Modern Jewish historiography

Jewish historiography is the scholarly analysis of Jewish history in modern times. The first such histories described the history of Judaism. From the mid-19th century, national histories of the Jewish people began to be published. Each major publication was influenced by the political climates of their respective times.[1][2][3][4][5]

Jewish history books in the National Library of Israel

Early modern histories

Some historians, acting on a desire to achieve Jewish equality, used Jewish history as a tool towards Jewish emancipation and religious reform. “Envisaging Jewish identity as essentially religious, they created a Jewish past that focused on Jewish religious rationality, and stressed Jewish integration within the societies in which Jews lived.”[6]

Gans

David Gans (‎1541–1613) was a rabbi, astronomer/astrologer, historian, and chronicler whose work "Tzemach David" (1592) was a pioneering study of Jewish history.[7][8]

Basnage

Jacques Basnage (1653-1723), a Huguenot living in the Netherlands, was the first author in the modern era to publish a comprehensive history of the Jews.[9] Basnage aimed to recount the story of the Jewish religion in his work Histoire des juifs, depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu'a present. Pour servir de continuation à l'histoire de Joseph (1706, in 15 volumes).

It was the first comprehensive post-biblical history of Judaism;[10] Basnage was aware that no such work had ever been published before.[11] Basnage sought to provide an objective account of the history of Judaism.[12][13] His work was widely influential, and developed further by other authors such as Hannah Adams.[14][15]

Jost

Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) was the first Jewish author to publish a comprehensive history of the Jews.[16] His Geschichte der Israeliten seit den Zeit der Maccabaer, in 9 volumes (1820–1829), was the first comprehensive history of Judaism from Biblical to modern times by a Jewish author. It primarily focused on recounting the history of the Jewish religion.[17]

Jost's history left "the differences among various phases of the Jewish past clearly apparent". He was criticized for this by later scholars such as Graetz, who worked to create an unbroken narrative.[18]

Zunz

Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), a contemporary of Jost, was considered the father of academic Jewish studies, or Wissenschaft des Judentums (or the "science of Judaism").[19]

Latter modern histories

The first modern professional Jewish historians appeared in the early 19th century.[20] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote that "[v]irtually all nineteenth-century Jewish ideologies, from Reform to Zionism, would feel a need to appeal to history for validation".[21]

Graetz

Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective. Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews) (1853-1876) had a dual focus. While he provided a comprehensive history of the Jewish religion, he also highlighted the emergence of a Jewish national identity and the role of Jews in modern nation-states.[22][23]

Dubnow

Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) wrote Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (World History of the Jewish People), which focused on the history of Jewish communities across the world. His scholarship developed a unified Jewish national narrative, especially in the context of the Russian Revolution and Zionism.[24] Dubnow's work nationalized and secularized Jewish history, whilst also moving its modern center of gravity from Germany to Eastern Europe and shifting its focus from intellectual history to social history.[25] Michael Brenner commented that Yerushalmi's "faith of fallen Jews" observation "is probably applicable to no one more than to Dubnow, who claimed to be praying in the temple of history that he himself erected."[26]

Dinur

Ben-Zion Dinur (1884 – 1973) followed Dubnow with a Zionist version of Jewish history. Conforti writes that Dinur "provided Jewish historiography with a clear Zionist-nationalist structure... [and] established the Palestine-centric approach, which viewed the entire Jewish past through the prism of Eretz Israel".[27]

Significant later works

Baron

Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989), a professor at Columbia University, became the first chair in Jewish history at a secular university in 1930.[20] He wrote A Social and Religious History of the Jews (18 vols., 2d ed. 1952–1983) covered both the religious and social aspects of Jewish history. His work is the most recent comprehensive multi-volume Jewish history.[28] His work acknowledged further developed the Jewish national history, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel.[29]

Studies of Jewish historiography

The German Wissenschaft des Judentums (or the "science of Judaism" or "Jewish studies") movement, was founded by Isaac Marcus Jost, Leopold Zunz, and Eduard Gans, and was the birth of modern academic Jewish studies. During this period, all such studies focused on pre-modern Jewish histories. Significant studies included Moritz Steinschneider's essay, "Geschichtsliteratur der Juden," and later those of Salo Baron and Amos Funkenstein. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009) wrote Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) which explored the intersection of historical scholarship and Jewish collective memory. It has been described as the "pathbreaking study on the relationship between Jewish historiography and memory from the biblical period to the modern age".[30] Whilst it largely centered on premodern Jewish histories, it set the stage for future analysis of modern Jewish histories.[31] Yerushalmi wrote that:

