Perceptions of Jewish History (Centennial Book) - Hardcover

Funkenstein, Amos

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520077024 ISBN 13: 9780520077027

Publisher: California University Press, 1993

Synopsis

"Perceptions of Jewish History scintillates with original ideas and insights. It will appeal to a broad audience."

--Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame

 

"Students of the Jewish past will welcome this volume; it will also attract readers with the widest possible range of interests."

--Robert Chazan, New York University

About this title

About the Author

Amos Funkenstein was the Koret professor of Jewish history at University of California Berkeley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Perceptions of Jewish History

By Amos Funkenstein

University of California Press

Copyright 1993 Amos Funkenstein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520077024
1
Introduction The Themes

Few cultures are as preoccupied with their own identity and distinction as the Jewish. It asserted and reasserted its uniqueness in every mode of creative expression, not least in the liturgy, which includes a daily thanksgiving to the Creator "that he did not make us like all the nations of the lands, and did not set us up like other families of the earth. That he did not set our inheritance like theirs and our lot like their multitude."1 The uniqueness of the nation was seen as a condition for its durationwhether in theological terms or, since the crisis of secularization, in alternative idioms. It served as an explanation for the sufferings inflicted on Jews and as a rationale for sufferings they

On the antiquity of alenu, see Josef Heinemann, Prayers in the Period of the Tana 'im and Amora 'im: Its Nature and Patterns (Jerusalem, 1978), pp. 173-75. Alenu was taken from the mussaf to New Year's liturgy and introduced into the everyday morning prayer in the thirteenth century. Parts or all of it were censored in the West and altered in the ashkenazic liturgy. See Ismar Elbogen, Der jdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1st ed. , Leipzig, 1913; 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main, 1931), pp. 63-64. Hebrew trans. , Yosef Hainman and Yisra'el Adler, Hatefila be-Yisra 'el behitpatchutah historit (Tel Aviv, 1972).

occasionally inflicted on others. It stood at the center of Jewish self-reflection.

A culture, a society, may view its existence and distinctive features as a matter of course or as a given part of the furniture of the world, as a natural endowment. Neither was the case with the Jewish culture since biblical times. The continuous assertion and reassertion of its identity and excellence is already an indication that they were not taken for granted. A culture that does not take itself for granted is, by definition, a self-reflexive culture. Historical consciousness became the mode of Jewish self-reflection. I do not mean to suggest that Jews, at least until the nineteenth century, entertained any doubts about their place in the world or about their future existence; both were guaranteed as a divine promise and premise. And yet their existence was to them a source of perpetual amazement: it was never viewed as a naturally given datum, and it remained always in need of explanation. The very emergence of Israel as a young culture among older cultures within "historical" times needed explanationthe biblical account of history, we shall see, provided it. The conquest of a land already inhabited by others likewise needed a justification. The ties of Israel to the Holy Land, Rabbi Abraham Isaak Hakohen Kook once said, are "unlike the natural bonds with which every nation and tongue is tied to its country," not organically grown, but instituted.2 Every further turn in the history of Israel had to be explained, none seemed self-evidentneither in times of prosperity nor, indeed, in times of need.

This, perhaps, is the cardinal difference between an indistinct, more or less always present collective memory and a historical consciousness: the latter is an answer to definite questions asked. Being such an answer, it cannot merely enumerate events, but must weave them into a meaningful narrative, to be interpreted and reinterpreted. The varieties of the perceptions of Jewish history through the agesof the Jewish historical consciousnessare the subject of this book. The essays included in it were written separately over a long time and can, of course, be read separately. They are nevertheless united by their subject and by some methodical and substantial presuppositions which the reader is entitled to know of in advance. Some of the questions posed arise whenever historical narrative and reasoning become an object of inquiry: what is the difference between collective memory and historical awareness? What changes did the perception of history, now an integral

Rabbi Abraham Isaak Hakohen Kook, Iggrot ha Ra 'ava (Jerusalem, 1965) II, p. 194.

dimension of our culture, undergo? Is historythe actual events that happenedreducible altogether to the historical narrative? These and similar questions are treated in the following introductory essays, the first two chapters of the book. They are followed by some detailed studies. Many pertinent and interesting subjects were either not treated at all or only in passing: these essays were not written with a book in mind. All of them do, however, contribute to the main thesis of the book: the realization that, long before the crisis of secularizationin fact, for as long as Jews thought about themselvestheir identity, existence, and fate were never a matter of course, never taken for granted, either by themselves or, indeed, by their environment.

Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness

Collective Memory

"History," wrote Hegel in Philosophy of History, "combines in our language the objective as well as the subjective side. It means both res gestae (the things that happened) and historia rerum gestarum (the narration of the things that happened)." "This is no coincidence," he goes on to explain, for without memory of the past there is no history, in the sense of events which are meaningful to the collective, events experienced by a collective that is aware of them. Collective awareness presumes collective memory. Without it there are no laws and no justice, no political structures, and no collective purposes. Without "history," there is no history and no state.3

Hegel is vague, and perhaps deliberately so. Did he refer to the writing of history? If so, then he conserved, unwittingly, the assumption shared by ancient and medieval authors that there is no history without its written preservation, that every event that is "worthy of being remembered" (dignum memoriae ) has certainly been put into writing by

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. Herman Glockner (Stuttgart, 1927), pp. 97-98. In contrast see Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 9th ed. (Tbingen, 1960): "And thus its presence which governs the detailed historical matter . . . is not in itself proof of histories of an 'era . . . non-historical eras (unhistorische Zeitalter ) are not therefore also without time barriers (ungeschichtlich ) ." The contradiction of the opinions depends on different conceptualizations of time and temporality (ibid. , pp. 405 ff.).

a witness whom they consider the best of historians.4 Or was Hegel perhaps referring to that elusive entity known today as "collective memory? Where does this reside, how is it expressed, and how does it differ from the writing of history or thought about history?

