NOTES

Unless otherwise identified translations are mine.

Introduction

1. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, translated by Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953), 43. President Obama’s reflections on history were delivered at the memorial service for Rev. Pinckney, one of those murdered in a Charleston church by the white supremacist Dylann Roof on 17 June 2015. Obama’s remarks, and the Charleston murder, helped stimulate a debate in the South over the wisdom and morality of keeping Confederate symbols (e.g., flags and statues) in places of public prominence. See “Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/26/remarks-president-eulogy-honorable-reverend-clementa-pinckney.

2. The question is articulated anew with concision by Lynn Hunt in Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014), 1.

3. See, for example, by Gordon Hutner and Feisel G. Mohamed, “The Real Humanities Crisis Is Happening at Public Universities,” New Republic Online, 6 September 2013; and Diana E. Sheets, “The Crisis in the Humanities: Why Today’s Educational and Cultural Experts Can’t and Won’t Resolve the Failings of the Liberal Arts,” Huffington Post, 5 July 2013 (updated 14 September 2013), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-diana-e-sheets/the-crisis-in-the-humanit_b_3588171.html.The Harvard report noted a 4 percent drop in humanities concentrators at Harvard from 2003 to 2012, and a larger, 16 percent drop (when history was included) over a sixty-year period from 1954: “Addressing a Decline in Humanities Enrollment,” Harvard Magazine, 5 June 2013.

4. Michael Bérubé, “The Humanities Declining? Not According to the Numbers,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 July 2013, available at http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Declining-Not/140093/. For a related argument, focused on women’s decreasing interest in the humanities, see Heidi Tworek, “The Real Reason the Humanities Are ‘in Crisis,’” Atlantic, 18 December 2013.

5. Gerda Lerner, “The Necessity of History,” in Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115.

6. Ibid., 116.

7. See Blaine Greteman’s helpful grounding of the current “crisis” ina broader six-hundred year history in “It’s the End of the Humanities as We Know It: And I Feel Fine,” New Republic, 13 June 2014, available at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118139/crisis-humanities-has-long-history.

8. It is this potential that leads Jo Guldi and David Armitage to acknowledge in their History Manifesto that history allows us to “look past the parochial concerns of disciplines too attached to client funding, the next business cycle, or the next election” to see the larger picture. The book by Guldi and Armitage has generated a great deal of controversy, particularly their claim that historical research today succumbs to what they call “short-termism,” the tendency of scholars to chew off ever smaller chunks of time in their studies. See Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2–3, 7. For a sharp critique that disputes the proposition that historical studies are becoming more short term in scale (and that long-scale studies are particularly valuable for policy debates), see the contribution by Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler to the American Historical Review forum on The History Manifesto, “The History Manifesto: A Critique,” American Historical Review 120 (April 2015): 530–542. See also the forum on the Manifesto sponsored by the leading French journal Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 2 (April–June 2015), in particular Lynn Hunt, “Faut-il réinitialiser l’histoire?” 319–325, and Claudia Moatti, “L’e-story ou le nouveau mythe hollywoodien,” 327–332.

9. The eminent women’s scholar Joan Scott, for example, has described her task as a historian as “avowedly political: to point out and change inequalities between women and men.” Over the course of her career, and especially in Gender and the Politics of History, Scott has sought to trace the constantly shifting meaning of categories such as “men” and “women” with an eye toward dissolving the power hierarchies that have repeatedly privileged the former over the latter. See Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 5–7.

10. John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 226. On the link between historical knowledge and social change, Franklin once observed: “I think knowing one’s history leads one to act in a more enlightened fashion. I can not imagine how knowing one’s history would not urge one to be an activist.” Franklin’s quote from Emerge (March 1994) is available at http://jhfc.duke.edu/johnhopefranklin/quotes.html (accessed on 25 January 2015).

11. Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15. Geary wrote his book in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which, among other effects, unleashed a torrent of ethnic chauvinism across the newly reconfigured European continent. He called to task historians, even “reputable scholars (who) are drawn in to the polemical uses of the past,” by reifying and then mythologizing fluid concepts such as the nation (8).

12. Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library, 2008), 72, 84 (quotation).

13. My own preoccupation with the problematic of historicism commenced with the first scholarly article that I published: “The Scholem-Kurzweil Debate and Modern Jewish Historiography,” Modern Judaism 6 (1986): 261–286. It dealt with the critique during the 1960s by the Israeli literary scholar Baruch Kurzweil of the historicization of Judaism by modern scholars, especially by Kurzweil’s main nemesis, Gershom Scholem. Of particular note was Kurzweil’s Nietzschean-inspired “On the Use and Abuse of Jewish Studies,” in which Kurzweil praised the great German philosopher, who “understood well the danger of historicism. . . . More than history reveals, it all too frequently covers up.” See Kurzweil, “‘Al ha-to’let veha-nezek shebe-mada’e ha-Yahadut,” in his Be-ma’avak ‘al ‘erkhe ha-Yahadut (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1969), 221.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, translated by Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 11.

15. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 14.

16. On the perils of objectivity in Nietzsche’s thinking about history, see Mark Sinclair, “Nietzsche and the Problem of History,” Richmond Journal of Philosophy 8 (Winter 2004): 1–6. Nietzsche’s essay, which, we recall, focused on the use and abuse of history, had more tempered moments alongside its withering critique. Thus, he affirmed with equanimity that “the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people, and a culture.” Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 10.

17. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1989), 86, 94, 101. Yerushalmi invoked Nietzsche in an epilogue to a revised edition of Zakhor. Titled “Postscript: Reflections on Forgetting,” it was based on a talk he gave in France in June 1987. See Zakhor, 106–107. Yehuda Kurtzer attempts a constructive reframing of memory in relationship to history in Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2012), as well as David G. Roskies’ literary treatment of Jewish sites of memory, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Meanwhile, for a lucid discussion of the history of Jewish historiography, see Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, translated by Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). At various points in this chapter, Brenner’s and my interests and narrative trajectories overlap, as, for instance, in our common discussion of Jacques Basnage and Hannah Adams, as well as of Zeev Yawetz and Berel Wein. This may be due to the fact that Brenner is not only a friend and colleague but also a student of the same teacher, Yosef Yerushalmi. In any event, I am indebted to Brenner and his work, even as I seek to define a distinctive set of guiding motifs for modern Jewish historiography. For more on modern Jewish historiography, see the important collection by Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1994), as well as Lionel Kochan, The Jew and His History (London: Macmillan, 1977), and Reuven Michael, Ha-ketivah ha-hisṭorit ha-Yehudit: meha-Renesans ‘ad ha-‘et ha-ḥadashah (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1993).

18. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 8.

19. Ibid., 16. Nietzsche, for his part, offered a far less charitable set of images, comparing modern humans unfavorably to a herd of grazing animals whose contentment lay in their ability to forget all and live in the moment. Unlike the forgetful cow, we are addled by a “surfeit of history” that stands as an obstacle—indeed, is “hostile and dangerous”—to life. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 8, 28. Nietzsche suggested that in his day “a race of eunuchs” presided over the fetishistic cult of history in its modern guise (29, 31).

20. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 102.

21. Among the scholarly luminaries who responded to or wrote about the book in the years after its appearance were Harold Bloom, Robert Bonfil, Robert Chazan, Amos Funkenstein, and Michael A. Meyer. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Zakhor’s appearance, the Jewish Quarterly Review hosted a symposium to assess the book’s impact that included Moshe Idel, Peter Miller, Gavriel Rosenfeld, Sidra DeKoen Ezrahi, and Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. See Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 291–543.

22. William H. McNeill has made the point sharply, perhaps overly so, in his 1985 essay “Why Study History?” There McNeill asserts: “Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.” McNeill, “Why Study History?” at American Historical Association website, http://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/archives/why-study-history-%281985%29 (accessed on 23 December 2014).

23. Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschictlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973), 261, quoted in Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Collective Memory and Historical Time,” Práticas da História 1 (2016): 16. Barash offers a helpful and searching examination of the idea of “collective memory,” noting that it is “marked by discontinuity and flux brought on by the arrival of new generations and gradual demise of older contemporaries” (28). Aleida Assmann provides a periodization of the relationship between history and memory, concluding (and identifying) with the current phase of “interactions between memory and history” in which the historian can and does play a productive role: Aleida Assmann, “Transformations Between History and Memory,” Social Research: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 75 (2008): 61. See also Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133, and the comprehensive survey in Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

24. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire: La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), xix, translated by Arthur Goldhammer as Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3. The initial exchange with Yerushalmi took place at a conference at Schloss Elmau, Germany, in the summer of 2000; revised versions of the presentations were published in Michael Brenner and David N. Myers, eds. Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute: Themen, Positionen, Kontroversen. (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2002). See in that volume David N. Myers, “Selbstreflexion in modernenen Errinerungsdiskurs,” 55–74, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Jüdische Historiographie und Postmodernismus: Eine abweichende Meinung,” 75–94 (quotations at 76–77).

