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Perceptions of Jewish History

University of California Press

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

"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 )....