Richard Evans and Deborah Lipstadt represent related though distinct sensibilities regarding the historian’s function as witness and fortifier of memory. These sensibilities suggest to us that the stakes of historical recollection—and the historian’s labor—are especially high in confronting the Holocaust. What must be remembered? What lessons are to be learned?
These questions have stimulated an impassioned debate among recent thinkers. They are responding to the growing tension between the rapid pace of change in our twenty-first-century cyber universe, in which there is a new headline or tragedy in every hourly turn of the news cycle, and the need to remember traumatic events and tragedies, which occur with unsettling frequency in our time. In one of the most direct engagements, the writer and reporter David Rieff argues forcefully in In Praise of Forgetting that collective remembrance is decidedly unstable, often ineffective, and full of the potential to lead to myopic chauvinism. He deals in considerable detail with the Jewish impulse to remember, as well as with Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Tacking back and forth between the virtues and dangers of forgetting, he concludes that “remembrance, however important a role it may and often does play in the life of groups, and whatever moral and ethical demands it not only responds to but often can fulfill, carries with it political and social risks that at times also have an existential character.” Rieff suggests that even the canonical post-Holocaust mantra “Never Again” could fall prey to these risks.1
Two historians with distinctive angles on the Holocaust have recently offered strikingly different responses to the question of what can be learned from history in general and the Holocaust in particular. The Toronto historian Michael Marrus provides valedictory wisdom as an elder statesman of Holocaust research in questioning our ability to derive any single coherent or universal lesson from the study of the Shoah. “There are many purported lessons out there,” he asserts, “and they cannot all have the same transcendent significance or validity.” History, he continues, “does not speak to the present with so clear an admonitory voice.”2
By contrast, Timothy Snyder, author of a number of major works on eastern European history, including two volumes that challenge our understanding of the Holocaust, concludes Black Earth by insisting that the history of the Holocaust must be recorded in order to be understood, and “it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future.”3 Moving from the abstract to the concrete, as well as from the past to the present, Snyder urges us to recognize that state power, with all its risks and dangers, offers far more stability and freedom than a stateless world. “When states are absent,” Snyder declares, “rights—by any definition—are impossible to sustain.”4
This contrast between Marrus and Snyder calls to mind my discussion in the previous chapter of Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Cover, who offered differing visions of the scholarly mission with consequences for our thinking about history and the historian as witness. In comparing the historian and the witness, Ginzburg emphasized proof as the foundation of the quest for truth—and the antidote to a dangerous historical skepticism that can undermine our epistemological and moral foundations. Cover, while not speaking directly to the role of the witness, nonetheless offered a model of the scholar who can serve as bridge between descriptive and prescriptive tasks, as well as between the real and ideal.
It is easy to regard this set of positions as unbridgeable. But fastidious attention to sources and concern for veracity need not be at odds with the goal of planting the seeds of memory for future generations. Deborah Lipstadt, Richard Evans, Michael Marrus, Timothy Snyder, and Carlo Ginzburg all have a powerful sense of urgency about getting it —that is, history—right; the consequences of their attempts to do so are meaningful not merely to the relatively small cohort of trained historians but to wider audiences possessed of broader concerns than those of the practicing scholar. Ginzburg, after all, sought to use The Historian and the Judge to persuade his readership of the legal and moral imperative of freeing his friend from jail. Evans testified at the Lipstadt trial and then wrote about it to ensure that the integrity of history be preserved. Wittingly or not, his testimony and the massive research that undergirded it have served to fortify the collective remembrance of the Shoah.
This is not a new function. Since antiquity, historians have repeatedly moved beyond the simple task of describing to instruct, reproach, and instill memory. In the modern era, when the methodological protocol guiding their work has been defined with greater precision and guarded ever more jealously, historians have used their professional tools to liberate, console, and provide witness, among many other utilities. These aims offer up a portrait of the modern historian that is markedly different from the image of the isolated scholar buried under a mountain of historical data and severed from the vibrant currents of life.
Even with the rising mound of scholarship produced in our day, this cloistered image does not do justice to the historian. I have explored in this book a range of historians who were committed to the proposition that history could and must serve life. At times, they operated in extremis when the stakes of history were most clear to them. History was alternately a lifeline of support, an essential reminder of a monumental past, necessary evidence in a judicial proceeding, or a bridge to the memory of future generations.
