Reclaiming Jewish History

By Bonnie Cousens

What is the real story of the Jewish people and their experience? Can we connect with our ancestors as they really were, rather than as we imagined them to be? Through stimulating surveys of their field and serious, even heated, discussions of the implications of their ideas, the panel and participants in the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism’s Colloquium '97 discovered much about the truth and legends of Jewish history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 15, 1999
• ISBN: 9780985877866

Book preview

WHY READ JEWISH HISTORY?

Steven J. Zipperstein

Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Stanford University. He has taught at Oxford, Cornell, and U.C.L.A., as well as in Poland and Russia and at Hebrew University, and his work has been translated into many languages.

Dr. Zipperstein has lectured widely and has been awarded the Judah L. Magnes Gold Medal by the American Friends of Hebrew University.

His first book, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (1985) won the Smilen Award and was named the outstanding book in Jewish history published that year. His book Elusive Prophet: Ahad Hdam and the Origins of Zionism (1993) was recipient of the National Jewish Book Award. He has served as editor of the journal Jewish Social Studies, as well as the book series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture.

WHY READ JEWISH HISTORY?

There was once a kingdom whose holiest city was perched on a mountain above a fierce desert. It produced, much like its neighbors, its share of stories about the origins of the world, its heroes and villains, its disasters and triumphs, the happy and furious interventions of God. Its belief in one God (once this belief coalesced, that is) set it apart somewhat. But this people was known (to the extent to which it was known outside its immediate borders) mostly as a warlike people, awkwardly situated as it was along the route of invading armies. The intrusion of the larger world was, in the end, a curse and a blessing: such intrusions led to the disruption of the lives of the people of Israel and the eventual disappearance of the so-called ten tribes; it pitted the remaining Judeans, rather unequally, against Greeks, later the Romans, too, who nonetheless had mostly complimentary things to say about the people of Israel. To be sure, the Greeks also had some unkind things to say but these weren't drastically different from what they said about other strangers.

The intrusions of these grander empires played a major role, however, in thrusting this otherwise small, otherwise rather undistinguished people (by the standards of the day, that is) into the larger world. It also helped make some of their internal religious debates—which is precisely what, originally at least, the difference between that Jew named Jesus and his critics amounted to—into the central spiritual concerns of the western world. And aspects of these debates over the prerequisites of piety, salvation, goodness, the nature of God's law would come to define the thinking of much of the western world for the next two thousand years.

Indeed, among the most resonant images in the western world would eventually be that of a Jew, bleeding on a cross, crucified, as many long believed, by Jews. It is not that this always would inspire hostility, but the power of such imagery meant that Jews were, in one way or another, now thrust into center stage and in ways that would never have been predicted before and that had little to do, as often as not, with their actual numbers, with their objective influence, with their actual lives. They would now seem uncannily influential, if only because Jesus, his story, and his followers’ ruminations about the people of Israel would remain at the center of Western consciousness.

It was, then, the mythical lives of the Jews as embodied in sacred text, in resonant image, in the imaginations of much of the world that tended most vividly to represent them. The words Jew or Pharisee would come to evoke for many the most readily accessible images of betrayal, of spiritual blindness, of the limitations of soul and imagination.

These terms would also spark a fascination with a people whose stories of origin were now, willy-nilly, also those of so much of the rest of mankind. The tales of this people (not all that dissimilar in content from those produced by others of the same Near Eastern region) now came to define Western culture long after Jewry's cultic center in Jerusalem was destroyed and this people dispersed.

In this lecture I will seek to identify a cluster of themes as I follow this culture (I use, interchangeably, terms like civilization, culture, and people) from Judea, to Babylonia, from the shores of the Black Sea where ancient Jewish communities sprouted up before the beginning of the Common Era, to elsewhere in Europe, to northern Africa, to Asia, and, eventually, to the Americas. I'll blend analysis of history and faith, high culture and everyday life, language and the other artifacts of material existence.

I will also, at the end of this talk, reflect on why it is that this history ought to matter to us. It matters, not the least of which, because it helps us appreciate better our own, often unarticulated sense of the world: our assumptions about ourselves, our kin, our loved ones, our enemies, our assumptions about loyalty, work, death, about our most intimate reactions which, as we are reminded, are shaped by forces larger than ourselves. It should not be seen as an exercise in narcissism, or an excessive preoccupation with the self to acknowledge that our interest in the past begins, as often as not, with ourselves in the present. As long as we remain willing to wrestle honestly with the past such impulses can be both inspiring and enlightening.

Take, for instance, the following example of the efficacy of such knowledge about the past in understanding what was (until recently, at least) a rather typical Jewish reaction: the great Yiddish cultural historian Max Weinreich once proposed that the reason why so many Jews are frightened of dogs is because of the practice of Polish noblemen who set dogs on Jews in the East European countryside. Hence, Weinreich suggested, the most effective test of the relative acculturation of Jews is not to ask them what language they speak but, rather, whether or not dogs scared them: the more terrified, the more history impinged on them; the less scared, the less it shaped that particular Jew.

