Modern Jewish historiography

Jewish history books in the National Library of Israel 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. 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. 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. 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. 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."¹