We naturally ascribe historical "consciousness" and "memory" to human collectivesthe family and the tribe, the nation and the state. Nations are meant to remember their heroes "forever"; to perpetuate the memory of a person means to have it entrenched in the collective memory, which forgets, perhaps, only failures and sins. In some languagesincluding Hebrewthere is a special term for this act of memory (Verewigen, immortaliser, lehantsiakh ). Upon reflection, the notion is confusing. Consciousness and memory can, after all, be attributed only to individuals who act, are aware, and remember. Just as a nation cannot eat or dance, it cannot speak or remember. Remembering is a mental act, and therefore absolutely and completely personal. Even if we were to commit ourselves to an extreme assumption (as did some medieval thinkers)that we all share a common intellect5 insofar as our notions or propositions are validwe would still have to distinguish between personal memories. The memories of people who have experienced a common event are not identical, even if we assume a "unity of the intellect"; for each of them, a concrete memory evokes different associations and feelings.

These reservations aside, "collective memory" is by no means a mistaken or misleading term. It simply needs to be used within clear limitations. Remembering, whether of personal experiences or of events in the past of a society, is a mental activity of a subject who is conscious of performing it. Memory may even constitute self-consciousness, because self-identity presumes memory. On the other hand, even the most personal memory cannot be removed from its social context. When I remember (and none too happily) my first day at school, I recall the city, the institution, the teacherthrough and through social entities or constructs. My personal identity was likewise formed with reference to social objects, institutions, offices, value-hierarchies, and events. Even the very act of self-consciousness is far from being isolated from society.

See below, pp. 22-29.

E.g.. Ibn Roshd and the Averroeists of the Middle Ages (unitas intellectus ), as well as the somewhat different assumption of de Malebranche and Spinoza in the seventeenth century; see Amos Funkenstein Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986), pp. 290-96. In a sense, this is the assumption of all those who construct a "general consciousness," such as Kant.

Again we remember Hegel, who was the first, it seems, to show that self-consciousness requires a social context by virtue of its very conceptualization. The philosophical literature prior to Hegel treated self-consciousness as though it were isolated in its own world and perhaps even "windowless," whether conceived of as a substance (Descartes, Leibniz) or as a function, that is, a point of intersection for the rational organization of the world (Kant).6 In a famous chapter in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel abandoned this tradition, stating that self-consciousness "is in and for itself (an-und-fr-sich ), in that and because it is for another (fr ein Anderes ) in and for itself; in other words, it exists only as recognized." Because of the paradox in its reference to itself, self-consciousness is divided between recognizing consciousness and recognized consciousness; Hegel used the word Anerkennen, which (in contrast to simply Erkennen ) is distinctly social.7 The relationship between these two types of consciousnesswhich actually are oneis both a conceptual and a historical process, a process that threatens to terminate and to eliminate both if a temporary balance were not achieved in a "master-slave" relation.

Hegel thus initiated a trend of interpretation that culminated, against his intentions, in the recent demand to deconstruct the notion of the self, of the subject, as mediating the world or as giving meaning to it and to our language. It should, some say, give way to a much more relative notion of the subject as a construct dependent on suprapersonal structures, for every structure, in an open or concealed manner, both gives and destroys meanings.8 If this is true of self-consciousness, it is truer yet of memory. No memory, not even the most intimate and personal, can be isolated from the social context, from the language and the symbolic system molded by the society over centuries.

We should not, therefore, abandon the concept of collective memory,

Descartes made the "I think therefore I am"sum res cogitans be it a judgment or a performativeinto an attribute of a substance (thought). Descartes assumes without proof or any argument that this one-time act of self-consciousness is identical to a person with all its contents and continuity; among its contents is the concept of God. Only out of such an assumption can Descartes reconstruct the world destroyed previously by the "malignant spirit." For Leibniz, the self is a monad, implying by virtue of its very definition all its "states." Kant, who identifies the unity of consciousness with self-consciousness ("The I accompanies all my perceptions"), denies (much as Ryle later) that it can be treated as a substance; but it is still an isolated self.

Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hofmeister, Smtliche Werke VI (Hamburg, 1952), pp. 141-50.

See Manfred Frank, Die Unhinterehbarkeit von Individualitt: Reflexionen ber Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anlass ihrer 'postmodernem ' Toterklrurung (Frankfurt am Main, 1986).

but must reformulate the relationship between collective memory and the individual act of personal remembering. The following analogy may help. Modern linguistics has developed the fundamental distinction, first introduced by the Swiss linguist de Saussure, between "language" (langue ) and "speech" (parole ). Language is a system of symbols and the rules of their functioning: the inventory of phonemes, words, letters, rules of declension and syntactic rules available at all times to the speaker. Yet a language does not exist as an independent abstraction; it exists in that it is instantiated in every actual act of speech. And because every such act differs from the next even where its linguistic components are completely identical, every act of speech also changes the language in some way.9

This distinction should be useful in the attempt to define collective memory. The latter, like "language," can be characterized as a system of signs, symbols, and practices: memorial dates, names of places, monuments and victory arches, museums and texts, customs and manners, stereotype images (incorporated, for instance, in manners of expression), and even language itself (in de Saussure's terms). The individual's memorythat is, the act of rememberingis the instantiation of these symbols, analogous to "speech"; no act of remembering is like any other. The point of departure and frame of reference of memory is the system of signs and symbols that it uses.