...the secularization of Jewish history is a break with the past, [and] the historicizing of Judaism itself has been an equally significant departure... Only in the modern era do we really find, for the first time, a Jewish historiography divorced from Jewish collective memory and, in crucial respects, thoroughly at odds with it. To a large extent, of course, this reflects a universal and ever-growing modern dichotomy... Intrinsically, modern Jewish historiography cannot replace an eroded group memory which, as we have seen throughout, never depended on historians in the first place. The collective memories of the Jewish people were a function of the shared faith, cohesiveness, and will of the group itself, transmitting and recreating its past through an entire complex of interlocking social and religious institutions that functioned organically to achieve this. The decline of Jewish collective memory in modern times is only a symptom of the unraveling of that common network of belief and praxis through whose mechanisms, some of which we have examined, the past was once made present. Therein lies the root of the malady. Ultimately Jewish memory cannot be "healed" unless the group itself finds healing, unless its wholeness is restored or rejuvenated. But for the wounds inflicted upon Jewish life by the disintegrative blows of the last two hundred years the historian seems at best a pathologist, hardly a physician.[32]

The study of modern Jewish histories began with Michael A. Meyer's "Ideas of Jewish History" (1974), developed further by Ismar Schorsch's "From Text to Context" (1994). These works emphasized the transformation of Jewish historical understanding in the modern era and are significant in summarizing the evolution of modern Jewish histories. According to Michael Brenner, these works – like Yerushalmi's before them – underlined the "break between a traditional Jewish understanding of history and its modern transformation".[33] Michael Brenner's Prophets of the Past, first published in German in 2006, was described by Michael A. Meyer as "the first broadly conceived history of modern Jewish historiography".[34]

