David Sclar, “History for Religious Purposes: The Writing, Publication, and Renewal of Tsemah David,” Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture 12:1 (April 2015): 16–30. (original) (raw)
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History as the rise of a modern Jewish identity
History has always held an important place in the forming, inflection and reflection of Jewish identity. The emancipation movement and subsequent Jewish enlightenment in 19th-century Germany brought about a major crisis in Jewish identity regarding issues around integration to modern German society. From this emerged both an intellectual and a religious movement that sought different ways to negotiate Judaism within a Christian hegemony. But these movements were in conflict with one another, each vying to support the correct means of social participation and integration without assimilation. History, more precisely historiography, became the central element of delineating one form of modern Jewish identity upon which this conflict was waged. In this article, I will outline the important role historiography took in the rise of the scientific study of Judaism or Wissenschaft des Judentums in modern Germany, the emergence of the Jewish Reform movement and its impact on Jewish socio-religious identity, and conclude by delineating the second-generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its negation of the Reform movement. This essay underscores the connections between historiography and identity. Reform Judaism developed out of the 19th-century emancipation movement in Germany that allowed Jews, and other ethnic minorities, to participate openly in civil society as citizens. Within this inclusivist social thrust, the German Jewish community were offered new opportunities to engage modes of cultural production—i.e. academia, art, governance, economics and business. This, along with new secular-modernist definitions of citizenship and an identification with the nation-state, developed a need to reinterpret Judaism from its conceptions of the past to fit modern views. However, Jewish emancipation came with the price of assimilation to Christian society. Jewish scholars and liberal reformers aimed to negotiate Jewish identity within this modern social context without succumbing to assimilation. By mid-century, this caused an irreparable rift between liberal Jewish reformers and conservative Jewish scholars. History and historiography became the rhetorical tool in this polemic between social engagement and ethnic differentiation. I wish to discuss the relevancy and impact of 19th-century Jewish historiography on the Jewish Reform and counter-reform movements, and the forging of a modern Jewish identity. This thesis will be argued in three major sections. The first section will engage the definition, historical context and experience of Jewish emancipation and the Jewish Enlightenment within a German context. In so doing, we will understand the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums or the scientific study of Judaism. The second section will investigate the burgeoning Reform movement by underscoring its relationship to Wissenschaft and modernity, its founders, and its core values and concerns. In order to gain the clearest view of these developments, I will explore the work and worldview of Abraham Geiger, considered the progenitor of the modern Jewish Reform movement. This will lead to the third and final section that questions the impact the Reform movement had on Jewish historiography, or the writing of Jewish history, at the height of the 19th-century. This discussion is most concerned with the place of historiography in the counter-movement against Jewish Reform. I will discuss the second generation of Wissenschaft scholars focusing on the historian Heinrich Graetz. I will outline his conception of history and delineate how he used historiography to counter Geiger's Reform movement and make epistemological innovations. This, ultimately, will explain how this very influential religious movement impacted the writing of Jewish history and, moreover, the forging of a modern Jewish identity. 1 I would like to thank Dr. Ira Robinson for his guidance and mentorship in writing this article, Dr. Rebecca Margolis for her comments and editing, and David Walsh for his insight and patience in reviewing this material.
The modernization of European Jewry was a gradual process that spread from individuals to communities and from one social class to another. It travelled from city to small town and from central and western Europe eastward. Among its component elements were economic redistribution, acculturation, secular edu cation, and religious reform. Scholars have examined each of these elements and their interrelation. They have also recognized the appearance of a new historical consciousness that began to play a crucial role in the formation of modern Jewish identity. Recently, the shifting relation of Jews to their history has received much attention, both in general surveys and in specific studies.' Yet the emergence of a fresh historical awareness, after centuries in which historical interest was at best limited, deserves further consideration, for the process was by no means simple and straightforward. As Jews began to attribute major significance to his tory in general and to Jewish history in particular, they faced issues that were not speedily or uniformly resolved: What was the purpose of historical study? What history should be learned? How was the study of history related to Jewish religion and its possible reform? And perhaps most important, should the study of Jewish history principally serve to liberate the Jew from tradition by historicizing it or create a new attachment to the past by reconceiving it as a model or anchorage for the present? These questions emerge especially among German Jews during the periods of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The answers given reflect both the intellectual milieu and the specific historical situation of the Jews. I. THE VALUE OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE Although Moses Mendelssohn, the first prominent and articulate modern Jew, on one occasion complained of his boredom with history, his first biographer, Isaac Euchel, felt constrained to point out, in 1788, that his subject's secular edu cation had begun with historical studies. That remark, in turn, served as a good l. The general works include
Considering the many attempts to defi ne what constitutes knowledge, and especially those to distinguish it from belief, 1 one gets the impression that religious knowledge is a contradiction in terms or at least a curiosity. The fact that religion, which necessarily implies religious knowledge, is based on self-evident convictions -on the belief in an entity oft en described as all knowing -contradicts the rationality usually ascribed to knowledge. From a historical perspective this assumption has to be challenged, however. For not only were conceptions of rationality and religion subject to change and continue to be so, but religious movements time and again claimed to be rational in essence.
In his influential Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi analyzed brilliantly the transition in Jewish conceptions of Jewish history from premodern to modern times. The present paper discusses a number of alternative perspectives on this transition. Yerushalmi argued convincingly the importance of the traditional conception of Jewish history, which he labeled "Jewish memory," for Jewish survival. This paper challenges the terminology, agrees with the role played by the traditional Jewish thinking in Jewish survival, and emphasizes the premodern circumstances that made the traditional thinking so vital and effective. With respect to modern conceptions of Jewish history, which Yerushalmi associates with Jewish history writing, this paper argues that an examination of the circumstances of modernity reveals the creativity of this altered view of the Jewish past and the ways in which it in turn has fostered Jewish survival in the face of radically new challenges.