It is noteworthy that the word zikaron or zekher (memory) in the infancy of the Hebrew languageand its analog in the infancy of many languagesincorporates both meanings. Alongside the subjective meaning (memory as a mental act)"Yet did not the chief butler remember (ve-lo zakhar ) Joseph, but forgot him" (Gen. 40:23)we also find the objective sense"this is my name forever, and this is my memorial (zikhri ) unto all generations"(Exod. 17:14). Here "memory" is a synonym for "name" or "letter";10 at times it is difficult to distinguish between the two meanings. The word denoting the masculine gender in Hebrew (zakhar ) and in Aramaic is etymologically related to memory (zekher ), as we might expect of a patriarchal society in which "nation," "community," or "assembly," is always exclusive of women.11 The male alone (zakhar ) constitutes the memory (zekher ).

Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnerale (Paris, 1916); 4th ed. (Paris, 1949), ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye; English trans. Wade Baskin, Course in General Linquistics (New York, 1959).

See, for example, Exod. 13:9; 13:17; Josh. 2:7. In Deut. 24:22 the remembering action is "memory."

See, for example, Exod. 19:15.

Again in analog, to language, which encompasses relatively closed regions of professional or status-related languages of different groups, collective memory preserves symbols and monuments that no longer "remind" most members of a society of anything. If language can be consciously manipulated,12 all the more so collective memory: it is not an anonymous-organic development that led to the circumstance that all of Napoleon's victories and not a single defeat are still memorialized in the names of the streets of Paris: Wagram and Marengo, Jena and Austerlitz, Borodino and Aboukir. In the latter, we are presumably called upon "to remember" the continental war against the Turks alone, rather than Nelson's victory.

But the analogy between language and memory is not seamless. We cannot distinguish unmediated and mediated levels of language, whereas collective memory is, in a sense, direct and unmediated in part, namely when individuals recall socially significant events they experienced. A common experience may be shared by a generation.13 Although here, too, memory is assisted by signs, symbols, and meanings, some of which have received public valorization, we can nonetheless speak of the relative absence of mediation. On the other hand, personal memoryas first shown by Augustine of Hippois likewise never pure memory. Most of our personal memories are, in that they are, also the memory of memories.14

Indeed, Augustine provided Western literature with the first in-depth analysis of memory as related to knowledge, desire, and personal identity. Like Plato, Augustine saw in every piece of knowledge an act of recall (anamnesis ); but the Platonic remembrance is that of pure and timeless forms, not of temporal constructs. In the view of Augustine, we remember first and foremost states of our soul, that is, of internal, time-bound events. Wherefore the experience of memory is also a measure of time (time is not merely, as Aristotle believed, "the measure of motion"). The past is the remembered present, just as the future is the anticipated present: memory is always derived from the present and from the contents of the soul at present.

This, though expressed in a sociological idiom, was also the fundamental insight of the French-Jewish sociologist Maurice Halbwachs.

See, for example, Viktor Klemperer, "LTI " Die Unbewltigte Sprache; aus dem Notizbuch einen Philologen (Darmstadt, 1966).

Peter Loewenberg, "The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort," American Historical Review, vol. 76/5 (1971): pp. 1457-1502; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936).

Aurelius Augustinus, Confessiones, X, 10,17; X, 16,14.

Students of historical consciousness cannot afford to overlook his work; he was the first to treat collective memory systematically. Halbwachs stressed the link between collective and personal memory and contrasted both to the historical memorythat is, reconstruction of the past by historians whose craft leads them to deviate from, or to question, accepted perceptions.15 Both personal and collective memory are primarily a projection of the present and its structure, composed of contents and symbols from here and now. Collective memory is, almost by definition, a "monumental" history in the Nietzschean senseand it needs the "plastic power" of the collective to keep it alive.16 The historian demands that we ignore the present and its meanings as much as possible, that we avoid anachronisms and the tendency to "project our concepts on the conditions of the past."17 Collective memory, by contrast, is completely insensitive to the differences between periods and "qualities of time"; its time is monochromatic; its interests are throughout topocentric. People, events, and historic institutions of the past serve as prototypes for the collective memory; none of them are recognized by their uniqueness.

Halbwachs, however, does not always refrain from hypostatizing the collective memory, even though he is aware that only the individual remembers sensu stricto . The tendency to ascribe an independent existence to collective mentality, to the "spirit of the nation," or to language itself, which thinks, as it were, by means of the individual, is clearly a romantic heritage. It ignores the fact that every change in language or in the symbolic system and functions that comprise the cognitive organization of the world (whether in high or local folk culture) begins with the speaking, acting, recognizing individual. Halbwachs, like Durkheim, was aware that only the individual thinks or remembers; nevertheless, he (like Durkheim or the members of the Annales school to this day) endows the collective memory with attributes that transcend the concrete historical narrative.

Halbwachs ignores the fact that the historical narrativethe historian's finished creation, or part of itmay itself become an integral part of the collective memory, like the Scriptures or Homer. Now you may argue that historiography, or any type of historic reasoning before the

Maurice Halbwachs, La mmoire collective (Paris, 1950), pp. 35-79, particularly p. 74; cf. also J. Assman, "Kollektives Gedchtnis und kulturelle Identitt," in Jan Assmann and Tonio Hlscher, eds. , Kultur und Gedchtnis (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), pp. 9-19.

See Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historic fr das Leben," in Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (1874: Mnchen, 1960), vol. 1.

Cf. chapter 2, n. 14.

onset of historicism and the professionalization of history, was rather naive and much closer to the collective memory, while historiography since the nineteenth century became critical, reflective, and very conscious of the uniqueness of times and periods; wherefore Halbwachs's attribution to collective memory of characteristics of precritical historiography (such as Christian typological thought) is significant and telling. This it is, but the transition from precritical historiography to historicism, however revolutionary, was not altogether sudden. Several indications of its coming can be discerned within the presumably naive historical consciousness that preceded it, including the distinction between one "spirit of the time" and another (qualitas temporum in the medieval language).18 And even ancient authors were aware of varying linguistic uses: "before time in Israel, when a man went to enquire of God, thus he spoke, Come, and let us go to the seer: for he that is now called a Prophet was before time called a Seer" (I Sam. 9:9). The poet, Cicero tells us, may use linguistic archaism.19

On the other hand, even the modern historian, whose calling it is to do so, seldom abandons the horizon of his collective memory altogether, because he does not hasten to destroy social norms, least of all those he is unaware of. More often than not the historian's writing reflects the past images shared by his larger communitypeople of his generation and location, images he embellishes and endows with scholarly respectability.

In order, therefore, to refrain from postulating an unbridgeable gap between collective memory and the recording of history, and at the same time not to blur the differences between them, we need an additional interpretative dynamic construct to explain how the second arises out of the first. Unlike the relationship between "language" and "speech"and even in contradiction to itreflection on the contents of collective memory gives rise to increasing freedom in their individual instantiation. In other words, the more a culture permits conscious changes and variations of the narrator in the contents, symbols, and structures of collective memory, the more complex and less predictable the narrative of history becomes. The liturgical incantations of the list of tribal leaders in a sacred ceremony differ in kind from the poetry of

See Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 202-89, and chapter 2 on historical facts below.

Cicero, De oratore III, 153. Earlier, Aristarchus of Samos formulated the basic interpretative rule that Homer should be explained by Homer alone. See Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, 1968), pp. 225-30.

Homer or the narrative of the Book of Judges; and both again differ from the Book of Kings or Herodotus. I introduce the term "historical consciousness," in this precise meaning, as such a dynamic heuristic constructthe degree of creative freedom in the use of interpretation of the contents of collective memory. This degree differs at different times in the same culture or at different social environments at any given time within the same culture.

Halbwachs's ideas were recently revived by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his fascinating book on Jewish historiography and collective memory. He, too, confronts historiography with collective memory, and both of these with the work of historical interpretations since the beginning of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century. His point of departure is the question why historiography virtually disappeared from the Jewish culture between Josephus Flavius and the nineteenth century, even though it was saturated with historical memories, despite the fact that as early as the Scriptures, liturgical memory was established in the command to "remember," Zakhor .20 The short outbreak of historiographic creativity in the seventeenth century, he says, was an exception. And, he argues, the interest in history was never identical to the historical memory. Until the nineteenth century, Jews were never interested in history qua history. Political events of their own time did not seem important to the Jews in the Diaspora. The Scriptures served them as an archetypical pattern for all events in the present, for themselves and for the generations after them. Paradoxically, it was at the beginning of Jewish studies, when historical consciousness and historical research became the backbone of the new methodical study of Judaism, that the split occurred between critical historical consciousness and collective memory.

Historical Consciousness

Awareness of history in Jewish culture and its environment is also the explicit subject of this book. My points of disagreement with Yerushalmi's perspectives are a quick way to summarize the unifying themes underlying the essays collected here.

First, lacking the mediating category of historical consciousness (which is not at all confined to historiography proper), Yerushalmi, like Halbwachs before him, inevitably polarizes the contrast between his-

Yosef Havim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982). On the commandment to remember, which he rightly stresses, cf. A. Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, 1977), pp. 179-204.

torical narrative and "collective memory." It is my contention that, with or without historiography proper, creative thinking about historypast and presentnever ceased. Jewish culture was and remained formed by an acute historical consciousness, albeit different at different periods. Put differently, Jewish culture never took itself for granted.

Second, the Jewish historical consciousness articulated, in endless variations, the perception of the distinctness of Israel. Polemical and apologetical exigencies, together with awareness of new cultures, sharpened this perception. A more secularized age then translated it from a divine, transcendent premise and promise into an immanent-historical vocabulary. To concentrate on the liturgical-collective memory only means to lose sight of this main theme of the Jewish historical reasoning, an incessant astonishment at one's own existence.

Third, historical consciousness and collective memory were never completely alien to each other, not even in the nineteenth and twentieth century. On the contrary; then as before, thinking about history reflected the moods and sentiments of the community in which this thinking took place.

A new type of historical images emerged, in antiquity, out of collective memories: it consisted not only in a reminder of the past in order to forge a collective identity and to maintain it, but in the attempt to understand the past, to question its meaning. That historical consciousness in this precise sense developed first and primarily in ancient Israel and in Greece is, I shall argue in the third essay, not a coincidence: both cultures saw their origins in historical rather than mythical times; both preserved a memory of relatively recent origins, preceded by a nomadic prehistory ("A wandering Aramaean was my father" even became a liturgical formula).