See also

References
  1. Brenner 2010, p. 15: "Along with periodization we can also see the differing titles of works on Jewish history that cover more than one era as indexes of their respective orientations. It is no accident that Jost’s work on the history of religion is called The History of the Israelites; that Graetz titles his already nationally oriented work History of the Jews; that Dubnow, as a convinced diasporic nationalist, chooses the title World History of the Jewish People, in which both the national character of the Jews and their dispersal over the whole world are contained; and that in his monumental work Dinur distinguishes between Israel in Its Own Land and Israel in Dispersal. In all these cases the title is already a program."
  2. Brenner 2010, p. 49, 50: "At the same time, however, they shaped a scholarly discipline that used the weapons of historiography to elaborate new Jewish identities. All over Europe, during the nineteenth century historiography was part of the battle among Jews for their emancipation, their identification with their respective nation-states, and their striving for religious reform. What for Jews had earlier been one Jewish history was now transformed by historians into several Jewish histories in the respective national contexts.At the same time, during the second half of the nineteenth century a new variant of Jewish historiography developed that put passionate emphasis on the existence of a unified Jewish national history. Its begin- nings are found in the work of the most important Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, Heinrich Graetz."
  3. Meyer 2007, p. 661: "A constant temptation within Jewish historiography has been and is still today its instrumentalization, whether for the sake of emancipation, religious reform, a socialist or Zionist ideology, or the resuscitation and reshaping of Jewish memory for the sake of Jewish survival - all of these standing against the Rankean ideal of historical writing for its own sake."
  4. Yerushalmi 1982, p. 85: "It should be manifest by now that it did not derive from prior Jewish historical writing or historical thought. Nor was it the fruit of a gradual and organic evolution, as was the case with general modern historiography whose roots extend back to the Renaissance. Modern Jewish historiography began precipitously out of that assimilation from without and collapse from within which characterized the sudden emergence of Jews out of the ghetto. It originated, not as scholarly curiosity, but as ideology, one of a gamut of responses to the crisis of Jewish emancipation and the struggle to attain it."
  5. Biale 1994, p. 3: "The question of Jewish politics lies at the very heart of any attempt to understand Jewish history. The dialectic between power and powerlessness that threads its way from biblical to modern times is one of the central themes in the long history of the Jews and, especially in the modern period, defines one of the key ideological issues in Jewish life. How one understands the history of Jewish politics may well determine the stance one takes on the possibility of Jewish existence in diaspora or the necessity for a Jewish state. Or conversely, perhaps the ideological position one takes on this political question may determine how one interprets Jewish history. It may therefore not be an exaggeration to say that modern Jewish historiography is the historiography of Jewish politics, even when its explicit concerns appear to lie elsewhere. Since the modern historian writes in a context in which political questions are so important, he or she brings them to bear--consciously or not--on the broad field of Jewish history. To take but one famous example, Gershom Scholem's magisterial history of Jewish mysticism cannot be separated from his commitment to Zionism, although in no sense can one speak of a crudely direct correspondence between the one and the other."
  6. Meyer 2007, p. 662.
  7. גרטנר, חיים; Gertner, Haim (2002). "The Beginning of 'Orthodox Historiography' in Eastern Europe: a Reassessment / ראשיתה של כתיבה היסטורית אורתודוקסית במזרח אירופה: הערכה מחודשת". Zion / ציון. סז (ג): 293–336. ISSN 0044-4758.
  8. Alter, George (2011). "Dossier: David Gans: A Renaissance Jewish Astronomer". Aleph. 11 (1): 61–114. doi:10.2979/aleph.2011.11.1.61. ISSN 1565-1525.
  9. Meyer 1988, p. 169.
  10. Brenner 2010, p. 8, 19.
  11. Yerushalmi 1982, p. 81b: "It is significant that the first real attempt in modern times at a coherent and comprehensive post-biblical history of the Jews was made, not by a Jew, but by a French Huguenot minister and diplomat, Jacques Basnage, who had found refuge in Holland… nothing like it had been produced before, and Basnage knew this. "I dare to say," he writes, "that no historian has appeared among the Jews themselves who has gathered together so many facts concerning their nation." He complains of the paucity of reliable materials. Of those Jewish works that were devoted to the "chain of tradition" he observes that, "attached only to the succession of the persons through whom the tradition has passed from mouth to mouth, they have preserved the names and have often neglected the rest.""
  12. de Beauval, J.B. (1716). Histoire des juifs, depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu'a present. Pour servir de continuation à l'histoire de Joseph. Par Mr. Basnage. Nouvelle edition augmentée (in French). chez Henri Scheurleer. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  13. Segal, Lester A. (1983). "Jacques Basnage de Beauval's". Hebrew Union College Annual. Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. 54: 303–324. ISSN 0360-9049. JSTOR 23507671. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
  14. Brenner 2010, p. 19.
  15. Meyer 1988, p. 169-172.
  16. Meyer 1988, p. 167.
  17. Brenner 2010, p. 13, 32.
