Jewish History 14: 109–113, 2000.

109

Book review

Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (eds.), Jewish History and
Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Hanover, New Hamp-
shire and London: Brandeis University Press, Published by University Press of New
England, 1998, xv + 462 pp. (no price stated).

Writing in 1981, in the last chapter of Zakhor, his famous meditation on the
rupture between Jewish collective memory and modern historical consciousness,
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi candidly expressed doubt about the future of his profession
and the cultural significance of modern historical scholarship. Yerushalmi was then
convinced that “a historiography that does not aspire to be memorable is in peril
of becoming a rampant growth.” “As the flood of monographs and books crosses
my desk each year,” he continued, “I often wonder why a scholar chose this partic-
ular topic when, with the same linguistic and methodological equipment, he could
have chosen another. Each time I hear that a young and promising scholar has not
‘published enough,’ something within me protests.”1
Some twenty years later, the flood of monographs and books has shown no visible
sign of abating. In fact, the growing numbers of publications on Jewish topics reflect
the steady rise of university positions in Jewish studies in North America, Israel, and
now Europe. Whether or not the new scholarship appearing in many languages meets
the standards of memorability Yerushalmi had in mind is still as open a question
as it was twenty years ago. And whether or not it has left a noticeable impact on
contemporary Jewish cultural sensibilities also remains no less obvious than when
Yerushalmi offered his provocative musings. At least one could argue that on rare
occasions, academic scholarship can transcend the bounds of its usual audience of
readers to affect others deeply concerned with Jewish cultural survival and identity,
as the case of Yerushalmi’s own work makes abundantly clear. Nevertheless, the
cultural distance and even alienation of the Jewish historian and his form of intel-
lectual creativity from the Jewish community and its survivalist concerns has not
significantly diminished over time.
In the interim, Yerushalmi has published his stimulating monograph on Freud,
which some view as a kind of resolution to the dilemmas raised in Zakhor,2 and
in addition, he has trained a significant number of talented graduate students at
both Harvard and Columbia, who already hold university positions and who have
contributed in no small measure to the continuing stream of Jewish historical writing,
especially in the last decade.
Jewish History and Jewish Memory is a loving and elegant tribute to the intel-
lectual and pedagogic achievements of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi edited by three
110 BOOK REVIEW

of his students and containing some twenty-three essays all penned by students
and close colleagues. Like most commemorative volumes of this kind, the book
contains a wide array of subjects and approaches not easily linked to each other
and notoriously difficult to review. Nevertheless, the editors have made a conscious
effort to encourage the contributors to focus on the themes that have meant most to
their honored teacher: the dialectical relationship between memory and history in the
Jewish tradition, and “ the problematics and permutations of Jewish identity created
by modernity’s ruptures”, as David Myers aptly puts it.
Despite the inevitable unevenness of some of the contributions and the relative
“memorability” of some essays over others, the editors have clearly succeeded
in loosely shaping a coherent volume around four major interrelated but discreet
themes: “Tradition and the Construction of Jewish History”, by which they mean the
awareness and use of historical arguments in pre-modern Jewish literature; “Time
and History in Jewish Thought”, that is, explorations of the construction of historical
time in kabbalistic and philosophical literature; “The Rupture of Modernity”, clearly
the broadest category, where the strategies of coping with the challenge of modernity
while retaining pre-modern forms of Jewish identity are examined in multiple social
and cultural contexts; and finally, “Jewish Memory and Historical Writing”, a rela-
tively more circumscribed section focusing on the use of historical writing for various
sub-communities of modern Jews.
I will not attempt to summarize each of the essays; David Myers offers such an
inventory in the preface to the volume. Rather, I shall try to offer some initial impres-
sions on the import of the collection as a whole as well as single out what I consider to
be its most significant individual contributions. Admittedly, such privileging of some
essays over others is inevitably a subjective choice, but so is the review process in
which I am presently engaged.
That the common themes in which this book engages emanate from the intellec-
tual project of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is a fact repeatedly emphasized by the editors
and even by the individual contributors who consciously link their efforts to his. But
the common agenda of this community of scholars is connected even beyond their
positive relationship to Yerushalmi and his work. With only one obvious exception,
that of the Israeli scholar Moshe Idel, the contributors were trained and/or work in
the Diaspora; most of them are American born and American trained. A few others,
Arthur Goren, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, and Edward Fram, have spent considerable
periods of their lives in Israel but each of them have cultural and professional roots in
American soil. There are several academicians who work in Europe: Pierre Birnbaum
and Pierre Vidal-Naquet in France, and Michael Brenner in Germany, but the over-
whelming majority, the remaining sixteen, were born and reared in North America
following the Shoah and have studied and taught in American universities throughout
their entire professional careers. Since most are Yerushalmi’s own students, pointing
out their common intellectual origins might appear unremarkable and unnecessary.
But it is not merely their kinship with Yerushalmi that colors their scholarship; it is
also their shared cultural and professional origins that mark their collective voice.
Jewish History and Memory is first and foremost a product of relatively young
Diaspora intellectuals, for the most part, trained and stimulated by the American
 BOOK REVIEW 111

