Beiheft 27

Essays in Jewish Historiography

Cover image: detail of Leon Modena (1930), from the Shvadron Collection of the National Library of Israel

+ SHAYE J. D. COHEN, History and Historiography in the Against Apion of Josephus, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 1-11.

The Against Apion of Josephus is not only a defense of Judaism and Jewish history, but also an essay in historiography and historical criticism, as an outline of the work reveals. Josephus explains how history should and should not be written, and attempts to prove that certain versions of the past are truer than others. The Against Apion may attack the reliability and integrity of Greek historiography as being divisive and instable, but it is from the Greeks that Josephus learned the idea and techniques of historical criticism. He develops his argument by appeal to the superiority of Jewish history, canon, and community, but all these pro-Jewish and anti-Greek arguments have Greek origins. The Greek argument from consensus shaped the historical and theological argumentation of the Against Apion, and Greek precedents provided the basis for the ahistorical or antihistorical view of Judaism that Josephus proposes. Josephus' polemic proves weakest in his argument from canon, and in his contrasting Jewish stability with Greek restiveness.

+ JACOB NEUSNER, Judaic Uses of History in Talmudic Times, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 12-39.

Talmudic history, understood as how events are organized and narrated to teach, cannot be said to deal with great affairs; it simply tells what those responsible for compiling it thought about the world around them. But if manifest history is scarcely present, a rich and complex world of latent history does lie ready at hand. The Talmud and related literature contain two sorts of historical information: stories about events within an estate of clerks, and data on the debates of those who produced the Talmud. The authors of the Mishnah found no reason to narrate history because what was important in Israel's existence was sanctification, an ongoing process. Its framers recognized the pastness of the past and hence, by definition, laid out a conception of the past that constitutes an historical doctrine. The Talmud of the Land of Israel, spurred by the story of the suffering of Israel and efforts to explain the tragedy, moves toward an interest in the periodization of history and a willingness to include events of far greater diversity than the Mishnah. A teleology lacking all eschatological dimension - the Mishnah - here gives way to an explicitly messianic statement that the purpose of the law is to attain Israel's salvation -the Talmud of the Land of Israel.

+ ROBERT CHAZAN, Representation of Events in the Middle Ages, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 40-55.

In medieval Jewish perception and representation of self and other there was a propensity toward viewing current happenings through the prism of the past. The general human inclination toward patterning, acting in combination with a strong Jewish sense of historic continuum, produced a pronounced tendency toward archetypical representation, such as that found in rabbinic literature and synagogue liturgy, as well as in the chronicles penned in the wake of the crusader assaults of 1096. At- the same time, a host of specific needs and a similarly broad human inclination towards particularity engendered perceptions and descriptions that were remarkably free of stereotyping -perceptions and descriptions that are rooted in full awareness of the inevitable complexity of everyday human experience.

+ BRUNO CHIESA, A Note on Early Karaite Historiography, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 56-65.

Poznanski's Mabo' 'al 'ofen ketibat ha-Qara'im 'et dibrey yemehem (An Introduction to Karaites'Manner of Writing in Their Own History) remains, despite its flaws, the only essay expressly devoted to Karaite historiography. al-Qirqisani's Kitab al-an war wal-maraqib (The Book of Lights and Watchtowers) is an historical piece of work viewed, by personal choice or owing to his own cultural development or under the historical circumstances, through theological glasses. al-Qirqisani was writing for the benefit of his own co-religionists in order to strengthen their faith. However limited his historical perspective may appear, it resolves into a public appreciation of the author's party, which is founded on a recovery of the past, and which aimed to strengthen the Selbstverstandnis of a Jewish minority. It would be difficult to describe such an approach otherwise than as an attempt to historicize the past. The Kitab al-anwar appears not only as a document of the literary history of Karaism, but as an original reading of the history of Judaism, the differentiation between secular and religious being only ours.

+ LOUIS JACOBS, Historical Thinking in the Post-Talmudic Halakhah, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 66-77.

Investigation into the history of the Talmud was sparked by the Karaite rebellion against the authority of the Talmud at the beginning of the eighth century. The most influential work of Talmudic chronology is the Iggeret de-Rav Sherira Gaon ("The Letter of Rabbi Sherira Gaon"), composed in 986, which sought to explain how the Mishnah and the Talmud were compiled, and demonstrate the unbroken chain of the tradition. Maimonides gives a summary of the history of the tradition in his Commentary to the Mishnah. Although Maimonides' reconstruction is an artificial one, with no attempt to verify sources or test their reliability, he stated that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled about one hundred years after the Jerusalem (or Palestinian) Talmud; in cases of disagreement, therefore, the rulings of the Babylonian Talmud were the ones adopted by the post-Talmudic Halakhah. The French glossators, or Tosafists, argued that a law in the Talmud could be changed when the original circumstances in which it was promulgated were no longer evident. More objective, critical historical accounts have been given by more modern scholars, particularly Yon Tov Lippmann Heller, Jeheil Heilprin, and Hayyim Joseph David Agulai.

+ ROBERT BONFIL, How Golden was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography? History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 78-102.

