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]
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]
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. [7] 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; [8] Basnage was aware that no such work had ever been published before. [9] Basnage sought to provide an objective account of the history of Judaism. [10] [11] His work was widely influential, and developed further by other authors such as Hannah Adams. [12] [13]
Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) was the first Jewish author to publish a comprehensive history of the Jews. [14] 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. [15]
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. [16]
The first modern professional Jewish historians appeared in the early 19th century. [17] 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". [18]
Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) 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. [19] [20]
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. [21] 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. [22] 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." [23]
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". [24]
Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989), a professor at Columbia University, became the first chair in Jewish history at a secular university in 1930. [17] 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. [25] His work acknowledged further developed the Jewish national history, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. [26]
The study of Jewish history was begun in modern times by the German Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. 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. Such efforts culminated with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009) who 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". [27] Whilst it largely centered on premodern Jewish histories, it set the stage for future analysis of modern Jewish histories. [28] 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. [29]
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". [30] 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". [31]
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports "the development and protection of the State of Israel".
The Haskalah, often termed as the Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those in Western Europe and the Muslim world. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881, with the rise of Jewish nationalism.
Simon Dubnow was a Jewish-Russian historian, writer and activist.
Heinrich Graetz was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective.
Jewish Autonomism, not connected to the contemporary political movement autonomism, was a non-Zionist political movement and ideology that emerged in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, before spreading throughout all of Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the late 19th century, Jewish Autonomism was seen "together with Zionism [as] the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era." One of its first and major proponents was the historian and activist Simon Dubnow. Jewish Autonomism is often referred to as "Dubnovism" or "folkism".
"Wissenschaft des Judentums" refers to a nineteenth-century movement premised on the critical investigation of Jewish literature and culture, including rabbinic literature, to analyze the origins of Jewish traditions.
Paula Hyman was an American social historian who served as the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University.
Richard I. Cohen, also known as Richard Yerachmiel Cohen is a professor of history, presently holding the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the history of Jews in Western and Central Europe in the modern period, in particular the Jews of France, art history, Jewish historiography, and The Holocaust.
Jacob Katz was an acclaimed Jewish historian and educator.
Jewish secularism refers to secularism in a Jewish context, denoting the definition of Jewish identity with little or no attention given to its religious aspects. The concept of Jewish secularism first arose in the late 19th century, with its influence peaking during the interwar period.
Ben-Zion Dinur was a Zionist activist, educator, historian and Israeli politician.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi was the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, a position he held from 1980 to 2008.
The Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955, is an international research institute with centres in New York City, London, Jerusalem and Berlin, that are devoted to the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. The institute was founded in 1955 by a consortium of influential Jewish scholars including Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. The Leo Baeck Medal has been awarded since 1978 to those who have helped preserve the spirit of German-speaking Jewry in culture, academia, politics, and philanthropy.
Wir Juden is a 1934 book by German rabbi Joachim Prinz that concerns Hitler's rise to power as a demonstration of the defeat of liberalism and assimilation as a solution for the "Jewish Question", and advocated a Zionist alternative to save German Jews. The book urged German Jews to escape National Socialist persecution by emigrating to Palestine. Prinz himself was expelled in 1937, travelling to the US where he became a leader of the American Jewish community and the Civil Rights Movement.
David N. Myers is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History. Myers was the president and CEO of the Center for Jewish History from July 2017 to August 2018. He serves as the President of the New Israel Fund Board.
Otto Dov Kulka was an Israeli historian, professor emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His primary areas of specialization were the study of modern antisemitism from the early modern age until its manifestation under the National-Socialist regime as the "Final Solution"; Jewish thought in Europe – and Jews in European thought – from the 16th to the 20th century; Jewish-Christian relations in modern Europe; the history of the Jews in Germany; and the study of the Holocaust.
Michael Albert Meyer is a German-born American historian of modern Jewish history. He taught for over 50 years at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is currently the Adolph S. Ochs Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at that institution. He was one of the founders of the Association for Jewish Studies, and served as its president from 1978–80. He also served as International President of the Leo Baeck Institute from 1992–2013. He has published many books and articles, most notably on the history of German Jews, the origins and history of the Reform movement in Judaism, and Jewish people and faith confronting modernity. He is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner.
Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory is a non-fiction work of Jewish historiography first published in 1982 by the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009), a professor of Jewish history at Columbia University. It consists of four lectures that Yerushalmi gave as part of the 1980 series of "Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies", now known as the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington in Seattle. Harold Bloom wrote the foreword for the publication. The title, Zakhor, is the Hebrew word for remember. The New Yorker described the book as "one of the most influential works on Jewish history" since the 1950s.
Carl Anton born Moses Gershon Cohen, was a Curonian writer and Hebraist.
Roni Stauber is an Israeli historian. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. Stauber serves as the Director of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center and the Director of the university's Diploma Program in Archival and Information Science. Stauber is also a member of the academic committee of Yad Vashem. His research focuses on various aspects of Holocaust memory and the formation of Holocaust consciousness in Israel and around the world. In particular, he examines the interrelations between ideology and politics, and between collective memory and historiography, with a focus on Israeli-German relations.