Overview: The Critical Study of Jewish History
The academic study of Judaism, including the modern,
critical study of Jewish history, began in 19th century Germany. Early
19th-century German society afforded history a new and prominent role. The
spirit of the age, romantic nationalism, argued that the forces of history and
tradition were dominating factors in human behavior. Historian Howard Sachar explains, “To understand any belief or
ideal, any custom or institution, one had merely to examine its gradual growth
from primitive beginnings to its present form. The validity of any institution
or idea was no longer to be measured by its reasonableness or utility, but
rather by its origin and history.” In this manner, the 19th century became the
age of historical investigation.
Modern historical investigation introduced the methodology
of science to history. In an effort to discover “what really happened”—to
separate fact from fiction—historians were expected to collect and analyze
their sources objectively. The results, reasoned scholars, would dispel
ignorance and promote understanding of people, cultures and institutions.
The birth of modern historical method coincided with a
period of conservatism and mounting anti-semitism in Germany. During this
period, maskilim (followers of the
Jewish enlightenment movement) questioned why large segments of Christian
society continued to display hostility toward them despite the fact that they
had acquired knowledge of European culture and adopted its manners and
behavior.
One group of maskilim
reasoned that this continued hostility resulted from European society’s
ignorance of Judaism’s history and its contribution to European culture. In
order to present the treasures of Jewish creativity to the non-Jewish world,
these Jews, mostly university students, founded a group dedicated to raising
Jewish scholarship from obscurity to science, called the Society for Culture
and Science among the Jews (Wissenschaft
des Judenthums) in 1819.
Leopold Zunz was a founder and leader of the Society. Zunz
was a Jewish orphan who received a traditional religious education and taught
himself secular subjects by reading German books. Begging and borrowing, he
managed to attend the University of Berlin where he was exposed to German ideas
of history and science. He ultimately received a doctorate at the University of
Halle and thereafter made his living as a rabbi and Sunday School teacher for
various Reform congregations. Zunz lead the Society in the attempt to master
all the material incorporated into Jewish literature, to arrange it according
to its historical development, and to relate it to world literature.
With such a huge task before them, it is not surprising that
the Society ran out of energy in just a few years, but Zunz alone succeeded in
realizing a major goal of the organization by cataloguing the lot of Jewish
literature.
In his most famous work, Contributions
to History and Literature, Zunz combed Jewish history to demonstrate that
the Talmud, medieval poetry, homiletics, philosophy, and folklore all belonged
to the realm of literature as they were authentic expressions of Jewish
national life and thought. With the publication of this work in 1845, Zunz
demonstrated that Jewish genius had not exhausted itself with the Bible as
Christians had asserted. He revealed the wealth of the Jewish literary
tradition.
Zunz attracted a group of followers, among them Mortiz
Steinschneider, who devoted his life to Jewish scholarship. Steinschneider’s
first book chronicled Jewish literature from the 8th to the 18th
century. It was so well received that a year later he was called to Oxford to
prepare a catalogue of Hebrew literature for the library there. Jewish
scholarship had arrived!
In addition to Zunz and his group in Germany, other
traditionally educated Jews who were interested in and familiar with Western
European culture resolved to apply the new scholarly methods the classical
sources of Judaism. Notable among these scholars were Samuel David Luzzatto, in
Italy, and, in Galicia, Nahman Krohmal and Solomon Judah Rappaport.
The most famous Jewish historian to emerge during this
period was Heinrich Graetz. His eleven volume History of the Jews would become the most widely read and consulted
work in modern Jewish studies. It attracted much criticism, for although Graetz
collected the facts in a scientific manner, his own ideas came through in his
interpretation of the facts. His rare synthesis of scholarship and style
popularized not only the history of the Jews but also the science of Judaism.
These first modern Jewish historians and the scholars who followed
them faced issues both typical and unique in their efforts to record the Jewish
past. Like all historians, Jewish historians must determine causality, create
periodizaiton schemas (the division of history into identifiable periods), and
take a stand on whether history is moving progressively toward a goal.
The job of the Jewish historian, however, is made more
complex by the fact that their subject matter is, in the words of historian
Michael Meyer “a protean entity—which seems to bear few if any constant
characteristics and which for the far greater part of its history has been
scattered without a land of its own.”
Jews have lived in all corners of the globe, and their daily
life, including religion, has been influenced by the societies in which they
lived. While Jews are influenced by larger societal trends, they are also
affected by events that are unique to the Jewish experience. This “double
consciousness”, a product of living as both part of and apart from larger
society, results in complexity for historians of the Jewish experience, who
must consider both the larger culture and Jewish culture when analyzing and
understanding Jewish life.