It is this last function that brings us back to Yosef Yerushalmi, whose presence has hovered over this book. Much of what has animated me to write it is the desire to reconsider the relationship between history and memory that he proposed in Zakhor. I imagine this reconsideration not as a refutation but rather as an intense engagement with and, at the end of the day, an homage to his work. It was Yerushalmi who decisively put in front of us the question of what utility were Jewish history and the historian. It was he who declared that “modern Jewish historiography can never substitute for Jewish memory,” that the path of the modern historian had diverged sharply from that of the premodern framer of myth and meaning.5 But it was also he who proclaimed in Zakhor that “the burden of building a bridge to his people remains with the historian.”6 He gestured there and earlier to the notion of the historian as a “physician of memory.” This figure seems an apt fit for many of those surveyed in this book, who frequently traversed the border between history and memory.
But is this a good or appropriate function for the modern historian? After all, when assuming such a task, historians must recognize that the possibility of distortion or misrepresentation, intended or not, is always alive, all the more so in trying conditions. Such conditions, it would seem, have inclined Jewish historians to privilege the woes and travails to which Jews were subjected over a more balanced assessment of a stable daily existence marked by periodic persecution. Indeed, when we think of the tradition of “cherishing woes,” and when we take stock of all the attention that historians and others have paid to the recollection and commemoration of past tragedies, we must ask, Have the pathways of Jewish memory been irreversibly paved by trauma? Is there an excess of trauma-induced memory?7
These questions call to mind the admonition of the Israeli historian and philosopher of science Yehuda Elkana. In a bracing op-ed from 1988, Elkana, who survived Auschwitz as a young child, insisted to his fellow Israelis that “we must learn to forget! Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied from morning to night with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust. They must uproot the domination of that historical ‘remember!’ [zakhor] over our lives.”8
Elkana’s concerns have since been echoed by various observers concerned about the consequences of an excess of memory on contemporary Israeli and Jewish political attitudes and behavior.9 Among them, the historians Saul Friedlander, Tom Segev, Idith Zertal, and Moshe Zuckermann have questioned whether the regular and ritualized invocation of past tragedies impairs Israeli government policy. They are mindful of the fact that Israeli leaders across the ideological spectrum such as David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Menachem Begin, and Benjamin Netanyahu have frequently invoked the specter of the Holocaust—and the peril of new Hitlers—in articulating policy positions.10 From a different perspective and in a different context, the American sociologist Arlene Stein has asked whether there is “too much memory” in a chapter of her Reluctant Witnesses devoted to the link between Holocaust memory and support for Zionism in America. She has criticized the ease with which the Holocaust has been invoked by advocates on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.11 More generally, questions are arising in Europe and North America about whether the culture of memorializing and teaching about the Holocaust has reached a tipping point: Germans, in particular, wonder whether younger generations born well after the Second World War can or should face frequent exposure to the history of the Holocaust, whereas in the United States young people have begun to ask whether educational priorities should be placed elsewhere.12
These are not new questions, but they are exceptionally important and delicate ones. Punctuated by Yehuda Elkana’s cri de coeur, they recall Nietzsche’s memorable statement that “without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”13 It is interesting to ask whether forgetting is a necessary precondition to living—or, in reasonable doses, the antidote to an excess of trauma-induced memory.
One place to peer into this possibility is in conflict-ridden regions in which competing groups hold to deeply entrenched and opposing historical narratives. Here, in the throes of intense hostility, one can grasp the need to strike a sage balance between remembering and forgetting. If historians in such settings serve only to affirm the historical virtue of their respective groups, then their task as agents of reconciliation would be deeply compromised. In such a context, the path of forgetting—or perhaps disrupting and undoing—the narrative of self-virtue would be the wiser route.