Jewish historiographical production of the Renaissance and Baroque periods was in fact the expression of the unsuccessful attempt by a handful of individuals to make sense of Jewish history as a living history in diaspora conditions. Their failure was the inevitable result of the essential incompatibility of the subject matter of history, in those days conceived mainly as political and military narrative, and the destiny of their people the world over. Jewish historiographic output can be seen as part of the Jewish endeavor to redefine Jewish identity at the dawn of the modern era. However, the time had not yet come for a "New History" among both Jews and non-Jews -attempted in particular by Joseph ha-Cohen, David Ganz, and most perhaps most successfully by Azariah de Rossi-which might have provided a possible answer to the crisis of Renaissance historiography.

+ NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS, Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena's Life as an Early Modern Autobiography, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 103-118.

European autobiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fed particularly by the religious exploration of the self and the desire to tell about and place oneself within the web of one's family. Jewish autobiography has behind it these same impulses, though it is more likely to be an expansion of ethical teachings appended to a will than an elaboration from an account book. It also differs from Christian autobiography in lacking a definitive conversion. Rather the life is imbued with a cyclical sense of sin, of God's power and punishment, and of the unpredictable: the individual's life is a recapitulation of the history of the Jewish people. Leon Modena's Life of Judah is a combination of confession, lament, and self-celebration. It bears comparison to Girolamo Cardano's Book of My Life, for both men express pride in their fame and many books, despair about their sons, and admit to the vice of gambling. Cardano's glory and complaints delimited a secular sphere within the Christian universe of meaning, while Modena's were still closely tied to God's tangled relations with His chosen people. Further, the realm of the "secret" was defined differently by Christian and Jew. Christian writers usually assumed the inside/outside contrast to apply especially to the individual and that secrecy was bad but inevitable in a society of preferment. For Jewish writers the inside went beyond the individual and his or her family to the wider Jewish community. In that protected space and in the safe language of Hebrew, a range of situations and feelings could be explored with considerable frankness, the inner/outer contrast leading to surprising self-discovery.

+ ADA RAPOPORT-ALBERT, Hagiography with Footnotes: Edifying Tales and the Writing of History in Hasidism, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 119-159.

The sources to which one has to turn for information about the lives of Hasidic masters belong to the hagiographical tradition. During its first stage of compilation in the early nineteenth century, this tradition preserved much authentic historical and biographical material, in spite of the explicit disavowal of any historiographical intent by its editors. They were apologetic about the publication of "mere tales and histories" whose value lay not in the preservation of historical records but rather in their capacity for moral and religious edification. Up until then, this material had been circulating orally but, in contrast to speculative-homiletical works, was not recognized as a legitimate and useful tool for the propagation of Hasidism. However, from the second half of the nineteenth century, in response to the challenges of Jewish Enlightenment, secularization, and most directly in response to the scornful critique of Hasidism and its hagiography which was emanating from the new school of modern Jewish historiography, Hasidic authors, like the exponents of other nineteenth-century ideologies, were beginning to appeal to history for validation. They were adopting the scholarly mannerisms if not quite the historical methodology of their critics. Since the hagiographical tales, and the chain of oral transmission which had traditionally preserved and authenticated them, were both losing their credibility in the new atmosphere of rationalistic skepticism and scientific rigor, Hasidic hagiographers were now eager to present their morally edifying oral traditions as reliable historical records by anchoring them in concrete documentary evidence. The forgeries of the Kherson Genizah supplied what appeared to be incontestable "archival" verification of the tales. The Admor Joseph Isaac Schneersohn exploited the Kherson "documents" in his extensive histories of early Hasidism which reveal his anachronistic, typological thinking and are often incompatible with the facts. As a leader of HaBaD Hasidism at a time of crisis, he saw it as his duty to harness the powerful historiographical idiom to the tasks of rehabilitating the HaBaD movement and of campaigning for the preservation of Orthodox Jewish life in conditions of unprecedented adversity.

+ MICHAEL A. MEYER, The Emergence of Modern Jewish Historiography: Motives and Motifs, History and Theory 27 (December 1988), Bei. 27, 160-175.

During the Enlightenment, Jews began to attribute major significance to history in general and to Jewish history in particular. The past was used, particularly by Marcus Fischer, to provide precedents for present-day in struction, and was employed, by Solomon Maimon, Peter Beer, and Abraham Geiger, for the sake of destroying encrusted contemporary norms by demonstrating their late importation into Jewish tradition. The emer gence of modern Jewish historiography was given further impetus by external factors: the increased prominence of general historical studies in Germany, which lent history its objective, rather than exemplary, tone while revising ideas of natural law and eternal truths; and the attention paid by non-Jewish historians, in particular Jacques Basnage and Hannah Adams, to Jewish history. Isaac Marcus Jost gave an account of the external history of the Jews, the shifting relations between the Jews and the governments under which they lived, and later focused on issues of Jewish religious and cultural history. Heinrich Graetz's history served to draw together and find roots for a broader political and spiritual Jewish identity, and used the Jewish past to regain a sense of Jewish separateness by revealing the separate historical path of the Jews.