25. Yerushalmi, “Jüdische Historiographie und Postmodernismus,” 75.

26. In overt fashion, this theme anchors my essay “History and Memory in Jewish Studies: Overcoming the Chasm,” in Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels, eds., The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 8: The Modern World, 1815–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 804–830. My first book, based on the Columbia University dissertation I wrote under Yerushalmi’s direction, attempts to excavate the wide space between critical history and collective memory. See Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

27. Amos Funkenstein, “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,” History and Memory 1 (Spring–Summer 1989): 21. See also David N. Myers, “Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary,” History and Memory 4 (1992): 129–146.

28. Two prominent Jewish historians arrived at a similar conclusion twenty years ago. In a forum sponsored by the Association for Jewish Studies on Zakhor in 1986, Robert Chazan argued that one can read between the lines of Yerushalmi’s words to see “an alternative kind of healing function for the Jewish historian.” Michael A. Meyer declared that “historians, like midrashists, are interpreters that fasten upon significant passages in their sources and seek to spin out of them a larger story.” See “Responses to Yerushalmi’s Zakhor,” AJS Newsletter 36 (Fall 1986): 12, 14.

29. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 81–100.

30. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi “A Jewish Historian in the ‘Age of Aquarius,’” Commencement Address, Hebrew College, Brookline, Massachusetts, June 1970, reprinted in David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye, eds. The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 52–53.

31. Yerushalmi “A Jewish Historian in the ‘Age of Aquarius,’” 57, 58–59. See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (New York: Morrow, 1964), 696.

32. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 2.

33. Ibid., 30–33, 78.

34. Ibid., 86.

35. Yerushalmi’s masterful first book, based on his Columbia University dissertation, was devoted to the life and journeys of a Spanish converso who left the Iberian Peninsula to live an open Jewish life in Italy. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). He remained keenly interested in the subject throughout his career.

36. Yerushalmi, “Sur Baer et Galout,” in Y. F. Baer, Galout: L’imaginaire de l’exil dans le judāisme, translated into French by Marc de Launay (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 2000), 27, 40, 47. See also the German original: Jizchak Baer, Galut (Berlin: Schocken, 1936). I extend thanks to my former student and conversation partner Moshe Lapin, for insisting that this text of Yerushalmi’s required closer scrutiny.

37. Yerushalmi, “Sur Baer et Galout,” 42.

38. Yerushalmi, “Sur Baer et Galout,” 19–21, and 26.

39. Peter Gay and Gerald J. Cavanaugh, eds., Historians at Work, vol. 1: Herodotus to Froissart (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), xx. It is important to recall, as the historian Ethan Kleinberg reminded me in a personal communication, that Herodotus was also known as “the father of lies,” due to the imaginative tales he inserted into his historical accounts.

40. Friedlander’s mediating position, drawn in part from Funkenstein’s category of historical consciousness, is clearly spelled out in Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), viii. I should note that my first exposure to major questions of historical interpretation came in Friedlander’s seminar at Tel Aviv University in 1983. A bit less than a decade later, I joined him as a colleague in the UCLA History Department.

41. This notion bears resemblance to the Greek grammatical notion of the “middle voice,” of which Hayden White (about whom more presently) has made notable and controversial use in theorizing about the writing of history. See White, “Writing in the Middle Voice,” Stanford Literary Review 9 (1992): 179–187, and his contribution, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53. For a related site of mediation, see Jan Assman’s notion of mnemohistory, which is “concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered,” in Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9.

42. One indication of the duration of this debate might be that the journal History and Memory has continued to be published since 1989. Its first issue hardly marked the birth of the debate, but rather was the realization of an emerging body of mature research on the relationship.

43. Halbwach’s canonical La Mémoire collective from 1950 has been translated as On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See Yerushalmi, Zakhor, xxxv. See also Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1386–1403.

44. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, edited by Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 282–283.

45. A recent survey of the North American–based Association for Jewish Studies membership undertaken by the sociologist Steven Cohen revealed that 85 percent of the field identified as Jewish and 15 percent as Christian (5 percent), Muslim (1 percent), other (1 percent), or none (8 percent). Of those who identified as Jewish, 25 percent described themselves as “just Jewish,” that is, without denominational affiliation. See Steven M. Cohen, “Profiling the Jewish Studies Profession in North America Highlights from the Survey of AJS Members,” 15 July 2015, at http://www.ajsnet.org/surveys/AJS-2014-Full-Survey-Report.pdf.

46. Initially, some of the first professors at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where the first postwar program was established in 1963, were Jews: Jacob Taubes, Adolf Leschnitzer, and Michael Landmann. Over time, as the number of programs expanded, non-Jews came to dominate the field. Christoph Schulte discusses the transition from an earlier philologically inclined Judaistik to a more methodologically diverse Jewish studies in “Judaistik or Jewish Studies? The New Construction of Jewish Studies at the University of the Former German Democratic Republic,” Shofar 15 (1997): 32–40. For a sharp counterargument, see Peter Schäfer, “Jewish Studies in Germany Today,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 3 (1996): 146–161.

47. On the Historikerstreit, see Peter Baldwin, Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians Dispute (Boston: Beacon, 1990), and Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

48. See Tobias Brinkman, “Memory and Modern Jewish History in Contemporary Germany,” Shofar 4 (1997): 17–18.

49. Birgit Klein assembled some data on the composition and motives of Jewish studies students in Germany, most of whom were non-Jewish, in “Warum studieren in Deutschland Nichtjüdinnen und Nichtjuden Judaistik?” Judaica 49 (March 1993): 33–41.

50. For a recent critique of “identity politics,” see Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, 18 November 2017. To be sure, “identity politics” as an imbalanced, unreflexive, and one-dimensional apologia for the claims of a given group has little merit. But it is a different matter when identity politics seeks to “assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations”: Cressida Heyes, “Identity Politics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 16 July 2002, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics (accessed on 16 January 2016). See also James Clifford, “Taking Identity Politics Seriously: The Contradictory, Stony Ground . . . ” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, eds. Without Guarantees: Essays in Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000), 94–112.

Chapter 1
History as Liberation

1. Later in the century, Wilhelm Dilthey emphasized the importance of imaginative acts of re-creation as an essential step toward a liberating Verstehen (or understanding). Dilthey did not believe that one could or should “extinguish oneself,” as Ranke did. In anticipation of Collingwood, he wrote that “the highest form of understanding in which the totality of mental life is active [is] re-creating or re-living.” Through this mental work of imaginative empathy, one can achieve Verstehen: “Man, tied and limited by the reality of life is liberated not only by art . . . but also by historical understanding.” See “Empathy, Re-creating and Re-living” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings, edited by H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 226, 228. See also the account by the important Dilthey scholar Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 54.

2. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Causes of the American Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review 16 (October 1949), 981. Butterfield flatly asserted: “It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present.” The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931), 11.

3. Butterfield recants in The Englishman and His History: “We are all of us exultant and unrepentant whigs.” Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1970), 3.

4. Walzer introduces his book by stating that it is “about an idea of great presence and power in Western political thought, the idea of a deliverance from suffering and oppression: this-worldly redemption, liberation, redemption.” Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic, 1985), ix.

5. See Gerda Lerner, Living with History/Making Social Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Boston: Beacon, 1994).

6. Many historians aim only to get the past right. Lerner and Zinn had a different “regime of historicity,” to borrow François Hartog’s term. They understood their work as focused on effecting change for the future (and thus belong to the pre-presentist era in Hartog’s taxonomy). See Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expérience du temps (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2003).

7. Howard Zinn, “The Uses of Scholarship,” in Howard Zinn on History (New York: Seven Stories, 2001), 187.

8. Basnage mixed chronological and thematic approaches in his multiple volumes, saving a running account of Jewish history from the eighth to the eighteenth century for the last volume. See Jacques Basnage, The History of the Jews, from Jesus Christ to the Present Time: Containing Their Antiquities, Their Religion, Their Rites, the Dispersion of the Ten Tribes in the East and the Persecutions This Nation Has Suffer’d in the West. Being a Supplement and Continuation of the History of Josephus, translated by Tho. Taylor (London: J. Beaver and B. Lintot, 1708), 1: vi–x. See also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 81–82, and Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, translated by Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 18–19.

9. Basnage, The History of the Jews, 1: 2.

10. Ibid., 1: 1.

11. Ibid., 1: 2–3. See also Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 19, and Jonathan M. Elukin, “Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (October–December 1992): 603–630.