An instructive case is present-day Northern Ireland, still emerging out of the Troubles that afflicted the country from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Essential to the long-term success of the agreement will be the ability of Protestant Unionists and Catholic Republicans to overcome centuries of demonization of each other. Can historians play a productive role, perhaps by disrupting entrenched narratives that divide the world into good and evil? This is the hope of Belfast-based Richard England, who believes that a mix of balance, context, understanding, and openness to counterfactuals enables a “responsible form of public history” that can change perceptions. Another Northern Ireland–based scholar, Cillian McGrattan, maintains that since historical narratives have played a large role in stoking ethnic tensions, historians can and must play a role in challenging, deconstructing, and providing alternatives to one-sided versions. This work may cause tension with public officials who either favor their own group’s account of the past or ignore the past altogether. But McGrattan insists that “by bringing a critical voice to the public debate concerning the causes and consequences of past actions, historians have a vital role to play in deepening democracy and justice in post-conflict societies.”14
In this instance, the historian acts as a surgeon of memory, disassembling whole narrative blocs to disrupt the flow of unhealthy memory, while opening new and healthier passages of historical understanding. Along with this role of dissecting, historians might be able to perform other functions of value, especially in areas riven by conflict.
This is the underlying rationale of the Institute for Historical Justice and Rehabilitation (IHJR) in Leiden. Established in 2004, the Institute has outlined a multistep “theory of change” for conflict zones in which history assumes a central role. The first step calls for historians from “antagonistic communities [to] come together to discuss and construct a shared historical narrative” with the aim of inducing sensitivity to the experience of the other group. Subsequent steps call for scholars to refine and expand the shared narrative, at which point local civil society activists on the ground can begin to disseminate it. The concluding stages call for government bodies to “translate IHJR’s work into policies”—in particular, by promoting and implementing acts of reconciliation between antagonistic communities.15
The guiding principle of the Institute—that history matters deeply, especially in challenging distorted historical accounts of the “other”—has been applied to a number of global hotspots. The Institute invested time and effort in assembling scholars in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in two of the most intractable cases of political and historical polarization: Armenia/Turkey and Israel/Palestine. In light of the deep chasm dividing these groups on the question of genocide, the Institute convened Armenian and Turkish historians to study the shared historical experiences of their respective groups prior to the events of 1915–1923. An abiding aim of this work was to encourage a new measure of openness and sensitivity toward one another—in ways that might prepare the ground for Turks to overcome a century of denial of the mass murder of over one million Armenians and thereby allow their descendants a measure of historical justice by validating their collective memory.16
In the case of Israel and Palestine, the Institute brought historians together to explore the starkly divergent experiences of the year 1948: for Jews, it was a year not only of independence but of liberation from millennia of exile, whereas for Arabs, the year witnessed the mass dispossession of native inhabitants in what came to be known as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” Rather than seek to produce a seamless shared history, the Institute commissioned a pair of historians, Motti Golani and Adel Manna, a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian of Israeli citizenship, to produce narratives that were juxtaposed under the title “Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba, 1948.” The authors maintained the hope that exposure to the competing narratives might alter each side’s perception of the other, though they could not predict whether that work would precede or follow a more formal process of peace negotiations.17
Work of this kind seeks to serve a number of purposes including inculcating greater sensitivity to the other and offering the prospect of healing deep psychic traumas through historical recognition. Both are extremely important in the context of the tortured relations between Jews and Arabs in historic Palestine. Each group’s historical memory highlights its own heroism and often the other group’s infamy. Throughout much of their shared existence, educators within the two groups fashioned historical curricula that variously ignored or vilified the other. The stakes were and are high, for the longer children are nourished on myths of the heroism of their side and villainy of the other, the more difficult it will be to uproot mutual suspicion. The Oslo peace process, formally inaugurated by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasir Arafat in 1993, lurched forward and back again as it sought to achieve reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Along the way, it set in motion a number of projects focused on altering school curricula and historical perceptions of the other. The loss of momentum in negotiations by the turn of the twenty-first century meant that far-reaching reforms never took hold. Since that time, a nongovernmental effort initiated in 1998 by the Palestinian scholar Sami Adwan and the late Israeli scholar Dan Bar-On under the rubric PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East) has produced a model textbook of side-by-side historical narratives, “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative: Palestinians and Israelis.”18 The ongoing work of PRIME is intended for use by teachers in Jewish and Arab schools in Israel and Palestine.
Can historians make a difference in a situation such as this in which there is a total political impasse? After all, they are hardly magicians and rarely master statesmen. But they can be framers of memory and perhaps, in a sense, even group therapists, recovering long-suppressed memories and dissecting unhealthy ones. It is especially helpful if they remember, as Viet Thanh Nguyen powerfully counsels in his recent book exploring competing Vietnamese and American memories of the Vietnam War, that there is much to be gained by remembering not only one’s own past but that of others as well.19 Work of this sort can contribute to paving a path of mutual understanding and reconciliation, though certainly not in isolation from concurrent political and social factors.
