources related to the widespread pogroms that broke out in 1919 in Ukraine and resulted in tens of thousands of Jewish deaths. The massive disruptions of the First World War had shifted Dubnow’s focus from the longue durée of assimilation to the equally lengthy history of anti-Judaism. “Many peoples,” Dubnow wrote in 1923, “have inscribed their names in the history of the millennial Jewish martyrology. But not many of them, indeed, none of them, have occupied as distinguished a place as the Ukrainian people.” It is striking that Dubnow, well known for his criticism of Graetz’s emphasis on the history of suffering, here speaks without reservation of a Jewish martyrology. Faced with the devastation of the pogroms, and armed with a sweeping command of Jewish history, he now saw before his eyes an interminable trail of destruction, which he cast in traditional terms, referring to “all the Pharaohs of Egypt and the past Hamans up to the collective Hamans of the recent periods.” Rather than follow the ways of the nations of the world in their pursuit of bloodthirsty revenge, however, the Jews were different. They remained beholden to the biblical commandments to abstain from murder, theft, and adultery. “Our only revenge,” Dubnow announced, “is immortalizing the slaughters in our history.”45
It is interesting to compare Dubnow’s postmortem consolation, delivered while he was living in Berlin, to a more anticipatory version forged a decade later in the same city. In 1933, the department store magnate and book publisher Salmann Schocken inaugurated at his new printing press a series of small volumes written by leading Jewish scholars and artists of his day (including S. Y. Agnon, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Martin Buber, Heinrich Graetz, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem among many others) or containing classical texts drawn from the Jewish past. From the first publication until the last in 1938, eighty-three volumes of the Schocken Bücherei series appeared, covering a vast range of themes and prompting Ismar Schorsch to marvel fifty years later at the “almost unbounded cultural range and the speed at which it was produced.”46
With the series, Salmann Schocken was attempting to capture and memorialize the extraordinary riches of “Jewish literature from all lands and times.” It could then serve as an enduring testament to the vitality and creativity of that literary culture. At the same time, the series was to provide a measure of spiritual sustenance to German Jews during a period of rising peril and narrowing cultural horizons. It is in that spirit that Yitzhak Baer, the German-born historian in Jerusalem, published his 1936 valedictory to exile, Galut. And it is in that spirit that Schocken placed as the first volume in the series a collection of sayings from Isaiah translated into German by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Tröstung Israels: The Consolation of Israel.47
Dubnow’s post-pogrom collection and the Schocken Bücherei represent related, though distinct, forms of consolation: the former followed a familiar path by brandishing the survival of the Jews after the fact; the latter provided a source of comfort in medias res, through the praxis of historical writing itself. An interesting instance of the second form emerged in the vibrant Jewish community of Salonica in Greece in the interwar period. Devin E. Naar has excavated a cohort of scholars including Joseph Nehama, Isaac Emmanuel, and Michael Molho who, facing rising anti-Jewish agitation and economic crisis in the 1930s, “turned to the annals of their own past to provide comfort (afalago), consolation (konorte), and inspiration” as a means of boosting the morale of Salonican Jews. By recalling the glories of the past, they sought to encourage their fellow Jews to aspire “to return to ‘our’ previous heights.”48
A similar impulse guided the Oyneg Shabbes project, which is surely one of the clearest instances of historical research in extremis ever recorded. The project brought together Jewish scholars and lay writers, religious and secular, socialist and nationalist, rich and poor, in the increasingly constricted conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto to chronicle what they and their coreligionists were undergoing between 1939 and 1942. We know a great deal more about the project due to Samuel D. Kassow’s magisterial Who Will Write Our History? which brings to light the extraordinary labors of Emanuel Ringelblum, the Polish-Jewish historian who was the leader of the Oyneg Shabbes project.49 Writing in late 1942, after three years of intensive labor, Ringelblum recalled that at the outset of the project all were called to the task of recording: “journalists, authors, teachers, community workers, young children, even children.” The larger goal for which this assortment of laborers assembled was to preserve an accurate account of the murder of European Jewry for future generations. This was not cast as a partisan task. Ringelblum once averred to a colleague, “We have to regard ourselves as participants in a universal attempt to construct a solid structure of objective documentation that will work for the good of mankind.”50 It is astonishing to hear Ringelblum insist on upholding the values of universalism and objectivity while dwelling in the belly of the Nazi beast.51
In fact, the reader is moved by Ringelblum’s unyielding devotion to history as a vital medium of truth. He and his colleagues harbored the hope that history would serve as an ultimate vindication of the triumph of good over evil. We are also struck by the organization, comprehensiveness, and balance of the Oyneg Shabbes circle, which proudly refused to portray all Poles or even all Germans as evil.52 As a result of the thousands of documents left behind by the circle, we have a richly detailed and poignant record of daily life within the Warsaw Ghetto that serves as a fitting legacy to the compilers’ industry and ingenuity.
But alongside this considerable achievement, the work of the Oyneg Shabbes group also provided a measure of escape from the enormous pressures of the day. Participants sought to gain distance from the grim world around them by undertaking a meticulous, multifaceted survey of ghetto life. The product was not merely a bequest to future generations. It was also a form of therapeutic self-consolation in its own right, providing participants with a sense of purpose, both at a daily and a more global level. Through its work of historical compilation, the Oyneg Shabbes circle also joined in what the Yiddish historian Mark Dworzecki was already calling in 1946 “spiritual resistance,” a term that has come to embrace the wide range of cultural, religious, and social activities in which Jews engaged as they sought a measure of normality in the face of Nazi dehumanization.53
Dworzecki’s concept captured the will to live of Jews in the most dire of circumstances, including the assumption of imminent death. Those committed to this form of resistance, including the members of the Oyneg Shabbes circle, engaged in a kind of self-consolation in medias res, utilizing the media of history and culture to remind themselves and their persecutors that they had not surrendered. We have also traced a lineage of chroniclers in this chapter who recalled past travails ex post facto as a form of consolation. At times, the chroniclers called attention to the cyclical nature of history, a pattern to which, they believed, the Jews were partly subject and which they frequently transcended. In both cases, these diverse groups of actors belong to a tradition of “interim Jewish hopes for the times before the end of Time.”
By way of conclusion, I would like to mention a serious and underappreciated modern Jewish historian who grasped the underlying logic of studying and writing history as an act of consolation. The German-Jewish scholar Selma Stern conducted pioneering research on early-modern central European Jewish history, including on the interaction between the state and its Jews. Her most popular book was The Court Jew, written in 1950, nine years after she came to the United States with her husband, the ancient historian Eugen Täubler. Prompted by the recently concluded war to assess the Jews’ place in history, Stern resorted to a cyclical view of history, though a positive version thereof, in which “everything dies in order that it may be reborn.” The experience of the Court Jew, the classic liminal figure, embodied the ebbs and flows of Jewish history. “For time and again,” she argued, “the Jew has helped prepare the way for a new era, only to find himself ground between the old forces which had outlived their day and the new which, with his help, were giving the world the promise of a better future.”54 Recognizing this pattern had its benefits, chief among which was solace. For, Stern concluded, “what one can understand one can endure.”55 Recognizing the travails of the past—and surviving them—was an important way of bearing the pain from them. Just as history was called upon to liberate, so too it has been called upon to console by demonstrating both the trials and the perdurance of the Jews.