12. Hannah Adams, History of the Jews from the Destruction of Jerusalem to the Present Time, 2 vols. (Boston: J. Eliot, Jr., 1812), 2: 325–326.

13. Ibid., 2: 330–331.

14. Ibid., 1: vi. See Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 20.

15. Leopold Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur,” Maurer’schen Buchandlung (1818), reprinted in Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Verlag Louis Lamm, 1919), 1: 5.

16. Zunz, “On Rabbinic Literature,” in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 247, 250 (“Etwas,” 1: 4, 24). But for a view of Zunz that questions the central role of history and historical thinking in his work, see Amos Bitzan, “Leopold Zunz and the Meanings of Wissenschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78 (April 2017): 233–254.

17. See Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), Thomas A. Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). For a challenge to the view that a “crisis of historicism” afflicted European intellectual culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24ff.

18. Leopold Zunz, “Die jüdische Literatur” (1845) in Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 1: 59. See also Michael A. Meyer, Michael Brenner, and Mordechai Breuer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Emancipation and Acculturation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 135. On Zunz and Wissenschaft more generally, see the standard works of Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), and Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1994). Schorsch has recently written a biography of Zunz based on an exhaustive survey of available archival sources: Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

19. The most comprehensive study of Beer’s life and thought is Louise Hecht, Ein jüdischer Aufklärer in Böhmen: Der Pädagoge und Reformer Peter Beer (1758–1838) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008). See also Michael Brenner, “Between Haskalah and Kabbalah: Peter Beer’s History of Jewish Sects,” in Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers, eds., Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 389–404, as well as David N. Myers, “Peter Beer in Prague: Probing the Boundaries of Modern Jewish Historiography,” in H. Amstutz et al., eds., Fuzzy Boundaries: Festschrift für Antonio Loprieno (Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2015), 705–714.

20. Peter Beer, Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und noch bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre oder Kabbalah, 2 vols. (Brünn: J. G. Trassler, 1822, 1823), 2: x–xii.

21. Yosef Kaplan, “‘Karaites’ in Early Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” in David S. Katz and Jonathan Israel, eds. Sceptics, Millenarians, and Jews (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 203–204. Kaplan notes da Costa’s two references to Karaites, though he also notes that da Costa does not identify with the movement. On Beer, see Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 153.

22. Kaplan, “‘Karaites’ in Early Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” 228–229.

23. In recent decades, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has insisted with singular force and insight that Protestant theology, especially regarding exile, left a deep imprint on modern Jewish collective—and particularly, Zionist—identities. See Raz-Krakotzkin’s iconic article, “Galut mi-tokh ribonut: ‘shelilat ha-galut be-tarbut ha-Yisre’elit,” Te’oryah u-vikoret 4 (1993): 23–55, and 5 (1994): 113–135, as well as his “Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrachi Jewish Perspective,” in Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 162–181, and “Jewish Memory Between Exile and History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (Fall 2007): 530–543.

24. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3ff. See also the discussion in Reuven Michael, Ha-ketivah ha-historit ha-Yehudit (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1993), 279–300.

25. See Geiger’s letters to Derenbourg from 30 September 1833, 23 February 1836, and 20 July 1841 (quotation) in Max Wiener, comp., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism: The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century, translated by Ernst J. Schlochauer (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), 83–84, 90.

26. Geiger, letter to Theodor Noeldecke, 1 December 1865, ibid., 128.

27. Heschel notes that Geiger “longed for something comparable in Judaism.” Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 108. See Geiger’s letter to Jacob Auerbach, 5 January 1837, in Wiener, comp., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism, 103. Strauss himself modeled the use of scholarship as a tool of liberation from bias or naïveté in his controversial Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus) of 1835. There he subjected the Gospels to critical scrutiny, casting their accounts of Jesus’s life as mythical rather than factual. Through this book, the far-reaching “Historical Jesus” debate came into full public view in Europe

28. Wiener, comp., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism, 156–157 (emphasis added).

29. Ibid., 168.

30. Geiger, letter to M. A. Stern, the German-Jewish mathematician, 14–16 November 1839, ibid., 108.

31. Wiener, comp., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism, 155.

32. See Geiger’s statement of 16 July 1845 in the rabbinic conference summary, Protokolle und Aktenstuecke der zweiten Rabbiner-Versammlung (Frankfurt am Main: E Ullmann, 1845), 18ff., excerpted in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World, 203.

33. On the Hildesheimer Seminary, see David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), as well as David Ellenson and Richard Jacobs, “Scholarship and Faith: David Hoffmann and His Relation to Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 8 (1988): 27–40. See also Assaf Yedidya, “Orthodox Reactions to ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums,’” Modern Judaism 30 (2010): 69–94. On Orthodox historiography beyond Germany, see Haim Gertner, “Reshitah shel ketivah historit ortodoksit be-Mizraḥ Eropah: Ha-‘arakhah meḥudeshet,” Tsiyon 67, no. 3 (2002): 293–336; Nahum Karlinsky, Historyah sheke-neged: “Igrot ha-ḥasidim me-Eretz-Yisra’el”; Ha-tekst veha-kontekst (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1998); Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes: Edifying Tales and the Writing of History in Hasidism,” History and Theory 27 (1988): 119–159.

34. See Jawitz’s introduction to the original 1895 edition reprinted in Toldot Yisra’el, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Yerah Etanim, 1924–1925), iv.

35. Ibid. For a helpful recent summary of Jawitz’s life and work, see Assaf Yedidya, Legadel tarbut ‘Ivriyah: hayav u-mishnato shel Zeev Jawitz (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2016). Jawitz, Toldot Yisra’el, vi. See Yedidya, Legadel tarbut ‘Ivriyah, 86–88, as well as Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 158–159. Meanwhile, Graetz’s biographer, Philipp Bloch, relates the story of Graetz’s encounter with the older Zunz at the home of Michael Sachs in Berlin. When Zunz was told that Graetz was about to publish a new history, Zunz asked Graetz: “Another history of the Jews?” Graetz was said to respond, “Another history, but this time a Jewish history.” See Bloch’s memoir, based on Graetz’s diaries, at the beginning of volume 6 of Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1898), 60.

36. See Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 159. Yedidya notes the negative response of critical scholars, as well as Jawitz’s difficulty in gaining readers among either secular or Orthodox audiences, in Legadel tarbut ‘Ivriyah, 94–96, 189.

37. For a detailed analysis of the ArtScroll phenomenon in American Orthodox life, see Jeremy Stolow, Orthodoxy by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 8.

38. But see the accounts of the Christian scholars who are collected in Jean Delumeau, ed., L’historien et la foi (Paris: Fayard, 1996).

39. Berel Wein, Triumph of Survival: The Story of the Jews in the Modern Era, 1650–1990 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Shaar Press with Mesorah Publications, 1990), xi–xii. For Graetz’s version of this quote, see Bloch in Graetz’s History of the Jews, 60–61.

40. Yedidya, Legadel tarbut ‘Ivriyah, 32–33.

41. Wein, Triumph of Survival, 43.

42. Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 204.

43. The Yale scholar John Lewis Gaddis has noted that historians embark on divergent paths by oppressing and liberating the past. Oppression comes about when the historian imposes an overarching structure on the evidence at hand. This imposition can be a sort of “prison from which there’s neither escape nor reason nor appeal.” But the historian, Gaddis hastened to add, also liberates in a variety of ways—from the ravages of amnesia, from the delusion of historical inevitability, and from the tyranny of a fixed interpretation of the past. See Gaddis, “Historians Both Oppress and Liberate the Past,” Yale Bulletin and Calendar, 7 December 2001.

44. Leopold Zunz, “Vorrede,” Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (Berlin: A. Asher, 1832), reprinted in Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1919), 32–34.

45. Leopold Zunz, Namen der Juden: Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig: L. Fort, 1837). See also Schorsch, Leopold Zunz, 69–70.

46. Quoted in Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 163.

47. Baron wrote two exhaustive articles on the subject that could easily have made a single monograph. Curiously, Germany did not figure centrally for him, though he did note that at a later point German norms stifled the activist impulse of scholars. See Salo W. Baron, “The Revolution of 1848 and Jewish Scholarship, Part I: France, the United States and Italy,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 18 (1948–1949): 1–66 (quotation, 4), and “The Revolution of 1848 and Jewish Scholarship, Part II: Austria,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 20 (1951): 1–100.

48. Leon Pinsker, Autoemancipation: Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen (Berlin: Commissions-Verlag von W. Issleib, 1882).

49. The polyglot Dubnow published the essay originally in Russian in Voskhod 4–9 (1891): 1–91, and then in Hebrew as “Nahpesa ve-nakhkora” in Ha-pardes 1 (1892): 221–242. I have used here the English version, “Let Us Seek and Investigate,” translated by Avner Greenberg, with the helpful historical introduction of Laura Jockusch in Simon-Dubnow-Institut Jahrbuch 7 (2008): 343–382.