In highlighting the Israel-Palestine conflict, I must add a confessional note at this late stage. I approach the ongoing conflict between Jews and Arabs in the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea not simply as a historian, and surely not as a dispassionate one. I do so as a believing, practicing, politically progressive Jew with a deep and abiding connection to his people and a sense of moral urgency in advancing the goal of Palestinian self-determination. These combined commitments prompt me to ask what I (and other historians) can do to bring a measure of peace and justice to both groups in the fraught land they occupy. At least as far as I see it, such an ambition does not deviate from, but rather emerges out of, the lineage of Jewish historical writing that I have attempted to trace in this book.
In recognizing that link, I am not seeking to make a case for the exceptional nature of Jewish history nor of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a site of attempted historical reconciliation. Nor, for that matter, do I feel the need to apologize for my own identitarian investment in the object of research. It seems naive and potentially unproductive to believe that we bring a completely blank canvas to the depiction of the past, as I shall suggest in the brief methodological postscript.20 There is always a fair bit of the background filled in before we engage our sources, owing to environmental, temperamental, and ideological factors. Acknowledging and even embracing the desire to use the past to ameliorate the future—as is the case for me in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—may guide the way we frame our sources, but it does not mean a descent into anarchic relativism. It does not require the historian to suspend the judicious sifting of evidence. Nor does it diminish the constant imperative to gauge, weigh, and check one’s passions. The historian must continue to heed the norms, standards, and protocols of the profession even when propelled by a presentist urge or engaged in a self-consciously constructive act. But that adherence need not and, for better or worse, cannot lead to an evacuation of self or of the guiding impulses that frame our own questions.
And so I am drawn to the self-conscious deployment of history in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am more committed than ever to teaching the histories of Zionist and Palestinian nationalism together, noting the points at which they intersect and those at which they diverge, with a mix of critical distance and empathy. And I am committed to thinking of ways in which history can effect greater understanding and even reconciliation, without forgetting that few may be prepared to listen. Rarely is there a deafening clamor for the historian’s labors. And yet, we do possess a valuable asset—rich historical perspective—that can be brought to bear in productive ways. In conditions of political stalemate, the historian can play the role of archaeologist, rummaging through the past in search of that which was discarded by past societies.
If, for example, as many believe, the existing paradigm of diplomatic resolution in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—the model of a two state solution—has run into a dead end, historians are well positioned to explore the trove of past ideas to determine if something might be of relevance or value.21 They will discover various versions of the idea of a single state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. In today’s world, Palestinian activists (from Edward Said to Omar Barghouti), Western academics (from Tony Judt to Judith Butler), and Zionist figures (from Israeli settlers to Israeli president Reuven Rivlin) have all espoused versions of a single state, although they have very different understandings of what it would look like. In his book One State, Two States, the historian Benny Morris has reviewed earlier plans for a single state, ranging from the Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky’s call for a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River to the peace-oriented Brit Shalom’s proposal for a binational division of power between Jews and Arabs.22 Morris has also recalled other proposals including a series of confederated arrangements, a canton system that would divide the land according to population concentrations, and various two-state schemes.23 (Some have even proposed variations on a three-state solution, either through the creation of two states in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel or by returning control of the West Bank to Jordan and the Gaza Strip to Egypt.)24
After undertaking a wide-ranging review of the past, Morris found little worthy of revival in the present. Under current conditions, he believes that there is scant hope for either a one-state or a two-state solution, or, indeed, anything in between.25 This may be so at present, but the historian’s work is not done. Historians must continue to see the past as an open archive, brimming with discarded or neglected ideas to be retrieved in order to stimulate thinking about the future.26 To be sure, the past is not the sole repository of creative or constructive thinking for the future, but it is a neglected source. Historical perspective leavens, expands, and elevates our understanding of the world around us.
