a near perfect series of four lectures on the interplay between jewish thought, history, and the challenge of historiography in a tradition built upon collective memory. honestly mindblowing, need to read again ASAP

A neat explanation of place of historiography throughout Jewish history. Until modern times, Jews used the Torah (our history through the Second Temple) to make sense of our world and our future. Everything could be mapped onto the model of our ancient past, the group memory that we shared, and therefore we never needed to record the particulars of our history throughout the middle ages. In the 1500s, the Spanish expulsion was seen as a novelty in the Jewish world and perceived as the last exile, leading to a brief interest in historiography. However, this was short-lived and ultimately died out as Jews instead turned to kabbalah as a means to understand and change their world. 

Modern Jewish historiography began with Jewish emancipation and the emergence of Jews from the ghetto. Jews absorbed the historicist perspectives of 19th century European culture. "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." 19th century Jewish ideologies needed something to turn to for validation, and rather than faith, they chose history. An interesting element here that separated the study of Jewish history from gentile history is that European historians had an honored role in supporting the nationalism of their countries, but Jews had to give up their national identity in exchange for emancipation, and so "they reconstructed a Jewish past in which the national element was all but suppressed, and the hope for national restoration seemed an anachronism." Modern Jewish historiography also must reject the basic premises of past Jewish conceptions of history: belief that divine providence is an active causal factor in Jewish history, and belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history. The result of this historiography is the negation of the idea of a "normative Judaism," again, in contrast to how Jews see our history as "the singular chronicle of a singular people." The Jewish historian can't restore an eroding Jewish memory because  Jewish historiography is at odds with Jewish memory, and Jewish memory never depended on historians to begin with! 

Lastly, he argues that historiography is not an attempt to restore memory, but recreate an ever-more detailed past, undoing the selection of what was chosen to remain as group memory. But historiography can't provide a clear pattern of development or an interpretation of Jewish history the way Jewish memory and our powerful messianic faith does. This helps us understand why despite being the most "sustained Jewish intellectual effort in modern times," historiography has had barely any impact on modern Jewish thinking & perception. Modern Jews are ambivalent towards the past as we see our existence as something totally new, so we are nostalgic for the past but don't like what it has to offer. As in the 16th century, post-Holocaust Jews are not prepared to confront history directly, but seem to await a new, metahistorical myth. We construct anthologies of the past to explain how we got where we are, despite having re-rentered the main stream of history. It is the historian's job to expose these myths, as some are beneficial and some are harmful. We need to give up trying to construct continuities with the Jewish past and confront every radical break in our past. This will allow us to acknowledge that some things were lost and did not come to us in some new form- but we can try to retrieve some of it and get some meaning from it.

I found this really interesting and thought-provoking. I'm left with so much to think about, especially relating to our obsession with continuity, the mythical pasts we create to support that obsession, and our difficulties with accepting loss and rupture. I'm glad I read this with Chanukah coming up because tensions between group memory and history and reconstructed mythical history are exactly what drives me crazy at this time of year. Also very relevant to the situation of historiography in Orthodox and especially modox circles & the orientialism present in our conceptions of our history. love!