To ancient or primitive societies, in which antiquity or a long pedigree makes for a true aristocracy, youth is a sign of inferiority, and a memory of youth calls for compensatory elements, all the more so if this memory of youth was coupled with a memory of slavery and of otherwise low social status. Israel compensated for its sense of youth with the conviction of being a nation chosen by a monogamous god as his only family: Israel is God's "territory" and "property," God takes an active part in Israel's fortunes. The sense of a recent beginning in historical times and the consciousness of chosenness, of distinction among others, albeit older nations, are intertwined throughout the Bible.

Greeks, too, suffered from such a sense of youth, and admiredas we are told both in Herodotus and in Plato's Timaeus civilizations older and richer than theirs, such as Egypt's. Greeks, too, compensated

for this sense of inferiority in some respects with a sense of superiority to others: theirs was not a cultural or religious but a political superiority. They were distinguished from the bulk of enslaved Oriental nations by their freedom, a freedom possible only in the framework of the polis .21

Both cultures, the Israelite and the Greek, developed historiography into a high, reflexive art. To say that the aim of the one was to endow history with "meaning" while the aim of the other was to detect "causes" is somewhat misleading: causes and meaning are present in both. "Meaning" in the biblical sense is the work of providence in history; in the Greek sense, it is the uncovering of those mechanisms of human society that are always the same, as human nature is always the same. What Greek historiographyor, for that matter, Greek sciencearticulated for the first time is the ability to "stand aside" and observe without overtly taking sides, to distinguish between the questio facti and the questio iuris .

Awareness of the unity of history as a whole also has its dual origin in Israel and in Greece. The image of historical time as well-defined historical "periods," originated in the Jewish apocalyptic literature. The apocalyptic literature, whether sectarian (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls) or not, viewed this "world" () as a temporary span of time, beginning with the sin of Adam and culminating in cosmic destruction, and an entirely new world to which only a few selected souls would escape. It viewed the present as being on the verge of the end of days, and sought proof of this both in the structure and the course of history, a structure revealed both through an idiosyncratic-actualizing "decoding of Scriptures," and in apocalypses proper, that is, prophecies after the event. This is the subject of the fourth essay. The image of the theaters of historyi.e. , historical space as a whole whose parts interact, originated in the philosophical and historical thought of Hellenistic-Roman antiquity. Much as the Stoa saw the entire world as one state (cosmopolis ), so also Polybius wrote the history of the oikoumene, the history of the settled world, as a gradual process of the unification of the world under the best and most balanced of governments.22

Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine, 2nd edition (New York, 1957), esp. ch. 12.

Polybius, Historiae, I, 4.1-2 (ed. F. Hultsch). See Kurt von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity: A Critical Analysis of Polybius ' Political Ideas (New York, 1954), pp. 184-219; F. W. Walbank, Polybius (Sather Classical Lectures 42, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), pp. 130-56, esp. 131-37.

These two images of the unity of history, the temporal and the spatial, were integrated in the thought of some Christian Fathers from the third century onwards. From early on, the Christian apologetics faced several almost contradictory tasks: facing the Jews, they had to prove the difference of the New from the Old Testament; facing pagans outside and heretics within their own ranks (Marcion, Gnosis), they had to prove the continuity between the New and Old Testaments, as the continuous revelation of the one God. And then: toward its own members, the Church insisted that they must live in the pagan culture and its institutions as "resident aliens" (peregrini ),23 while toward the imperial masters it developed a veritable political theology, according to which the Empire and Christianity were and are destined for each other.

Out of these contrasting perspectives grew various modes of interpreting history. They are, in part, the subject of the fifth and sixth essay. From the apocalyptic literature, Christian writers borrowed the method of "decoding" old prophecies to make them refer in detail to the present. They likewise developed the typological reading of historyidentifying institutions, events, and persons of the Old Testament as prefigurations of their parallels in the New Testament. They appropriated the history of Israel until the coming of Christ in that they viewed it as a gradual "preparation": God's providential acts, they maintained, are "accommodated" to the different capacity of humans at different times to perceive and to follow them. Since Eusebius of Caesarea, profane history, the history of the Empire, was likewise so appropriated as an evangelical preparation.

Contrasting the Jewish (or Christian) and the Greek perception of history, some scholars characterize the one as "linear," the other as "cyclical." Neither is the case. Where and when do we find, for the first time, an explicit insistence on the uniqueness of historical eventsor on the uniqueness of history as a whole? Perhaps not before Augustine. Against Origenes's doctrine of subsequent worlds (aeons) emerging each after the destruction of the other, in each of which the redeemer appears again, Augustine held with Paul that Christ came but once and for all times.24 If this is true of the central event in history, it is likewise

Tertullian, Apologeticus 19, 7 CCSLI, 121; Loeb Classical Library 250, p. 98: peregrinandum est in historias et litteras orbis .

Augustine, De civitate Dei XII, 21 CCSL 48, p. 376. Cf . Origenes, Contra Ceslum II, 3, 4; ed. Ktzschau I, p. 338; De principiis IV, p. 68 f. , ed. Klostermann, GCS Orig. V, p. 119. Clearly, Augustine slightly distorted the views of Origenes.

true of the entire history of the "city of God wandering (peregrinans ) on earth," a history that unfolds "like a grand symphony."25

Augustine's emphasis on the uniqueness of history may also be linked to his notion of time. The Aristotelian notion of time was that of a physicisttime measures external, repeated processes, such as the motion of the sphere of the fixed stars; Aristotle defines it as "the measure of motion according to the prior and posterior." To Augustine, by contrast, time measures both motion and restit is not the index of motion, but of experience and memory, much like Bergson's dure .26 Augustine's time is the internal time: as experience, it refers not to repetitive events or processes, but rather that which is distinct by its novelty and uniqueness. Kant may have been the first to unite both traditions of the perceptions of time.