The pleasures as well as the nightmares of history will preoccupy us tonight. Among the more pronounced of these pleasures through the centuries—and also, for some, one of the more nightmarish features of this past—is, of course, the power and resonance of faith. The Jewish culture about which I speak here as a historian cannot until modernity, and for many Jews not then, be severed from the wages of belief, ritual practice, rabbinic or mystical authority (which were, of course, often one and the same), from the ritually prescribed life cycle that determined so much about one's sense of time, season, so much about the pace of everyday life, its joys and its pressures. Clearly, we must not reduce all of the Jewish experience to faith: that would flatten Jewish history irreparably. But to overlook its power, its beauty, its wisdom, and also its repressiveness would obscure much about the subject we talk about tonight.

I speak this evening about three very broad themes: about wandering Jews, about social or class conflict and, finally, and perhaps most pertinently, about why it is that knowledge of Jewish history ought to matter? Several of the examples I draw upon for this talk will be, not surprisingly, from the world I know best: that of East European Jewry since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But I will cast my net wide across the full expanse of our history.

I begin with the wandering Jew because it helps us see clearly, I think, the interplay of myth and history in popular understandings of the Jewish past. It also helps remind us of the influence of christological notions on how we, as Jews and gentiles alike, tend to see Jewish history. What I mean by this is that the image of the wandering Jew is, in its origins and its character, a Christian notion starting with traditions dating back to the thirteenth century, and earlier, that there was actually a Jew, cursed by Jesus, spotted intermittently in Armenia, in England, in Hamburg, and elsewhere, who wandered since the time of Jesus and, alas, long after he repented of his errors and embraced Christ. In much of Christian lore about the wandering Jew (and this is a vast literature) he already believes in Christ but wanders nonetheless—eternal testimony to Jewry's blindness, to its perfidy, to the veracity of the teachings of Christianity. (This was an extraordinarily widespread legend—the most popular of the versions of this story, published in pamphlet form in German in 1602, went through twenty different editions in the year of its publication alone.) This image is the product, then, of the Christian imagination, not of Jewish history, and it remains resilient for reasons that are, strictly speaking, theological, not historical.

But, despite this, as you might well counter, the existence of the wandering Jew is, in broad strokes if not in the precise details I've related, indisputable. Whoever knows an old Jew knows, most probably, someone who has wandered, who was a foreigner and who saw at least a part of his or her life as one of dislocation. The vast majority of America's five or six million Jews and the vast majority of Israel's Jews, too, are the products of relatively recent immigrants, mostly turn of the century, and many of more recent vintage. Mel Brooks jokes that he assumed as a kid that when someone got old they immediately acquired a Yiddish accent: immigration, dislocation all seem to many of us part and parcel of the Jewish experience.

And this image is, or so it would seem, tragically pertinent to Jews throughout their experience: Think of the repeated explosions of European Jews, starting with the 1290 expulsion from England. The Spanish expulsion, the Khmelnitzsky pogroms of the mid-seventeenth century which caused so much of the Jewish community of the Ukraine to flee for their lives: the image of wandering Jews would appear to be, in this respect, as old as history itself. And this poor but spiritually rich wanderer even found his way onto Broadway, dressed as a fiddler, canonized as one of the outstanding emblems of Jewish life across time and space.

In truth, in modern times, particularly in the past one hundred years, Jews have, indeed, been unusually peripatetic. But it is important to bear in mind that mass migration is a product of the modern age, the product of cheap transportation, of countries (pre-eminently in the Americas) eager for large numbers of unskilled laborers, of rapid industrialization, and massive overpopulation in Europe and elsewhere. Jewish migration patterns before the late nineteenth century were by no means dramatic. Earlier, if we are to chart the movement of Jews from Byzantium through Europe this is a process with far fewer dislocations than one might imagine—the most dramatic of which was, of course, the 1492 explosion of Jews from Spain, which was seen at the time as all the more devastating because it was, essentially, unprecedented. Jews faced it without a preexisting framework with which to understand what such a catastrophe meant. The Spanish expulsion would haunt the Jewish imagination for years to come.

In broad strokes, the Jewish movement across Europe followed a course from southern Europe and, eventually, to north and west beginning in significant numbers only in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Movement from Spain to North Africa, Turkey, and Eastern Europe started in large numbers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and from central to eastern Europe westward in the late 1860s and, especially beginning at the turn of the twentieth century.