  18. Meyer 1988, p. 175: "In fact, however, Jost did not tear a coherent fabric asunder. Rather he loosely stitched together sources that he found unconnected, leaving the differences among various phases of the Jewish past clearly apparent. Graetz declared that his own approach was entirely different: not accumulative but dialectical - and hence fully integrative… As historicism in Germany came increasingly to center upon the German legacy and to act as a force for German unity, so did Graetz come to view study of the Jewish past as a tool for reversing the declining salience of Jewish identity in a community by then well on the road to social, cultural, and political integration. It was this motive, carried further to national consciousness and divested of its close religious connection, which came to prominence in eastern Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century."
  19. Veltri, Giuseppe (2000). "A Jewish Luther? The Academic Dreams of Leopold Zunz". Jewish Studies Quarterly. 7 (4): 338–351. ISSN 0944-5706.
  20. Yerushalmi 1982, p. 81a: "As a professional Jewish historian I am a new creature in Jewish history. My lineage does not extend beyond the second decade of the nineteenth century, which makes me, if not illegitimate, at least a parvenu within the long history of the Jews. It is not merely that I teach Jewish history at a university, though that is new enough. Such a position only goes back to 1930 when my own teacher, Salo Wittmayer Baron, received the Miller professorship at Columbia, the first chair in Jewish history at a secular university in the Western world."
  21. Yerushalmi 1982, p. 86: "The modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins at a time that witnesses a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living and hence also an ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory. In this sense, if for no other, history becomes what it had never been before - the faith of fallen Jews. For the first time history, not a sacred text, becomes the arbiter of Judaism. Virtually all nineteenth-century Jewish ideologies, from Reform to Zionism, would feel a need to appeal to history for validation. Predictably, "history" yielded the most varied conclusions to the appellants."
  22. Brenner 2010, p. 13.
  23. Brenner 2010, p. 53-92.
  24. Brenner 2010, p. 43-120.
  25. Meyer 2007, p. 663.
  26. Brenner 2010, p. 106: "Yerushalmi’s observation that history could become a religion for unbelieving Jews is probably applicable to..."
  27. Conforti 2005, p. 2: "Zionist historiographers accepted and welcomed this view, especially historians like Ben Zion Dinur, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Yosef Klausner, Avraham Ya’ari and others. These historians acted out of secular and nationalist motivations.They based their study of Jewish history on the idea that history has a central role in creating a modern, secular-nationalist Jewish identity. History, from their point of view, provided an alternative to the religious ethics of traditional Jewish identity. This school of thought emphasized the ideological motif in a sometimes explicit manner. Although the leaders of this school were exceptionally talented historians, the ideological mission they adopted often resulted in the formulation of a Zionist-nationalist image of the course of all Jewish history. The best known example of this nationalist approach among researchers in Eretz Israel is Ben Zion Dinur (1884–1973). To a large extent, his historiographic opus parallels the work of other nationalist historians in Europe, as Arielle Rein has demonstrated in her doctoral dissertation (Rein). His energetic work laid the foundation for research of Jewish history in Eretz Israel. A close examination of his writings reveals that he provided Jewish historiography with a clear Zionist-nationalist structure: A. Dinur, along with Ben-Zvi (Ben-Zvi), established the Palestine-centric approach, which viewed the entire Jewish past through the prism of Eretz Israel."
  28. Brenner 2010, p. 14.
  29. Brenner 2010, p. 123-131.
  30. Brenner 2010, p. 221.
  31. Brenner 2006, p. 15: The first attempts to deal with the history of Jewish history writing were made by the scions of 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums, most notably Moritz Steinschneider in his essay on the Geschichtsliteratur der Juden which, however, like most of his writings was a bibliographical essay rather than a comprehensive historical analysis. Naturally, Steinschneider and his colleagues dealt mainly with premodern accounts of Jewish history, an emphasis that can also be found in more recent attempts to analyze Jewish historiography, such as Salo Baron's essays on the topic collected under the title History and Jewish Historians (1964) and the more recent Perceptions of Jewish History (1993) by the late Amos Funkenstein. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's much acclaimed Zakhor (1989), which is not only the first comprehensive study but up to now the definitive systematic analysis of Jewish history writing, laid the groundwork for any contemporary discussion on Jewish history, but it does not focus on the history of modern Jewish history writing. After his profound discussion of premodern Jewish history and memory, Yerushalmi stresses the break and not the continuity in his concluding chapter on modern Jewish historical writing. Zakhor thus opens the way for a systematic discussion of modern Jewish historiography without undertaking such an attempt itself.
  32. Yerushalmi 1982, p. 91-94.
  33. Brenner 2006, p. 15-16: The most comprehensive attempts so far to summarize the achievements of Wissenschaft des Judentums and modern Jewish historiography are a collection of essays and an anthology. Ismar Schorsch's From Text to Context (1994), which brings together the author's essays on modern Jewish scholarship, underlines the same break between a traditional Jewish understanding of history and its modern transformation that Yerushalmi stressed in Zakhor. This break is also made clear in the only systematic anthology of Jewish history writing, Michael Meyer's pioneering Ideas of Jewish History (1987). In his introduction, which remains the most compact treatment of the subject, Mever writes: "It was not until the nineteenth century that a reflective conception of Jewish history became central to the consciousness of the Jew. The reasons for this new concern lay first of all in a transformation of the cultural environment.”
  34. Meyer 2007, p. 661a.

Bibliography
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