50. Dubnow, “Let Us Seek and Investigate,” 357, 360, 363.

51. The introduction has been translated by Koppel S. Pinson in his edition of Dubnow, Nationalism and History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 339. See also Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 99–100.

52. Ahad Ha-am, “Tehiyat ha-ruah,” Ha-Shiloah 10 (1902), reprinted in Ha-am, ‘Al parashat derakhim (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921), 3: 121.

53. See Yosef Klausner, “Megamatenu,” Ha-Shiloah 11 (1903): 9. On Klausner, see David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35, 93–99, and Brenner, Prophets of the Past, 160.

54. Gershom Scholem, “Kabbala at the Hebrew University,” Reconstructionist 3, no. 10 (1937), 8–12.

55. Yitzhak Baer and Ben Zion Dinur, “Megamatenu,” Zion 1 (1936): 1.

56. Yitzhak Baer, Yisra’el ba-‘amim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1955), 117.

57. Ben Zion Dinur (Dinaburg), Yisra’el ba-Golah (Tel Aviv: Devir and Mosad Bialik, 1958), vol. 1, book 1, 30–31 [Hebrew pagination].

58. So too did Baer, who ventured in the final sentence of Galut the idea that there is “a power that lifts the Jewish people out of the realm of all causal history.” Yitzhak Baer, Galut, translated by Robert Warshow (New York: Schocken, 1947), 120.

59. Ben Zion Dinur, “Zekhutenu la-arets,” in Mordechai Cohen, ed. Perakim be-toldot Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem: Ministries of Education and Defense, 1981), 410–414. Ben-Gurion’s comment is included in Shabtai Tevet, Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs: From Peace to War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 97.

60. For example, Dr. Ziad Abu Amr, deputy prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (as of August 2013), made the case in 1995 for the Arabs’ right to Jerusalem and Palestine without mentioning the presence of Jews in antiquity in “The Significance of Jerusalem: A Muslim Perspective,” Palestine-Israel Journal 2, no. 2 (1995): at http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=646. More recently, Deputy Minister of Jerusalem Affairs Salwa Hadib declared on the Palestinian Authority television channel (24 May 2015) that “the Palestinian people has been present in it [Jerusalem] for thousands of years . . . centuries before the Jewish religion.” The video clip can be found at http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=15297 (accessed on 28 August 2015).

61. For a careful reconstruction of the founding of YIVO, see Cecile Esther Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 59ff.

62. On this pre-YIVO phase, see Barry Trachtenberg, The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903–1917 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008).

63. Nokhem Shtif, “Vegn a yidishn akademishn institute,” in Di organizatsye fun der yiddisher visnshaft (Vilna: TSBK and VILBIG, 1925), 1, 24. See Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 66.

64. Shtif, writing under his penname Bal-dimyen, “Der yiddisher visnshaftlekher institute, a yor arbet,” Varshever shrift (1926–1927): 2–3, quoted in Kuznitz, YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, 64.

65. A locus classicus is Joan Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

66. Gerda Lerner, “Why History Matters,” in Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 206–207.

67. Ibid., 210–211.

68. Ibid., 5.

69. Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (1980): 91.

70. Paula E. Hyman, “Gender and the Immigrant Jewish Experience in the United States,” in Judith R. Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 312.

71. Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 5ff.

72. Paula E. Hyman, introduction to Puah Rakovsky, My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, translated by Paula E. Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3.

Chapter 2
History as Consolation

1. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Toward a History of Jewish Hope,” in David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye, eds., The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 315.

2. It is curious that both Yerushalmi and his teacher Salo W. Baron used a similar term, although with reference to different time periods and understandings. For Yerushalmi, Jews in earlier eras invoked a “midrash of history” to transform the past into “a text, capable of interpretation through a hermeneutic that flowed naturally and unselfconsciously out of the fundamental premises of Israelite faith.” Yerushalmi, “Toward a History of Jewish Hope,” 313. Meanwhile, in his late methodological reflections, Baron declared, with an eye on the present, that the study of the past might “serve as a sort of new historical midrash and help answer some of the most perplexing questions of the present and the future.” Salo W. Baron, The Contemporary Relevance of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 98.

3. The English scholar Rivkah Zim has written a comprehensive account of the long tradition of authors who turn to writing while imprisoned as a form of consolation. She analyzes how they used various forms of literature to defend their values against persecution, to cast an image of themselves for posterity, and to bear witness after the fact to the excesses that they and others had experienced. Rivkah Zim, Consolations of Writing: Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 16–18. Boethius spent the last year of his life in prison after being apprehended on a flimsily constructed charge of conspiracy in Verona. Knowing that his punishment would be death, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, which became one of the most widely disseminated and copied Latin texts of all time—and surely one of the most popular works ever on a philosophical theme. Employing the framework of a Platonic dialogue, Boethius stages a sustained dialogue between “Boethius” and Lady Philosophy, who dispenses wisdom about the nature and conduct of life. True contentment, Lady Philosophy ordains, cannot be measured in material wealth; it resides rather in mental and moral virtue. She reminds Boethius that Fortune can and often does abandon individuals, but ultimately it cannot undermine the essential goodness of human nature. See The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by W. V. Cooper (Ex-Classics Project, 2009), at http://www.exclassics.com/consol/consol.pdf.

4. Frederick Tupper, “The Consolation of History: An After Dinner Speech at the Annual Banquet of the Vermont Commandery of the Loyal Legion of the United States, May 11, 1920,” https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23415182M/The_consolation_of_history (accessed on 8 August 2014).

5. David G. Roskies, ed., Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 3, 5. See also David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

6. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 247.

7. See Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 10. See the new edition with an admiring and critical introduction by the Yale historian of World War I Jay Winter, Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

8. See “How the Brain Creates New Neural Pathways,” http://www.whatisneuroplasticity.com/pathways.php (accessed on 4 October 2015). For a more detailed scientific discussion of neuroplasticity and memory, see Federico Bermúdez-Rattoni, ed., Neural Plasticity and Memory: From Genes to Brain Imaging (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press/Taylor and Francis, 2007).

9. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 48.

10. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 28. See also Yehuda Kurtzer, Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 20–22.

11. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan prefer the term “collective remembrance” to “collective memory.” As they define it, “Collective remembrance is public recollection. It is the act of gathering bits and pieces of the past, and joining them together in public. The ‘public’ is the group that produces, expresses, and consumes it. What they create is not a cluster of individual memories; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” See Winter and Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6.

12. All translations of the Bible are from the 1985 Jewish Publication Society edition, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

13. See Ricouer’s meditation “On Consolation” in Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 89.

14. Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, in The Works of Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston, available at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/josephus/works/files/apion-1.htm.

15. For competing perspectives on the Chronicles’ veracity, see Ivan Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusader Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 40–52, Robert Chazan, God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). To be sure, debates over the genre, utility, and function of the medieval chronicle are not restricted to Hebrew versions. The Christian Latin chronicle is the subject of a rich body of scholarship that has prompted the formation of a learned society entirely devoted to studying it. See the Medieval Chronicle Society website: http://medievalchronicle.org/.

16. Shlomo Eidelberg, ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 25.

17. Ibid., 33, 49, 93.

18. Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom,” 43.

19. In the controversial argument of Yisrael Yuval, the vengeance-driven impulse of Jewish victims of the Crusades and their descendants—with its focus on avenging the blood of the martyrs—was absorbed and transformed by contemporaneous Christians into the blood libel charge that is first raised against Jews in the twelfth century. See Yuval, “Hanakam veha-kelalah, ha-dat veha-‘alilah mi‘alilot kedoshim le-‘alilot dam,” Zion 58 (1993): 33–90.

20. In addition to the work of Marcus, Chazan, and Cohen cited in note 15, above, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), chap. 2, and Eva Haverkamp, Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs (Hebrew Accounts of the Persecutions of the Jews During the First Crusade) (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2005).

21. For an important analysis of an Ashkenazic martyrological sensibility extending from 1096 to 1648–1649, see Yehezkel (Edward) Fram, “Ben TaTNaV (1096) le-TaH/TaT (1648–49): ‘iyun mi-hadash,” Zion 61 (1996): 159–182.

22. See Mintz, Hurban, 89. For an important exchange of views on differences between Ashkenazic and Sephardic visions of past and future, see Gerson D. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute, edited by M. Kreutzberger (New York: Unger, 1967), 115–156, and Elisheva Carlebach, “Between History and Hope: Jewish Messianism in Ashkenaz and Sepharad,” Third Annual Lecture of the Victor Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History, Touro College, New York, 1998.