A medieval expulsion often meant that one was compelled to move from one jurisdiction to another no more than a few miles away; often, in fact, it meant leaving one neighborhood for another in the same city. These comments are not meant to minimize the dislocation this must have entailed—or, for that matter, the sense of exile, of apartness, and often vulnerability that characterized Jewish self-perceptions in even relatively comfortable settings in pre-modern times. At the same time, it is simply an error to superimpose our images of countless Jews rushing toward the harbors of Hamburg or Liverpool toward the New World onto medieval Jewry: such movement did not then exist for anyone. The reasons why Jews are popularly associated with restless, relentless movement has less to do with social reality than with the religious presuppositions of Christianity.

These remarks might also encourage you to reconsider the still-widespread notion that Jewish life under Christianity, in particular, was until modernity a living hell, a thousand years and more of persecution alleviated only by the pursuit of Jewish scholarship, the fervor of Jewish messianic expectation, the warmth of the Jewish family, these the few, often elusive havens in an otherwise relentlessly hostile world. Yet a diminution of tragedy as the primary category in our understanding of the experience of Jews across history also forces us to recognize, I think, that the Central and East European Jewish world obliterated in this century was one where our people had far deeper roots than we sometimes assume. It was a world where many of our families had resided, and often in the same very spot, for generations—although this collective knowledge has been eradicated for most of us along with the Jewish communities themselves.

I recall thinking about this self-evident but strangely unsettling fact when, about three years ago, I passed for the first time near Kamenetz-Podolsk, in the Ukraine, on a train bound from Moscow to Odessa. Here in a region where my wife's family had lived for as long as anyone could remember, from where her grandmother, now nearly one hundred, brought with her magical incantations to Los Angeles—none of which she can understand but that remain, to this day, her most trustworthy armor against the hostile forces of the world—here, I realized, was a sort of home. I remember thinking at the time, only half-fancifully, how I now better understood why the pioneering songs of the East European halutzim (pioneers) to the Land of Israel tended to be so sad: these women and men had forsaken this gorgeous land, this stunning countryside punctuated by whitewashed towns with their healthy-looking, often quite beautiful Ukrainian women, a landscape that seemed, as unlikely as this might appear, painfully familiar, so familiar that it hurt to look at it since its towns—Kamenetz- Podolsk, Zhitomir, Berdichev, once synonymous, for Jew and gentile alike, with Jewish life—were now, and would always be, empty of Jews.

Neither when they wandered, nor when they stayed put, were Jews as peaceful or cooperative with one another as is sometimes assumed. We move now to our second topic. The themes of social and class conflict in Jewish history will, I suspect, be given a new lease on life in the near future: this in contrast to the overriding premise of much of the now-standard, existing Jewish history that has tended to emphasize consensus and cohesiveness in Jewish community life. Both the Columbia University historian Salo Baron and, before him, the distinguished historian Simon Dubnow devoted much of their considerable energy and erudition to writing about Jewish communal cooperation. The impact of Zionism, too, tended to solidify much the same consensual understanding of Jewish history.

There is, of course, something to this notion: the persistence of Jews in history would have been inconceivable without considerable mutual cooperation across social, class, cultural, linguistic, and geographical boundaries. Baron, for example, argued in his monumental A Social and Religious History of the Jews how Jewish urbanization rates, migration patterns, even economic activities ought to be understood as international phenomena. Much like the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz before him, Baron saw the Jews essentially as one tribe whose scattered adherents were unified by a common spiritual consciousness and much else. Still more explicitly than Baron, Simon Dubnow in Russia and Benzion Dinur in Palestine and the State of Israel saw their work as historians as linked to their commitment to nation-building that, in turn, further muted a preoccupation with internal conflict, with social or class tensions in Jewish life.

Before we turn to what this has meant for the writing of Jewish history, it is worthwhile to note that there is something amusing about a historical image that bears so little resemblance to Jewry's own sense of itself: on the one hand, we speak about ourselves as wildly quarrelsome (two Jews, three shuls [synagogues]), as a people who can't help but subject themselves to voluble, all-too visible, ferocious self-immolation. (The literary critic Irving Howe once speculated that the so-called Southern writers, like Allen Tate, who achieved great prominence in the U.S. in the 1930s and 40׳s had a far easier time of it because, unlike their Jewish competitors, they tended to praise one another's work. Jewish intellectuals, like Howe, on the other hand, savaged one another relentlessly.) Quarrelsome in the flesh, uncannily cooperative in the past—we're asked to believe that a culture known to be almost obsessively argumentative in private is a model of public decorum and unity. Even without recourse to archives, the notion boggles the imagination. We are One, the United Jewish Appeal used to say; the slogan always seemed to me an exercise in special pleading.

This represents, in any event, a flattened reading of the past that will, I think, make way for new, more persuasive interpretations of the sort that I will soon discuss. Here we have a good example of how changes in the world in which we live reshape our sense of what it is that was important in history, too: a consensual understanding of the Jewish past is less likely to be persuasive now in the face of open, fierce conflict in present-day Jewish life between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox in Israel, with American Conservative and Reform Jews openly battling the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, and with Jews