I shall try to show how these ways of historical thinking in Christianitythe typological and the accommodativewere taken out of their original, purely exegetical context in the twelfth century to become modes of interpreting recent and present history. Until the twelfth century, Christian Europe did not view present events as significant events within the sacra historia: from early Christianity to the second coming of Christ, to his second "presence" (), the world was deemed to be in its sixth age, an age in which all that happens is that it "grows old." Theologians and historians in the twelfth century discovered that the events of their time were significant, worthy of "interpretation" no less than the events of the Old and New Testaments. No century in the Middle Ages was richer and more abundant in historical speculation and historiographic creativity than the twelfth.

In ancient times as in the Middle Ages, the writing of historywhether sacred or secular historywas guided by the implicit assumption that the historical fact is immediately given: it does not need to be interpreted in order to be meaningful except at the deeper theological level (spiritualis intelligentia ). The eyewitness thus seemed to them the most reliable historian, as I try to argue in the fourth essay.

Somewhere between the sixteenth and eighteenth century, a revolution occurred that was no less radical than the concurrent scientific revolution. It brought about a new contextual understanding of history, in which historical fact became "understood" or meaningful only through the context in which it is embedded. This applies to both historical texts and any other monument of the past. The historian must

Augustine, Epistulae 138 I, 5, ed. Goldbacher, CSEL 44 p. 130 (veluti magnum carmen . . .   excurrat ).

See n. 14.

reconstruct the context, and the reconstruction is always linked to his or her "point of view" in the present.

This contextual perception was anticipated to some extent in the medieval concept of accommodation mentioned above, in that it also deems some institutions "fit" or "unfit" for their time, and distinguishes periods according to different "qualities of time" (qualitas temporis ). But only in the seventeenth century was the idea transferred from the religious domain to the secular. Not until the nineteenth century did history become the primary discipline of all human sciences.

Such, in rough outlines, seems to me the emergence of historical consciousness in Europe. The Jewish historical consciousness was both part of it and different from it in important ways.

Jewish Historical Consciousness, Traditional and Modern

It is indeed a fact that from the canonization of the Scriptures until the nineteenth century, Judaism lacked a continuous historiographic tradition. The books of the Hasmoneans constituted an exception. Flavius Josephus wrote for a foreign audience; a fragmentary Latin paraphrase (the Josiphon) was translated only in the tenth century into Hebrew (the Book of Josiphon). Yerushalmi explains this absence of historiography in that the scriptural history provided the tana 'im, amora 'im, and generations after them with more than enough archetypical patterns to perceive the events of their time. These generations, at least until Ibn Verga's The Rod of Judah, saw no specific significance or identity in the events of their time. They viewed the characters of the Scripturesanother sign of typological perceptionas ubiquitous.27

But up to the eleventh century, historical conceptions in the Jewish horizon did not differ substantially from those of Christianity in this respect. Christian historiography in antiquity, with few exceptions (such as Orosius) was likewise little more than the chronology of the Church, written to establish the "chain of tradition" or the apostolic succession. Genuine historical narratives were still relatively rare in the early Middle Ages. Most authors of annals until the eleventh century did not regard the events of the present as truly digna memoriae except for the history of the Church.28 Only from the eleventh century onward do we find new attempts to link sacred and recent profane history into

Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 8-10, 35-36, 47 ff. , 108 n. 5.

Only Church historians emphasized the unbroken continuity of historiography; see chapter 2 on history as continuum.

one vision of the enfoldment of a divine plan. And while Jews did see in their present humiliation in dispersion a definite divine intention to purge Israel from its sins, details mattered only littlethey but added more of the same. Profane history per se was of no interest, even the profane history of biblical times. Rabbi David Kimchi informs us that "the chronicles of the Kings of Israel were recorded in a book. But this book did not join the Sacred Scriptures because the [northern] Kingdom of Israel did not last, and also in the future only the kingship of the house of David will be resurrected."29

Moreover, the secular historiography in Europe was, until the nineteenth century, first and foremost political historiography; it focused on the clear bearers of political power, on rulers and their actions. Here the communities of Israel, in the Diaspora and in Israel "in Arabian chains," saw themselves as political objects rather than subjects. Wherefore the political events of their own history as it developed did not Seem to them "worthy of memory": it was not their history.

Yet despite thisand perhaps because of itthe medieval Jews were not inclined to the typological vision and extreme typological interpretations that were common in their Christian environment. In emphasizing the typological element in traditional Jewish historical consciousness, Yerushalmi exaggerates:30 it exists principally in the analogy between the pristine time of the united Kingdom and the messianic period. We find only few typologies in Jewish liturgy (The Ninth of Av, Purim)in contrast to their abundance in the Christian literature. A famous exception, the subject of the eighth essay in this book, proves the rule: Ramban (Nachmanides) developed a detailed typological vision of history in his exegetical works. But barely anyone imitated his method, in spite of the immense popularity of his commentary.

Though historiography hardly existed in the traditional Jewish literature, and even if the midrash provided a paradigm for completely ahistorical interpretations, a modicum of historical awareness existed none-

In the introduction to his commentary of the Book of Chronicles, he explains why they omit continuous references to the Israelite kings. Cf. Sara Japhet. The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Jerusalem. 1977), pp. 264-77, esp. n. 169.

