Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr is teaching a course on memory and history in Jewish thought. Two of the principal texts for the course are Amos Funkeinstein's Perceptions of Jewish History and Y.H. Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory.
Professor Mendes-Flohr, who is not just a historian of Jewish philosophy but a significant figure in that history, is addressing the issue of Judaism's unique historical consciousness -- an almost ahistorical (or perhaps, as Hegel would have it, a historiosophical) perspective that links all events not (or not only) to the tide of events but to the everpresent theme of redemption. As Lionel Kochan wrote -- a quote that Prof. Mendes-Flohr put at the top of his syllabus for the course -- "The Jew, regarded as ‘the most historical of peoples,’ have [until the modern era] taken little interest in their own history. At least this appears to be the case, if the paucity of historians is the criterion." Indeed, between Josephus in the first century C.E. and the late medieval period, almost no self-consciously historical Jewish text was written.
Was this because, as some historians posited, a people without a state was also a people without a history? Or was it because in Jewish thought, all history was simply the circling of a redemptive messianic beacon, coming round again through the spiral of time's ascent toward the End of Days?
As Yerushalmi notes, Jewish memory is a “dual movement of reception and transmission, propelling itself toward the future . . . The Jews,” he notes, “were not mnemonic virtuosos. They were, however, willing receivers and superb transmitters.” Reception and transmission sounds to me more like history than memory. In Jewish thought, however, collective memory was, in a very real sense, the only, or at least the most practical, form of historiography.
Y. H. Yerushalmi (1932 - 2009)
Funkenstein agrees. In his essay, "The Dialectics of Assimilation" (Jewish Social Studies (Winter 1995, vol. 1, issue 2)), he writes that we can scarcely “separate that which is original and therefore homegrown, autochthonous, from that which has been absorbed." In Jewish thought and practice, reception and transmission work in such close harmony that, after awhile, the exotic and syncretistic becomes the normative.
However, where Jewish memory and history are concerned, Funkenstein takes a very different approach. He asserts that attributing historical consciousness and collective memory to collectives -- "the family and the tribe, the nation and the state" is confusing. Remembering, he says, is a mental act, a personal one, confined to the one doing the remembering. It's not that "collective memory" doesn't exist, but it's a phrase that needs to be used with great care: memory is born of identity, and every memory is born of a social context. Funkenstein analogizes the relationship between cllective and personal memory to the relationship between language and speech: like each act of speach, "no act of remembering is like any other."
Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995)
These diverse views form the axis along which Professor Mendes-Flohr has structured his course. He has gently warned his students that the academy is not about belief, but about critical inquiry. A critical historical approach to issues of belief and praxis require patience, discipline, careful reading and a thoroughly skeptical approach. He even chided me for using the word "understanding," as any claim to "understand" a text, an idea, an historical moment meant only that other perspectives were not given their proper due. The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke's determination to tell history "as it actually happened" marked a progression in history toward scientific objectivity, but historical objectivity is a historicist impossibility.
Leopold von Ranke (1795 - 1886). Beware the historian who wears medals!
But Jewish historical consciousness is pressed into every moment of the Bible. As Herbert Schneidau noted, "To write history, for a Hebrew, was in some sense to take [God's] view of things into account: the literal belief in his watchfulness and interventionism, the intense sense of his personal presence and will and care, seem to have led to the habit of seeing things, as it were, with his eyes" (Sacred Discontent, p. 211). The Jewish sense of history therefore cannot be surgically removed from the sense of divine omnipresence and omnipotence. Not without killing the patient.
I am, I afraid, fascinated by this subject. As history moves out of the strictly messianic orbit and into the realm of a scientific/humanist endeavor to understand (there's that word) the interaction between the human being and the world it inhabits, it shatters into innumerable shards of interpretation and subjectivity. As far as Judaism is concerned, the separation of history of religion is the removal of God as The Actor in history. We are on our own.
As Hegel noted, however, perhaps history is theodicy. Perhaps we just can't read the tea leaves of time.
--T.A.
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