One of the things I love about history is that sometimes, it goes “meta” on you. What I mean is that on the one hand, there are historians who write about history. And on the other hand, there are historians who write about how other historians write history. It’s historiography: the history of history. (Sick of the word “history” yet? Too bad!) For example, there’s E.H. Carr’s What is History?, or Mary Spongberg’s Writing Women’s History Since the Rennaissance, or The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology by Thomas Söderqvist. One of the neat things about history is that there’s no one way to produce it: over time, historians’ accounts of, say, Classical history will be influenced by variations in research methodology, philosophical approach, and even values.
What’s all this got to do with Jewish books?, you may wonder. Well, it just so happens that earlier today, I began to read a wonderful little gem of a book called Zakhor: Jewish Memory and Jewish History, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Jewish historiography!
In this book, Yerushalmi traces the development of how Jews not only studied, but remembered, their own history. According to Yerushalmi, throughout much of its lifetime, Judaism has had an uneasy relationship with the formal writing and studying of history. He claims that writers of Jewish history over the ages have typically engaged in what should really be called “selective memory” – recording and commemorating some events and not others, couching historical events in a religious language and context, or simply forgoing recorded history in favor of commemorative holidays or liturgical poems. It’s all fascinating stuff, gracefully written, and completely accessible for any lay reader.
I also happen to know that JPS will, in the upcoming months, be publishing a work of Jewish history that dates back to the medieval period, and which is discussed in Zakhor. So keep your eyes peeled, and when the book is finally published, look to Zakhor to read about its historical context.
Heck, read Zakhor right now. It’s awesome.
- Naomi
#1 by Michael Makovi on October 22, 2009 - 8:06 pm
This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for some time. (It’s part of a VERY long list.)
I remember reading a summary of one of Yerushalmi’s points, something to the effect that while moderns know more history than pre-moderns, we feel less connection to history. Pre-moderns knew less about history, but they felt more intimately a part of that history.
That ties into something Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger said about the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars: if you want to know what kind of ink Rashi wrote with, see the Wissenschaft scholars – but if you want to know what Rashi actually said, see me. (Cited in Rabbi Isaac Herzog, Judaism: Law and Ethics) Similarly, Rabbi S. R. Hirsch (Ettlinger’s student) quipped (in his first essay (of six) on Tisha b’Av (”Tisha b’Av I”), and again in his essay “How to Carry Jewish Learning in Practical Life”, that it’s better to be a pious Jew who recites selihot but has no idea who wrote them when, than it is to be a Wissenschaft scholar who knows who wrote what when, but never rises up late at night to actually recite them.
I don’t wholly agree with Rabbis Ettlinger and Hirsch on this (this is one the VERY few things on which I disagree with Rabbi Hirsch), but their point has some truth to it.
So Yerushalmi’s book remains on my list of books to buy.
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Actually, it wasn’t until I read Rav Hirsch’s essay “How to Carry Jewish Learning into Practical Life” that I finally came to appreciate his stance on academic study of Torah sources.
I had long known of Rabbi Hirsch’s polemic against Frankel and Graetz, and I knew that the Berlin school of Rabbis Esriel Hildesheimer and D. Z. Hoffman disagreed with Rav Hirsch on the subject of academic study of Torah. (Rabbi Hirsch was afraid that Rabbi Hoffman’s monograph “Mar Samuel” was too similar to the work of Graetz.)
But I never really understood why Rav Hirsch was so opposed to this study. We’re talking a man who said that no Jewish youth could understand the Tanakh without studying ancient Egyptian and Babylonian history. How could such a man oppose academic study of Torah sources??!!
Finally, I read “How to Carry Jewish Learning into Practical Life”. This essay, besides being a fantastic source on Rav Hirsch’s notion of Torah as a non-theological non-metaphysical anthropological theonomy (which Heschel borrowed; see the translator’s appendix to Rabbi Dr. Leo Adler’s The Biblical View of Man), also contains what is perhaps Rav Hirsch’s best, most clear exposition on the subject of academic study of Torah.
In this essay, Rav Hirsch discusses some of the amazing academic findings. For example: we know that Jeremiah must have been writing around the time of the Babylonian exile, because at one point he used parchment, and we know that parchment didn’t exist until the Babylonian exile. (Similarly, for Wellhausen, it was one of the finalities of scholarship that in Moshe Rabenu’s time, no one was literate. Then we discovered the Hammurabi Code and the Tel el Amarna letters, sounding the death-knell for JEPD. Higher-criticism is still possible – cf. Albright etc. – but not of the Wellhausian variety.)
If that’s the sort of garbage the Wissenschaft scholaries were putting out, then no wonder Rav Hirsch called bunk on the entire enterprise! And therefore, we can distinguish between his demand for yeshiva youth to study ancient Near Eastern history, and his denunciation of academic study of Torah.
And then you add in what he said about selihot, and the picture is complete.
Rav Hirsch was biased by the fact that academic study was usually opposed to traditional study, rather than being paired with it hand-in-hand. It appears to me quite likely that if Rav Hirsch were alive today to see what academic study of Torah has accomplished, he’d be sounding quite a different tune. I imagine he’d be right up there with Rabbi Haim David Halevi, gushing with praise for the enterprise.