23. Well before Usque’s account, the twelfth-century Spanish scholar Abraham ibn Daud wrote of the “great consolations” that issued from the prophetic parables about the history of Second Temple kings. See Gerson D. Cohen, The Book of Tradition (Sefer Ha-Qabbalah) by Abraham ibn Daud (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967), 14 (Hebrew section). I thank Michael A. Meyer for this reference.

24. Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, edited and translated by Martin A. Cohen (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1977). See also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “A Jewish Classic in the Portuguese Language,” introduction to Usque, Consolação ás Tribulações de Israel, (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1989).

25. Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, 227–232.

26. Cf. Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes, translated and introduced by Joanna Weinberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and Jeremy Cohen, A Historian in Exile: Solomon ibn Verga, “Shevet Yehudah,” and the Jewish-Christian Encounter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Cohen notes the ways in which ibn Verga adumbrates a more modern approach to history: his idea of the “natural cause” as an explanatory model, his interest in economic and social factors, and a measure of skepticism toward religion. Cohen, A Historian in Exile, 5.

27. Salo W. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Menorah Journal 14 (June 1928): 515–526. See David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 1, “Negating Lachrymosity.”

28. On the relationship between premodern and modern Jewish historical writers, see David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 16–25. See also Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), who, regarded modern teleologies of history as a misguided attempt to secularize fundamentally religious perspective. Seventeen years later, Hans Blumenberg challenged Löwith’s stance in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, arguing that Löwith’s periodization was mistaken since the attempted secularization had already occurred in the Middle Ages. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). For an exposition of the contours and stakes of the debate, see Stephen A. McKnight, “The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: The Lowith-Blumenberg Debate in Light of Recent Scholarship,” Political Science Reviewer (Spring 1990): 177–195.

29. Simon Rawidowicz, one of Krochmal’s most important modern expositors, for example, points to the influence of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Herder, and especially Vico in his introduction to the 1924 critical edition of More nevukhe ha-zeman. See the revised second edition of Rawidowicz, ed. Kitve Rabi Nachman Krochmal (London: Ararat, 1971), 117, esp. n. 4. In contrast, Krochmal’s later biographer Jay Harris maintains that establishing the thinker’s intellectual influences is “hopeless.” See Jay M. Harris, Nachman Krochmal: Guiding the Perplexed of the Modern Age (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 125.

30. Shlomo Avineri, “The Fossil and the Phoenix: Hegel and Krochmal on the Jewish Volksgeist,” in Robert L. Perkins, ed. History and System: Hegel’s Philosophy of History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 47–72. Vico, for his part, believed that Jewish history transcended the cycles to which other nations were subjected. See Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 77ff.

31. Nachman Krochmal, More nevukhe ha-zeman in Rawidowicz, ed., Kitve Rabi Nahman Krochmal, 40. See also Harris, Nachman Krochmal, 126–155, as well as Salo W. Baron, The Contemporary Relevance of History: A Study in Approaches and Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 6, and Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 79–80.

32. See Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 6 and Michael A. Meyer, “Two Persistent Tensions Within Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Modern Judaism 24 (2004): 105–119. See also Sven Erik-Rose, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 48ff, as well as Myers, “The Ideology of Wissenschaft des Judentums” in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), 706–720. In addition, see Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, translated by Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9–11, and Nils H. Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 15ff.

33. Enterprises such as the Historische Commission für Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (1885) and the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums (1902)—and their companion projects such as Germania Judaica and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden—were designed to preserve, and publicize the relevance of, Jewish history in Germany. On the commemoration and memorialization of history by German Jews, see Jacques Ehrenfreund, Les juifs berlinois à la Belle Époque (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000).

34. Pierre Nora, introduction to Les Lieux de mémoire, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” which was reprinted in Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7.

35. Heinrich Graetz played that role in the midst of the Berlin Anti-semitismusstreit in 1879–1880, pushing back against the menacing claims of the German nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke that Jews (and Graetz, in particular) were incapable of loyalty to their homeland. See Michael A. Meyer, “Heinrich Graetz and Heinrich von Treitschke: A Comparison of Their Historical Images of the Modern Jew,” Modern Judaism 6 (February 1986): 1–11.

36. For example, Dubnow, who at an early point in his career criticized Graetz for his tendency to depict Jewish history as a lugubrious “history of suffering,” went on to describe the Crusades as “the era of mass slaughter.” Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes, vol. 4 (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1926), 271. For a discussion of Dubnow and others, see David N. Myers, “‘Mehabevin et ha-tsarot’: Crusade Memories and Modern Jewish Martyrologies,” Jewish History 13, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 50–64.

37. Siegmund Salfeld, ed., Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1898), vi. See also Myers, “’Mehabevin et ha-tsarot,’” 56.

38. See Zeev Jawitz, Sefer Toldot Yisra’el, rev. ed. (Tel Aviv: Ahi’ever, 1933–1934), 11: 53–54. Jawitz’s adulatory tone toward martyrdom was notably lacking in a pair of rather dry scholarly editions of materials related to the Jewish experience during the Crusades that appeared in 1892 and 1898 under the sponsorship of the Historische Commission für Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland.

39. Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 31.

40. Shimon Bernfeld, Sefer ha-dema‘ot: me’ora‘ot ha-gezerot veha-redifot veha-shemadot, 3 vols. (Berlin: Hotsa’ot Eschkol, 1923–1926), 1: 147.

41. Ibid., 1: 6. See also Myers, “‘Mehabevin et ha-tsarot,’” 57–60.

42. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 526.

43. Bernfeld, Sefer ha-dema‘ot, 3: 5, 8.

44. Simon Dubnow, “Sod ha-kiyum ve-hok ha-kiyum shel ‘am Yisra’el” (The Secret of Survival—and the Law of Survival—of the Jewish People), He-‘atid 7 (1923): 116.

45. Simon Dubnow, introduction to Ant.isemiṭism un pogromen in Uḳraine, 1917–1918: tsu der geshikhṭe fun Uḳrainish-Yidishe batsihungen (Berlin: Mizreh.-Yidishn hisṭorishn arkhiv., 1923), 9, 15. À propos revenge, a traditional Jewish imprecation conveys a sense of vengeance directed at violent enemies of Israel by calling for “their names and memories to be blotted out [forever].” The measure of succor that it provides, laced with bitterness though it may be, is distinct from the unmistakably Christian impulse, identified by Paul Ricoeur, that regards consolation as “deliverance from revenge.” MacIntyre and Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism, 95.

46. Ismar Schorsch, “German Judaism: From Confession to Culture,” in Arnold Paucker et al., eds., Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland: The Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933–1943 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), 68.

47. For a discussion of the series (and a list of its titles), see Renate Evers, “Die ‘Schocken-Bücherei’ in den Nachlasssammlungen des Leo Baeck Institutes New York,” Medaon 14 (2014), accessed at http://www.medaon.de/pdf/MEDAON_14_Evers.pdf.

48. Naar explores this cohort in his impressive study Jewish Salonica Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 191, 209.

49. Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

50. See Ringelblum’s essay, “O.S. (Oyneg Shabbes), December 1944, in Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! . . . : Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 4. Ringelblum’s colleague was Hersh Wasser, who recorded them. See Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?, 387.

51. Ringelblum wrote in 1942: “Comprehensiveness was the main principle of our work. Objectivity was the second. We endeavoured to convey the whole truth, no matter how bitter, and we presented faithful unadorned pictures.” Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor, 9.

52. See Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor, 10.

53. For a superb discussion of the origins of the concept in the work of the Yiddish historian Mark Dworzecki in 1946, see Mark L. Smith, “The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2016), 342ff. See also the extensive discussion of the term by the notable historian Yehuda Bauer in Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 119–166.

54. Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1950), viii, 267.

55. Ibid., xv.

Chapter 3
History as Witness

1. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Richard Crawley, 1: 22. Available at http://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/thucydi1.html#Top. All quotations are from this edition.

2. See Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). On the etymology of “martyr,” see http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=martyr&allowed_in_frame=0. Accessed on 23 September 2014.

3. The Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz gave voice to this ideal in his published Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, in which he related, “I have titled this book The Witness of Poetry not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.” Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 4.

4. Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1987), 196. The second volume of Levi’s memoir was published in Italian as La Trega in 1963. Michael Tager notes that a “demand for justice underlies Levi’s witness” in “Primo Levi and the Language of Witness,” Criticism 35 (Spring 1993): 265–288 (quote at 281).

5. Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 82–96.

6. Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice, translated by Anthony Shugaar (London: Verso, 1999), 17.

7. Ibid., 117–120.

8. Robert M. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 4 (1983–1984): 9, 11.

9. Robert M. Cover, “Folktales of Justice: Tales of Jurisdiction,” Capital University Law Review 14, no. 179 (1984–1985): 189–190.

10. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, translated by Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 1. For an exhaustive account of Yiddish historians during and after the war, see Mark L. Smith, “Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2016).

11. Dubnow’s first essay about the pogrom, “A Historic Moment” (May 1903), appears in English in his Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 192–199. For background on Dubnow’s work around Kishinev, as well as a wider discussion of the project of khurbn-forshung, see Laura Jockusch’s important Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 18ff., as well as her article “Chroniclers of Catastrophe: History Writing as a Jewish Response to Persecution Before and After the Holocaust,” in David Bankier and Dan Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 138–145.

12. Alexandra Garbarini, “Power in Truth Telling: Jewish Testimonial Strategies Before the Shoah,” in Jason Coy et al., eds., Kinship, Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 174. See also Jockusch, “Chroniclers of Catastrophe,” 148–155.

13. Leo Koch, “Professor Shimen Dubnov un zayn barbarishe talmid,” Yidishe Kultur 7 (May 1945): 39. See also Ilya Ehrenberg and Vasily Grossman, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, translated and edited by David Patterson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2009), 387–388.

14. Koppel S. Pinson records this quote in Dubnow, Nationalism and History, 39. His report is based on the near-contemporaneous account of Hillel Melamed, whose father, Hirsch, was a friend of Dubnow’s in Riga, “Vo azoy di nazis hobn dermordet Prof. Sh. Dubnow,” Di tsukunft 51 (1946): 320–321. See also the work by Dubnow’s daughter Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. J. Dubnow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

15. Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 213.

16. Vladimir Petrovic´ has studied the function of historical witnessing in his dissertation, “Historians as Expert Witnesses in the Age of Extremes.” He notes the presence of historians at the trials of Alfred Dreyfus and Émil Zola, as well as in the libel case directed against the historian Heinrich Friedjung in the early twentieth century. See Petrovic´, “Historians as Expert Witnesses in the Age of Extremes” (Ph.D. diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2008), 60–64.

17. Ulrich Sieg titles his chapter devoted to the case “The Talmud on Trial” in his Germany’s Prophet: Paul de Lagarde and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism, translated by Linda Ann Marianello (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2013), 202–214. Nils Roemer observes that it was not simply that Judaism was on the defensive in Germany at that time; rather, it was a case of “Wissenschaft on trial.” See Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 83ff. See also Barnet Hartston, Sensationalizing the Jewish Question: Anti-Semitic Trials and the Press in the Early German Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 215.

18. An interesting hybrid of the work of textual and courtroom witnessing may be commissions of inquiry, established in the wake of tragedies or momentous events in order to determine responsibility, prevent repetition, and set in place a public memory for the future. For a probing discussion of the place of commissions of inquiry in Israeli society and their efforts to forge public memory, see Nadav G. Molchadsky, “History in the Public Courtroom: Commissions of Inquiry and Struggles over the History and Memory of Israeli Traumas,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015).

19. I thank Magda Teter for her comments on a version of this chapter presented at a conference at Cardozo Law School, 25 September 2016. See also John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 156–158.

20. The discrimination case was initially brought by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) against Sears, Roebuck & Company in 1973. The EEOC maintained that Sears favored white men over women for higher-paying commission sales jobs. Testifying on behalf of the defense was Rosalind Rosenberg of Barnard College; Alice Kessler-Harris, then of Hofstra University, served as an expert witness on behalf of the plaintiffs. Rosenberg argued that Sears was not to blame for differential employment patterns; rather, she argued, women and men have different expectations and values in choosing jobs. Kessler-Harris, for her part, maintained that women’s choices in the job market were constrained by the opportunities presented to them—and that the case at hand amounted to discrimination. These competing views with the quotations are reported by Samuel G. Freedman in “Of History and Politics: Bitter Feminist Debate,” New York Times, 6 June 1986, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/06/nyregion/of-history-and-politics-bitter-feminist-debate.html?pagewanted=all. See also Ruth Milkman, “Women’s History and the Sears Case,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 375–400, as well Katherine Jellison, “History in the Courtroom: The Sears Case in Perspective,” Public Historian 9 (Autumn 1987): 9–19.

21. Kelly Scott Johnson, “Scholem Schwarzbard: Biography of a Jewish Assassin” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2012), 180.

22. Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura (New York: Hart, 1976), 289. For amplification on the Schwarzbard trial, see David Engel, “Being Lawful in a Lawless World: The Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard and the Defense of East European Jews,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5 (2006): 83–97.

23. It is commonly thought that the use of expert witnesses in court, usually scientific rather than historical, commenced in the English case of Folkes v. Chadd in 1782. See Keith J. B. Rix, “Expert Evidence and the Courts: 1. The History of Expert Evidence,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 5 (1999): 71.

24. This was the formulation of an American prosecutor, the German-born Jew Robert Kempner, Quoted in Buruma, Wages of Guilt, 144–145. See Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, 2. On Tcherikower’s prominence, see Garbarini, “Power in Truth Telling,” 177.

25. See the divergent perspectives on the role of Institute of Jewish Affairs in the Nuremberg prosecution offered by Michael R. Marrus, “A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–46,” Cardozo Law Review 27, no. 4 (2006): 1651–1665, and Boaz Cohen, “Dr. Jacob Robinson, the Institute of Jewish Affairs and the Elusive Jewish Voice in Nuremberg,” Holocaust and Justice: Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and Berghahn Books, 2011), 81–100.

26. Donald Bloxham, “Jewish Witnesses in War Crimes Trials of the Postwar Era,” in Bankier and Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context, 542.

27. Ibid.

28. Quoted in Cohen, “Dr. Jacob Robinson,” 94.

29. These are the key protagonists in Smith’s “The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust.”

30. See Laura Jockusch’s important book on historical commissions, Collect and Record!, as well as the new volume edited by Jockusch and Gabriel Finder, Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution, and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel After the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015). See also the important dissertation by Rivka Brot, “Ben kehilah li-medinah: mishpatehem shel meshatfe pe‘ulah Yehudim ‘im Natsim” (Ph.D. diss., Tel Aviv University, 2015).

31. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 55.

32. See Mathew Turner, “Historians as Expert Witnesses: How Do Holocaust Perpetrator Trials Shape Historiography?” Alfred Deakin Research Institute Working Paper 22 (November 2011): 5–12.

33. For example, Baron declared that “it is clear that Emancipation has not brought the Golden Age.” Salo W. Baron “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Menorah Journal 14 (June 1928): 526.

34. According to Hanna Yablonka, “Baron’s optimism, so misplaced, had nothing in common with the pessimism that imbued the whole history of Zionism, which saw in Diaspora existence a condition that would end in catastrophe.” Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, translated by Ora Cummings (New York: Schocken, 2004), 101. Nonetheless, Hausner reported that despite Ben-Gurion’s preference, he chose Baron over Shazar because he wanted an expert witness who would stick to the facts and not be excessively emotional, as he feared Shazar would be. Gideon Hausner, Mishpat Yerushalayim (Tel Aviv: Bet lohame ha-geta’ot and Ha-kibuts ha-me’uchad, 1980), 299.

35. Pinchas Rosen to Benjamin Eliav, 26 December 1960, unnamed translator, Salo W. Baron Archives, Box 65, Folder 5, Stanford University. The Zionist concept to which Rosen makes indirect reference is shelilat ha-golah, or negation of the Diaspora.

36. Hausner stated that he was seeking someone who could “relate in general fashion the story of European Jewry, what was before the Shoah and what remained after it.” Hausner, Mishpat Yerushalayim, 299, 327.

37. Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, 102. Baron testimony transcript, session 12, part 6, The Nizkor Project: “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann,” http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-012-06.html. See also Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 330.

38. Baron testimony transcript, session 12, part 7, The Nizkor Project: “The Trial of Adolf Eichmann,” http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-012-07.html.

39. Baron testimony transcript, session 12, part 6, The Nizkor Project, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-012-06.html. For a minor modification of the English translation (changing “feat” to “feature”), see the Hebrew transcript at http://index.justice.gov.il/Subjects/EichmannWritten/volume/Vol1_p114.pdf.

40. Baron testimony transcript, session 13, part 2, The Nizkor Project, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-013-02.html. See also Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron, 333–334.

41. Baron testimony transcript, session 12, part 7, The Nizkor Project.

42. Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, 104.

43. It does not seem the case, as Yablonka concludes, that Baron’s testimony “came under attack from all quarters.” Ibid., 103. See, for example, the reports on Baron’s testimony on 25 April 1961 in the Revisionist Zionist party newspaper, Herut, “Yeshivat ha-boker: Prof. Baron megolel bifne bet ha-mishpat et terumat Yahadut Eropa le-Yisra’el ve-‘olam,” and by G. Kressel, “Shalom Baron ‘im ‘eduto be-mishpat Eichmann,” Davar, 25 April 1961. See also the companion pieces “Eichmann Court Hears Historian” and “Top Jewish Historian: Salo Wittmayer Baron,” New York Times, 25 April 1961. Liberles reports on additional journalistic commentary in Salo Wittmayer Baron, 334–335.

44. Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron, 323.

45. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963), 19.

46. Ibid., 9–10.

47. Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York: Vintage, 2015).

48. Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, 260.

49. See Douglas’s discussion of “heroic memory” ibid., 160–173.

50. See Jacques Derrida’s interview with Poliakov, in “Humanity, Nationality, Bestiality,” in Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 96–97.

51. Richard J. Evans, “History, Memory and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” History and Theory 41 (October 2002): 338.

52. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 142.

53. Robert O. Paxton, “The Trial of Maurice Papon,” New York Review of Books, 16 December 1999, available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/12/16/the-trial-of-maurice-papon/#fnr-22. See also Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972). Paxton reflected on his work as witness in Elisabeth Bumiller,” A Historian Defends His Leap from Past to Present,” New York Times, 31 January 1998, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/31/books/a-historian-defends-his-leap-from-past-to-present.html.

54. Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic, 2001), 7.

55. Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (New York: Ecco, 2005), 208.

56. Evans, Lying About Hitler, 227.

57. Lipstadt, History on Trial, 275.

58. Evans, Lying About Hitler, 2, 35, 265. See also Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997), 7–8. .

59. Lipstadt, History on Trial, dedication page.

60. That position would seem to be at odds with Evans’s claim that the trial “had nothing to do with any moral issues or lessons of any sort for future generations.” Evans, Lying About Hitler, 259.

61. Henri Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France, translated by Ralph Schoolcraft (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 22, 49 86. See also the summary provided by Richard Evans in “History, Memory, and the Law,” 334–335, 338.

62. Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, 150ff., 260 (quotation).

63. Lipstadt, History on Trial, 25; Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Penguin, 1993), 213–214, 218. Lipstadt affirmed the importance of memory fortification in a series of email exchanges with me, 21–23 December 2015.

Conclusion

1. David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 120. Rieff’s interesting essay both draws on and converses with Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, though in an important way misapprehends it. While there is a dolorous tone over the corrosive force of modernity in the last chapter of that book, Rieff goes too far in suggesting that Yerushalmi yearned for “some form of commanding authority” such as Halakah in the modern age or that he possessed a nostalgic “veneration of memory as the guarantor of tradition” (142). At least in Zakhor, Yerushalmi was too much the historian, indeed, too alive to dynamic change in history, to allow this. As he states in the Prologue, “the reader will not have understood me if he interprets the doubts and misgivings I express as meaning that I propose a return to prior modes of thought.” Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1989), xxxvi. That said, I have suggested in the introduction that Yerushalmi elsewhere hinted at a more constructive role for history and the historian in fostering memory.

2. Michael R. Marrus, Lessons of the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 7, 11.

3. Timothy D. Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 343.

4. Ibid., 340.

5. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 101.

6. Ibid., 100.

7. That question brings us back for a moment to the insights of brain research, especially as advanced by the University of Southern California neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Damasio has written of the brain’s regulatory mechanisms, genetically refined and transmitted, that produce homeostasis, the state of equilibrium that allows us to function in the midst of upheaval and change. He makes reference not to the chemically induced homeostasis of the brain but rather to the sociocultural homeostasis of the group. “With culture,” he observes, “we begin to regulate not only the life of the individual but the life of the individual within the social group.” Susan Andrews, “Antonio Damasio Probes the Mind in His New Book,” Medical Xpress, 12 November 2010, https://medicalxpress.com/news/2010-11-antonio-damasio-probes-mind.html (accessed on 15 March 2017).

8. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Haaretz, 2 March 1988.

9. See, for example, the former Israeli politician Avraham Burg’s The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and the French historian Esther Benbassa’s Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm, translated by G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2010).

10. On the role of the Shoah in Israeli public and political life, see inter alia Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, translated by Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, translated by Chaya Galai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Moshe Zuckerman, Sho’ah ba-ḥeder ha-aṭum: ha-“Sho’ah” ba-‘itonut ha-Yisre’elit biteḳufat Milḥemet ha-Mifrats (Tel Aviv: Moshe Zuckerman, 1993). See also Saul Friedlander, “The Shoah in Present Historical Consciousness,” in his Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 43–47, as well as Saul Friedlander and Adam Seligman, “The Israeli Memory of the Shoah: On Symbols, Rituals, and Ideological Polarization,” in Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden, eds. NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 356–371. See also Friedlander’s lecture “Some Reflections on Transmitting the Memory of the Shoa,” delivered at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, on 10 October 2013, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfu2lJqWKOk. David Rieff also weighs in by declaring that “Israel offers a florid illustration of how disastrously collective memory can deform a society.” In Praise of Forgetting, 139. For a wide-angle lens on the culture of “victimhood” in Israeli society, linking it to a global post-modern sensibility, see Alon Gan, Korbanutam—umanutam: mi-siah korbani le-siah riboni (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2014), available at https://en.idi.org.il/media/3985/victimhood_book.pdf. I thank Dr. Nadav Molchadsky for calling my attention to this book.

11. Arlene Stein, “Too Much Memory? Holocaust Fatigue in the Era of the Victim,” in Stein, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166–182. See her opinion piece, “Holocaust Survivors Don’t Belong in the Israeli-Palestinian Debate,” Haaretz, 21 September 2014, available at http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.617059.

12. The controversy surrounding the German novelist Martin Walser’s speech in 1998 about the “instrumentalizion” of the Holocaust sparked intense debate. See Kathrin Schödel, “Normalising Cultural Memory? The ‘Walser-Bubis Debate’ and Martin Walser’s Novel Ein springender Brunnen,” in Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds. Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden Hill, 2002), 67–84. An especially sharp formulation of the question of whether Holocaust memory is overprivileged in America came from the Yeshiva University student Binyamin Weinreich in his “Why It’s Time for Jews to Get over the Holocaust,” The Beacon, 21 February 2012, available at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/is8WSLRMF2U.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, translated by Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 10, 14.

14. Richard England, “Coming to Terms with the Past: Northern Ireland,” History Today 54 (July 2004), available at http://www.historytoday.com/richard-english/coming-terms-past-northern-ireland; Cillian McGrattan, “Historians in Post-Conflict Societies: Northern Ireland After the Troubles,” History and Policy, 3 March 2011, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/historians-in-post-conflict-societies-northern-ireland-after-the-troubles. .

15. “IHJR Project on the Former Yugoslavia,” Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, http://historyandreconciliation.org/our-work/projects/former-yugoslavia/ (accessed on 23 January 2017).

16. The goal of the Institute’s work in the former Yugoslavia is to counter “some of the xenophobic national myths” and “bring attention to the similarities and overlapping experiences and identities among societies in the region in cultural, religion, social and political life.” “IHJR Project on the Former Yugoslavia.” .

17. See Motti Golani and Adel Manna, “Two Sides of the Coin: Independence and Nakba, 1948,” Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, http://historyandreconciliation.org/detailed-summary-two-sides-of-the-coin-independence-and-nakba-1948/ (accessed on 23 January 2017). The Institute also sponsors research on the important role that historical memory plays in shaping present-day perceptions of the conflict. One study compares the reactions of Palestinian and Israeli university students to photographs of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Another explores the divergent historical memories of the city of Haifa, which is heralded by Jews as a unique space of harmony and peaceful coexistence and by Arabs as a once vibrant urban center undone by the Nakba. A third looks at the way in which the two groups relate to three holy sites. The common thread in these projects is “to encourage tolerance and understanding by familiarizing both sides with the narrative of the Other.” For an overview of the Institute’s projects on Israel and Palestine, see “IHJR Projects in Israel and the Palestinian Territories,” Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, http://historyandreconciliation.org/our-work/projects/israel-palestine/ (accessed on 20 September 2016).

18. The United States Institute for Peace supported a number of these initiatives, which are summarized in Richard H. Solomon, “Teaching Peace or War,” United States Institute for Peace, http://www.usip.org/publications/teaching-peace-or-war (accessed on 23 January 2017). “Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative: Palestinians and Israelis,” PRIME website, http://www.vispo.com/PRIME/leohn1.pdf (English translation of the Hebrew and Arabic text, accessed on 23 January 2017).

19. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 9.