university system. As a moment in historical time, their collaborative publication

is a fascinating example of the emerging voices of American scholars writing on
Jewish subjects whose origins can be traced from as late as the 1960s, about the time
Yosef Yerushalmi began his career. As an indicator of the maturation and particular
directions of recent American and, to a lesser extent, French scholarship on Jewish
history, it might be compared constructively with similar academic testimonials
produced more regularly by the Israeli academic establishment in recent years such
as the volumes in honor of Jacob Katz, Haim Beinart, or Shlomo Simonsohn, or with
earlier volumes produced by a previous generation of American scholars in honor
of Salo W. Baron, Yerushalmi’s own teacher, or Alexander Marx. Such a task is
clearly beyond the scope of this review, but I would be remiss not to underscore the
historiographical as well as the larger cultural significance of such an undertaking
which itself is devoted to the subject of Jewish historical writing.
One of the most recurrent themes of many of these essays is the close linkage
they establish between historical writing and the promotion of Jewish ideological
concerns. This feature is clearly evident on the descriptive level in several intelligent
studies of early modern works such as Elisheva Carlebach’s treatment of Josel of
Rosheim’s Sefer Ha-Miknah or Talya Fishman’s reading of Saul Berlin’s Besamim
Rosh. It is equally apparent in Aron Rodrigue’s useful analysis of the nexus between
Leon Halevy’s historical writing and his political and cultural aspirations for French
Jewry, or in Hillel Kieval’s astute depiction of Marcus Teller’s need to create a
bold myth of Jewish origins for the Jews of Bohemia; or in Arthur Goren’s evoca-
tive narrative of the symbolic power of the foundational ceremonies of the Hebrew
University for Diaspora Jewry.
It is also evident on the prescriptive level where the “lessons” of the past are
boldly and unabashedly presented to make a polemical or homiletic point, sometimes
subtle but sometimes overt, about the present condition of contemporary Jewry.
I have in mind in this category more than Vidal-Naquet’s obvious mediation on
the parallels between Atlantis and Auschwitz. Certainly Pierre Birnbaum’s highly
personal exploration of the peculiar forms of French Jewish identity in the modern
era is much more than historical reflection and even more than a meditation on the
cultural meaning of Yerushalmi’s reconstructions of the hidden Jewish identities
of Isaac Cardoza and Sigmund Freud. Birnbaum’s exploration of the figure of the
biblical Joseph rather than Moses allows him to speculate on the French example
of assimilation that did not inevitably lead to cultural annihilation. Like Thomas
Mann’s image of Joseph who did not give up his Hebrew character in Egypt but
kept his “inner reserve” [p. 265], Birnbaum consciously offers an alternative Jewish
historiography hostile to certain forms of Zionist scholarship that disparage all forms
of assimilation.
Reading Birnbaum’s contribution in relation to the other contributions in the
volume allows one to see its close connections with both the essays of Aron
Rodrigue and Todd Endelman. Rodrigue’s aforementioned essay on Leon Halevy,
his emphasis on the historian’s universalistic message and its overt connection with
the construction of modern Jewish identity in France makes Birnbaum a direct
spiritual disciple of this French strain of Jewish historical thinking of a previous
112 BOOK REVIEW

generation. Birnbaum’s link with Endelman’s historical project is made explicit by