Alongside its archaeological function, history is also of value to the present in other meaningful ways. It can serve a vital ethical function, as Edith Wyschograd has proposed, by giving name to anonymous and forgotten victims of the past whose descendants’ pain would be alleviated by a measure of historical validation.27 This work, a kind of restorative justice, is especially important in post-conflict settings, including those in which a truth and reconciliation process has been established.28 But it can serve a valuable role as well in instances of long-standing and even dormant historical injustices, especially in which the work of remembering is of another’s travails or pain. An example of this “alternate ethics of remembering” is the decision by Georgetown University in 2015 to undertake a detailed investigation of the institution’s sale in 1838 of 272 slaves from which it profited.29 The university working group entrusted with examining Georgetown’s history based its work on the premise that “reconciliation over a marred history can only build on a history-telling that is frank, transparent, and true.” It then determined that the sale in question was the largest, though not the only, commercial transaction involving slaves owned by the university. Georgetown’s president, John J. DiGioia, accepted the committee’s various recommendations, which included a call to issue an apology, create an institute for the study of slavery, build a public memorial, and offer preferential admission to descendants of the slaves (though not to offer financial assistance to them). These proposals rested on a conscious desire to link historical research into Georgetown’s slave-owning past to memory of the past, and then to reconciliation as “the final goal of healing history’s wounds.”30
In addition to this type of work, history can also play an important advisory function by pointing out successful and unsuccessful actions in the past to present-day policy makers. Richard Neustadt and Ernest May taught a course for several decades at Harvard intended for policy makers that relied on case studies that unpacked and dissected the evolution of key government decisions. The goal of their reliance on history was not to dictate action, as they wrote in Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers. Rather, they proposed “drawing on history to frame sharper questions and doing so systematically, routinely.”31
More recently, two Harvard scholars, Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, paid homage in 2016 to Thinking in Time when they advanced the idea of a White House Council of Historians to advise the president of the United States. Animating this idea was their call for “a new and rigorous ‘applied history’—an attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing precedents and historical analogues.”32 It is this principle that anchors the Applied History Project that Allison and Ferguson co-chair at Harvard.
In a related vein, historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage issued a sweeping “history manifesto” in 2014 with the objective of encouraging historians to think in larger swaths of time in order to capture deep structural patterns in the past. They point to the capacity of Big Data to aggregate massive amounts of information as a boon to identifying these long-term patterns. Their call for a return to “long-termism” is key, in their view, to “renewing the connection between past and future.”33
Such an approach raises the prospect that a certain kind of historical work can even have a predictive utility. Eric Hobsbawm proceeded cautiously toward the conclusion that historians, while manifestly not prophets, can engage in forecasting and prediction, not of particular events, but of larger social trends that come into view through a close reading of the past. “History,” Hobsbawm asserted, “cannot get away from the future, if only because there is no line which divides the two.”34
Whether one subscribes to this predictive potential or not, there is a growing willingness to explore the ways that history can play a more visible role in public debate and policy deliberations oriented toward the future.35 At the same time, it is important to recall that historians do not necessarily agree with one another about the past—or, for that matter, the future. Deep and often bitter divisions separate scholars of Israel-Palestine, for example, and not only according to predictable national boundaries. Israeli scholars of differing generations (and even those who belong to the same generation) have very different views of the past and how to record it.36 The same could be said about historians writing anywhere on any subject.
But the absence of consensus should not prevent us from insisting that historical knowledge be an essential ingredient in thinking about and even planning for the future. Historians may be imperfect bearers of such knowledge, but they are the best we have—and often they are pretty good. The figures examined in this book typically used their deep knowledge of the past with an eye toward the future. They would have answered the simple question that opens Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft, and with which I opened this book—“What is the use of history?— in an abundance of ways. But all would have imagined, at least the modern scholars among them, that there were multiple uses for history. Many would have readily traversed the boundary between history and memory, had they been aware of its existence. Most would have sided with Yosef Yerushalmi, who, while acknowledging Nietzsche’s romance with forgetting, nevertheless asserted that if forced to choose, he would opt for “the side of ‘too much’ rather than ‘too little’” history.37
In that same moment, Yerushalmi pointed to an important constructive role for history when he asserted that the “antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering’ but ‘justice.’”38 In this important and ultimate regard, I am in complete agreement with Yerushalmi. For with a sufficient dose of history, one can begin to approach the demands of both memory and justice that are captured in the timeless African proverb, with its powerful Benjaminian echoes: “Until the lion has his or her own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best part of the story.”39 And yet, while helping to rescue the story of the victim, the historian must never cease to acknowledge other voices in a given historical moment, as well as the humanizing mandate to capture their rich diversity.