As does also Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine (Chicago and London, 1987), pp. 29-58. Neusner postulatesbut does not provethat Genesis Rabba was seen as a typological blueprint for all subsequent history. Cf. chapter 4, "History and Typology." Attention should, however, be given to his suggestion that many facets of the Jewish messianic imagery came in reaction to the ascendancy of Christianity.

theless elsewherenamely in the domain of legal reasoning. I do not mean Moses Maimonides's historical-accommodative interpretation of the "reasons for the commandments," the subject of the tenth essay, but rather the halakhic discussion itself throughout the ages. Here we find clear distinctions of time and place throughout: distinctions concerning customs and their context, exact knowledge of the place and time of the messengers and teachers of halakha, the estimated monetary value of coins mentioned in sources, the significance of institutions of the past. In the realm of halakha, every "event" was worthy of preserving, including minority opinions.

Once again we should not be in haste to see in all this an exclusively Jewish achievement. Interpreters of Roman law since antiquity paid careful attention to the circumstantiae of legal texts, their period, their location, and the usage of words that changed over the periods; their technique may have begun in rhetoric and philology. We recall that Aristarchus of Samos demanded that one "understand Homer with the aid of Homer alone,"31 and that pagan polemicists (such as Porphyrius) used the sense of anachronisms to question the authenticity of Jewish and Christian sacred writings. The degree of historical awareness of the commentators and creators of the halakha was approximately the same as the degree of historical awareness of the interpreters of Roman law in the Middle Ages prior to the development of the mos gallicus . To be more precise: the historical awareness of the sages of the halakha was restricted mainly to realia incorporated in rabbinical law and to questions of authenticity (such as the authenticity of the Zohar).32

I do not mean to say that legal reasoning was ipso facto historical reasoning. Some of its elements enhanced differential awareness of historical circumstances; others did not. An impediment to a true sense of anachronisms was the ubiquity of legal opinions: the legal discussion was a discussion across generations, in which all participants, past and present, met on one level of continuous presence. The homiletic imagination expressed this ubiquity when it made even some of Abraham's ancestors into heads of academies.33

See n. 19. Cf. , for example, T. Y. Kiddushin, ch. 1, 5.

See chapter 8, n. 17. (Emden, as before him Jehuda of Modena).

Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 138, n. 21 (Genesis Rabba 46, 4; 63, 7). The tendency to see all of history from the vantage point of the school is nowhere more pronounced than in the remark, in Echa Rabbati 2, "Bar Cochba said: I am the king messiah. The sages sent [a messenger to him] to see whether he could judge by smell [meriack veda 'm; a realization of the metaphor in Isaiah 11:31]. When they realized that he could not. they killed him."

Another facet of legal reasoning relevant to the perception of history, to its uses and abuses, was the deliberate employment of legal historical fictions. One such conscious fiction appears in the very beginning of the Savings of the Fathers: "Moses received the Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua, and Joshua passed it on to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the members of the Great Knesset." And where are the priests? Are not priests those whom the Scriptures designate to be the authorized commentators on the law"And thou shalt come unto the priests and Levites, and unto the judge that shall be in those days" (Deut. 17:9)? But the interests of the tana 'im required a line of tradition of lay interpreters of the law.

Another example is no less instructive:

On that same day [that Rabban Gamliel was demoted from the presidency at the court of Yavne] Yehuda, an Ammonite convert, came and asked to join the congregation. Rabbi Gamliel said to him: "You are forbidden, as it is said: 'No Ammonite or Moabite shall join the congregation of God."' Rabbi Joshua [b. Chananya] said to him: "Do Moab and Ammon remain in their place? Sanherib came and mixed up all the nations, as it is said: 'And I will remove the boundaries between nations and ruin their reserves.'"34

The time was shortly after the destruction of the Temple. Yavne tried to impose its legal authority and reduce to a minimum the internal barriers between groupssuch as the demand for ethnic purity required by priests so as to enable them to intermarry with nonpriestly families. "The priests agree to create distance but not to bring closer."35 For the sake of removing barriers, Rabbi Joshua b. Chananya was willing to ignore explicit scriptural evidence, such as the demand of Ezra to divorce Moabite and Ammonite womenan event which Joshua b. Chananya surely knew occurred after Sanherib.

Over and beyond these examples the basic fact remains plain: normative Judaism did not preserve a continuous record of political events in the form of chronicles or historical studies. It did, however, preserve a continuous and chronological record of legal innovations, and until the nineteenth century, Jews viewed the raison d'tre of their nation in the halakha. Innovations of halakha were genuine "historical" happenings, and the term "innovation" (chidush ) itself indicates that every halakhic ruling had to have historical, even if fictitious, legitimation.

My main aim in this brief review is to argue that historical conscious-

Mishna, Seder Toharot, Tractate Yadavim, ch. 4.

Ibid. , Seder Nezikin, Eduyot, chapter 8, 3 (almanat ha 'issa ).

ness, throughout the ages, does not contradict collective memory, but is rather a developed and organized form of it. The same holds true of historiography proper. While it is true that during the nineteenth century historiography became professionalized and, therefore, less accessible to the reading public, it is likewise true that at the same time the historian was given a special position as a high priest of culture, responsible for the legitimation of the nation-state. Historical studies, even the most technical, often reflected the problems of identity of the nation-state and other wishes and aspirations of the society in which the historian was embedded. Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to prove the continuity of French history since the ancien rgime and thus to restore the Revolution to French history; German historians debated whether Heinrich the Lion, Duke of Saxony, was right to refuse to participate in King Friedrich I's invasion of Italy, or whether Heinrich IV was indeed defeated by Pope Gregory VII at Canossa.