Birnbaum himself who cites approvingly Endelman’s previous studies on conversion.
In Endelman’s contribution to this volume, he convincingly argues that conversion
“signaled neither withdrawal from Jewish circles nor full integration into non-Jewish
ones” [p. 313] in the modern era. In demonstrating how converts both in Western and
Eastern Europe continued to hold positive memories of their Jewish past and even
supported their former co-religionists, Endelman surely echoes Birnbaum’s position
in seeing a positive value in assimilation and in arguing that even the seemingly final
act of conversion did not necessarily lead to cultural extinction.
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s study of the interplay of myth, philosophy, and history
in Maimonides’ conception of happiness may appear at first blush to have nothing
in common with the more modernist themes explored by Birnbaum, Rodrigue, or
Endelman. But despite the medieval provenance of her scholarly endeavor, there
does appear to be a contemporary agenda analogous to those of the others. Her major
conclusion is that contrary to conventional opinion Maimonides never freed himself
of myth but retained his own version of the rabbinic myth of the covenant whereby
the Torah alone is the perfect logos and a Jew achieves ultimate happiness only when
he imbibes the primacy of this logocentric myth for Judaism. Samuelson cannot resist
the temptation of connecting her past reconstruction with present realities. “Perhaps
a return to Maimonides’ logocentric myth of Judaism,” she concludes, “could enable
contemporary Jews not only to reconnect with the rabbinic tradition but also to
make their desperate pursuit of happiness both Jewishly and philosophically richer”
[p. 207].
Among the many fine contributions to this volume, let me single out a few that I
have not previously mentioned. David Myer’s intelligent synthesis of Yerushalmi’s
writing is an important contribution in demonstrating the overarching themes in
his work from his first essay on the French Inquisition and the Jews through his
careful elucidation of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Myers skillfully points out
Yerushalmi’s consistent interest in latent or cryptic identity whether in looking at the
Marranos or Freud. At a seeming point of rupture, Myers contends, there appear in
Yerushalmi’s narrative “ glimmers of hope” [p. 16]. Following this line of thought,
Yerushalmi’s Freud is a response to the dispairing mood of Zakhor, a historian’s
search to find meaning and grounds for optimism in the insecure moorings of Jewish
identity that modern consciousness has laid bare. Myers pursues this theme in a
subsequent essay not included in this volume where he views Yerushalmi’s impor-
tance as not merely an historian but as a kind of Jewish theologian who makes no
grandiose claims to “absolute Truth or Redemption,” but offers his readers some
basis for hope in a Jewish future, especially in his bold “Monologue with Freud”.
Yerushalmi ultimately finds that Jewish history can do more than exacerbate the
break with the past; it can also serve “[t]o assuage our solitude. To understand that
we are not the first to whom dispair was not alien, nor hope a gratuitous gift. To
understand then that we are not necessarily the last.”3 Myers may be pressing his
case too hard in shifting the import of Yerushalmi’s work from history to theology,
but by discussing him in this way, he helps to explain how Yerushalmi’s work has
 BOOK REVIEW 113

left its enduring mark on contemporary culture [e.g. Derrida’s commentary on him]
in a way unparalleled by other Jewish historians.
Four other essays are worthy of special mention. Michael Stanislawski’s study of
the Yiddish version of Solomon Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehudah is particularly important
for its cautionary remarks about the study of popular culture among early modern
Jewry. In distinguishing carefully between a popularization of a classic work and
popular culture, he offers some wise comparative remarks about the challenge of
distinguishing elite from folk culture and the difficulty of transplanting Christian
notions of popular culture into the soil of the relatively unstudied Jewish terrain
of the early modern period. Moshe Idel’s learned discussion of concepts of time
and history in kabbalistic sources begins with Eliade’s well-known categories of
time – microchronic, mesochronic, and macrochronic – but demonstrates effec-
tively how no category fully captures the complexity of Jewish time. In fact,
each system appears simultaneously in Jewish sources, even in the same one. Idel
substantially corrects the widespread impression that Judaism essentially follows
a linear or rectilinear notion of Heilsgeschichte. Elliot Wolfson’s analysis of the
complex symbolic hermeneutics of the Zohar underscores impressively the inter-
play of Jewish-Christian polemics, collective memory, gender, and sexuality in the
creation of this Spanish-Jewish classic. Finally, Lois Dubin admirably reconstructs
the complex use and misuse of the model of Italian Jewish culture by the German
maskilim in their critique of traditional Jewish culture.
All in all, Jewish History and Jewish Memory meaningfully recognizes an
important scholar and provides a positive indication of the quality of recent historical
scholarship and the meaning it is capable of imparting to the present generation.
On the basis of this collection, Yerushalmi is surely entitled to some pride in the
accomplishments of his students, and some hope.

Notes
1. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and
London, 1982), pp. 101–102.
2. See, for example, David Myers’ comment in this volume [p. 17]: “Unlikely as it may
seem, Freud serves as a model for a Jewish historian seeking to heal the rift in Jewish
collective memory. In this respect, Freud’s Moses offers, in its own way, an important
reply to Zakhor. The sense of dispair over the utility of the modern historical enterprise
gives way to a more sanguine, though tempered, sentiment . . . in Freud’s Moses . . . we
witness the clearest articulation of modern historiography’s potential, albeit limited, to
find meaning in the wake of the ‘radical break with the past’.” See also Myers’ other
essay on Yerushalmi listed in the next note.
3. David N. Myers, “Derrida’s Yerushalmi, Yerushalmi’s Freud: History, Memory, and Hope
in a Post-Holocaust Age,” in La Sho’ah: Tra interpretazione e memoria, eds. Paolo
Amodio, Romeo De Maio, Giuseppe Lissa (Naples, 1999), pp. 489–507. The citations
are on pp. 506–507. Myers cites Yoses H. Yerushalmi, “Vers une histoire de l’espoir juif,”
Esprit 104–105 (1985), p. 38.

University of Pennsylvania DAVID B. RUDERMAN