20. In this regard, I take a very different stance from that of Aaron Hughes in his polemic against what he sees as an excess of identity politics in Jewish studies. See Hughes, The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). Hughes identifies with the subject of his biography, the extraordinarily prolific scholar Jacob Neusner, who criticized scholars in the field of Jewish studies as overly beholden to the uncritical traditionalism of the “yeshiva,” as distinct from his own fealty to the critical methodology of the “university.” See Aaron W. Hughes, Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (New York: New York University, 2016), 4ff. In an unpublished paper, “On Identity and Scholarly Engagement,” delivered at the 2016 summer institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, I argued, contra Hughes (and, by extension, Neusner), in defense of the scholar’s identitarian investment in the object of his or her research.

21. In telling fashion, even such a vocal and long-standing advocate of the two-state ideal as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman now casts doubt on its prospects. See Friedman, “The Many Mideast Solutions,” New York Times, 10 February 2016, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/opinion/the-many-mideast-solutions.html?_r=0.

22. Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 34–55.

23. On Ben-Gurion’s proposal to Alami, see Morris, One State, Two States, 197. See also the proposed constitution formulated by a group under the banner Israel-Palestine Confederation at http://www.ipconfederation.org/constitution-english.htm, as well as Uri Avnery’s “An Israeli-Palestinian Federation Is Still the Way,” Haaretz 8 August 2013, available at http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.540551. On the canton system see Morris, One State, Two States, 59, Meron Benvenisti, “Which Kind of Binational State?” Haaretz, 20 November 2003, available at http://odspi.org/articles/benvenisti.html, and Carlo Strenger, “Divide Israel into Cantons,” Haaretz, 29 March 2014, available at http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.582591. On two-state schemes, in addition to Morris’s discussion in One State, Two State, see the recent proposal for a two-state scheme in which the two states do not possess their own discrete territories but rather inhabit jointly the terrain between the river and the sea in Mark LeVine and Mathias Mossberg, eds. One Land, Two States: Israel and Palestine as Parallel States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

24. See, for example, the proposal by Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Danny Danon, “The Three State Solution,” Foreign Policy, 2 June 2014, http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/02/the-three-state-solution-2/.

25. After casting doubt on the prospects for one- and two-state options, Morris briefly considers a combined West Bank-Gaza-Jordan state as the best option available, even if unlikely. Morris, One State, Two States, 193–201.

26. This impulse resonates with the spirit of “sideshadowing,” reconsidering forgotten moments from the path that did not conform to our received teleological narrative, that Michael André Bernstein discusses in Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. chap. 5.

27. Even if we cannot realize the promise of grasping history “as it actually was,” Wyschogrod argues, we must do all within our power to discharge the obligation to “give countenance,” especially in an age of mass murder when there are so many victims whose names, voices, and faces are lost. Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xii.

28. Some of the problems that Henri Rousso raised in objecting to historians as witnesses have also figured in the work of history writing in truth and reconciliation processes. In discussing the somewhat strained relationship between historians and the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa, Jacobus Du Pisani and Kwang-Su Kim observe: “Historians are committed to the never ending debate of history and not to the type of closure sought by priests and politicians.” Du Pisani and Kim, “Establishing the Truth About the Apartheid Past: Historians and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” African Studies Quarterly 8 (Fall 2004): 77–95. Elazar Barkan, a leading figure in bringing historians to the work of reconciliation, convened a roundtable, “Truth and Reconciliation in History,” to discuss the potentially therapeutic labors of historians in reconciling Jews and Poles, Turks and Armenians, and the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. See Barkan, “Historians and Historical Reconciliation,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 899–913.

29. In discussing this “alternate ethics, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes: “If the ethics of remembering one’s own operates in every society, the ethics of remembering others is the refinement of remembering one’s own.” He goes on to warn of the dangers of a society using its ethics of remembering as a cover to attack a group it believes does not match its ethical standards. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 9–11, 47–70 (quotation at 69).

30. The link is evident in the title of the report: “The Report of the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to the President of Georgetown University,” Summer 2016, available at http://slavery.georgetown.edu/ (accessed on 30 September 2016), 33. In the wake of this report, Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, convened a scholarly conference in March 2016 to examine the relationship between American universities and their former slave holdings. At the conference, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates renewed his call from 2014 for reparations to be given to descendants of slaves as an act of restorative justice. See Jennifer Schuessler, “Confronting Academia’s Slavery Ties,” New York Times, 6 March 2017, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014), available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

31. Richard Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), xi, 32–33.

32. Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, “Why the U.S. President Needs a Council of Historians,” The Atlantic Online, September 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/dont-know-much-about-history/492746/.

33. Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13–19. For a critique of their view that history has succumbed to “short-termism,” see above, Introduction, n. 8.

34. Hobsbawm reflected on the predictive capacity of historians in a 1981 lecture, “Looking Forward: History and the Future,” reprinted in Hobsbawm, On History (New York: New Press, 1997), 38.

35. Two important institutional manifestations of that willingness are the creation of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University and the Luskin Center for History and Policy at UCLA in 2017.

36. There is a wide literature on the debates among Israeli historians, including those who began, from the late 1980s, to challenge foundational myths of Israel history. For a range of views, see Yechiam Weitz, ed. Ben hazon le-revizyah: me’ah shenot historiyografyah Tsionit (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1997), Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), and Yoav Gelber, Nation and History: Israeli Historiography Between Zionism and Post-Zionism (Middlesex, UK: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). The so-called New Historians included Benny Morris, who laid out his cohort’s brief in “The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past,” Tikkun 3 (1988): 19–23, 98–103. Morris was challenged shortly thereafter by the veteran historian and journalist Shabtai Tevet in “Charging Israel with Original Sin,” Commentary (September 1989): 24–33, and, a decade later, by the renowned historian Anita Shapira, “The Past Is Not a Foreign Country: The Failure of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ to Explain War and Peace,” New Republic, 29 November 1999, 26–36. In the meantime, Morris had parted ways with fellow New Historians, as reflected in a provocative interview with Ari Shavit in Haaretz on 9 January 2004, available at http://www.haaretz.com/survival-of-the-fittest-1.61345 (accessed on 5 February 2017), and later in a review of his contemporary Ilan Pappé in Morris, “The Liar as Hero,” New Republic, 16 March 2011, 29–35.

37. Yerushalmi, “Postscript: Reflections on Forgetting,” Zakhor, 116–117.

38. Ibid., 117. See also Rieff, In Defense of Forgetting, 99.

39. This proverb in the Ewe-Mina language is found in Jennifer Speake, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 185.

Postscript

1. See Samuel Moyn, “Bonfire of the Humanities,” Nation, 21 January 2015, available at http://www.thenation.com/article/195553/bonfire-humanities.

2. Baron saw The Contemporary Relevance of History as a methodological “appendix” to his massive Social and Religious History of the Jews. He lamented that “most Jewish historians did not bother to come to grips with the basic philosophical and methodological aspects of their craft, but merely devoted their energies to describing historical events and movements in some narrative or analytical fashion appealing to them.” Salo W. Baron, The Contemporary Relevance of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), vii, 41. Meanwhile, Moshe Rosman set out to grapple with the challenges of writing history in a postmodern age replete with skepticism toward the very idea of historical truth. His own attempts to navigate between the poles of “essentialism” and “constructivism” lead him to a middle ground in which the historian can grasp a wide range of “historical experiences and historical perspectives” without succumbing to “the most extreme postmodern epistemological and methodological strictures.” Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 186.

3. Leopold von Ranke, Englische Geschichte vornehmlich im siebzehnten Jahurhundert (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1877), 103.

4. Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” translated by Stephen Bann, Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 7. See also Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23 (February 1984): 1–33.

5. White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” 5.

6. For a helpful distinction between naive historical realism based on immediate perception and a more deliberate and reasoned form of historical realism, see C. Bevan McCullogh, “Historical Realism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 40, no. 3 (March, 1980):420–425. White has a rather unconventional view of “realism,” holding that “‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.” Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 6.

7. The intellectual historian John E. Toews notes some of the limits of this approach in his important article “Intellectual History After the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): esp. 882.

8. See the volume edited by the conference organizer, Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

9. Quoted in White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” 3.

10. This view found enthusiastic adherents in the 1930s in the United States in the work of distinguished scholars such as Charles Beard and Carl Becker, the latter of whom echoed Croce in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1931, “Everyman His Own Historian.” After recalling Croce and the idea that all history is contemporary, Becker declared that “in so far as we think the past . . . it becomes an integral and living part of our present world of semblance.” Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” in Becker, Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935), 242.

11. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, edited by Jan Van Der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 282–283.

12. Ibid., 291–292.

13. As Collingwood puts it in his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” (1926): “It may seem paradoxical to say that one account is nearer to the truth than another while yet confessing that we do not know what the truth is; but we must face this paradox.” Collingwood, The Idea of History, 391. It is important to add that Collingwood himself, in contrast to the perspective advanced in this book, distinguished sharply between the function and nature of history and memory. Ibid., 252–253. See as well as the comparison of Dilthey and Collingwood in Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 32–35.