In the nation-state of the nineteenth century, "collective memory" was in part constructed by historians and found its way into society through textbooks, speeches, lectures, and symbols. Even the metatheoretical debate over the limits and unique means of cognition of the humanitiesempathetic "understanding" as opposed to causal-rational "explanation"reflected the feeling that writing history can best be done from the inside, while in the exact sciences one does not have to be a triangle in order to prove the Pythagorean theorem. The crisis of the nation-state in and after the First World War was also a "crisis of historicism."36

The same holds true for Jewish studies since the nineteenth century. How deeply did the radical historicization of Judaism separate scholars from "collective" Jewish memory? Yerushalmi thought that this separation became almost total. I doubt it. The collective memory of the community in which the Wissenschaft des Judentums was embedded shows a high degree of consonance in their fears and aspirations. Even if we grant that the majority of traditional Jews in France, Austria, and Germany were not aware of the full scope of the achievements of the Wissenschaft, its results nevertheless faithfully reflected the desires and the self-image of nineteenth-century Jews craving for emancipation, the mood of the "perplexed of the times." The vast majority of German and French Jews wanted to adopt the culture of their environment and at

Dilthey developed the main points of his teaching prior to the First World War. Troeltsch published his book after it: Ernst Troeltsch, Der Histoismus und seine Probleme (Tbingen, 1922).

the same time to preserve their special nature as a subculture.37 What suited that desire more than a presentation of the history of Israel as "the history of one and the same ideathe idea of [ethical-rational,] pure monotheism?" In the consciousness of the Jews until the nineteenth century, what made them unique among the nations of the world was their difference from others: they alone had been given the revealed law, they alone are bound to observe all its precepts. Their difference secured their existence, the "eternity of Israel." While other nations are subjects to the laws and contingencies of nature, "Israel has no guiding star." The last essays in this book try to show how, in the nineteenth century, this consciousness had been turned upside down; for the generations of gradually emancipated and secularized Jews, the uniqueness of Israel came to mean its universality . The learned studies of historians reflected the desire of their community and at times even shaped the "language" itself. Both Geiger's Urschrift and the Reform prayer bookthat is, both historiography and "collective memory"reflected the very same mentality and the same image of the past that wished to view contemporary Judaismand Judaism at all times in the pastas a liberal-bourgeois ideology open to its environment and to change. If Geiger interpreted the conflict between Sadducees and Pharisees as the clash of a national-conservative aristocracy and a democratic party open to change (of which Jesus was also an heir), only his scholarly acumen makes his interpretation more interesting for us today than the somewhat ridiculous homily in which "our forefather Jacob" appears as "an exemplary member of a municipal council" (unser Erzvater Jacob das Vorbild eines Stadtverordneten ).

The nation-state replaced the sacred liturgical memory with secular liturgical memorydays of remembrance, flags, and monuments. The national historian, who in the nineteenth century enjoyed the status of a cultural priest, and whose work, even professional, was still read by a wide stratum of the educated public, made the symbols concrete. It even created some of them, some almost from nothing, such as the legend of Hermann, the Cheruskian hero. A comprehensive critical study of the symbols and signs related to Jewish collective memory today, in Israel and outside it, has yet to be written. The pioneering article

Amos Funkenstein. "Hermann Cohen: Philosophic, Deutschtum und Judentum," in Jahrbuch des Instituts fr Deutsche Geschichte, Beiheft 6, pp. 355-65 (Tel Aviv, 1984); David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (New York, 1987).

by Saul Friedlndcr,38 on the memorialization of the Holocaust and the revival, is a good starting point for such studies. They will, I believe, lead to the conclusion that the distance between secular Jews (or secular Israeli culture) and traditional Judaism was created not by the lack of historical knowledge and symbols, but by their alienation from texts and textual messages, the halakha and the midrash . At any rate, in the history of Zionism and the Jewish settlement of Palestine, historiography likewise reflected the accepted norms and ideals of the society it served.

This is not meant to deny the critical role of the historian in modern society or to view his critical achievements as mere lip service. On rare occasions, the historian runs against the current and combats distorted "collective" images of the past; even more rarely, he succeeds in creating a new discourse beyond his professional domain. Nevertheless, the critical argument itself can become a pattern of "collective memory," as did the Marxist or the psychoanalytical idiom. Even the most aware and critical of historians is bound by assumptions, not all of which he is fully conscious of.

The fact that the historian is always influenced by the "point of view" of time and place,39 from which he or she cannot be altogether detached, does not necessarily impede the historical understanding. At times it adds a dimension that was entirely absent in the horizon of discourse of the period the historian wants to understand: the medieval period did not record its own economic history. Historical consciousness begins with the data of the present; the object of historical interpretation is never "completely determined," and every interpretation that does not contradict an agreed-upon factual basis adds to our "understanding."

But this is not the place to develop a comprehensive epistemology of historical interpretations. I have tried only to examine briefly the relation of historical consciousness to collective memory and historical writing, and thus to contribute to the demystification of collective entities. And I have also indicated what I believe is the main theme of historical reflection among Jews: the grounding of their uniqueness in an understanding of history.

Saul Friedlnder, "Die Shoah als Element in der Konstruktion israelischer Erinnerung," Babylon 2 (1987): pp. 10-22.

See chapter 3, n. 20.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: California University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520077024
• ISBN 13: 9780520077027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408