Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany

Memory, Power and Community

Dean Phillip Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754658979
• eBook ISBN: 9781317111030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Although Jews in early modern Germany produced little in the way of formal historiography, Jews nevertheless engaged the past for many reasons and in various and surprising ways. They narrated the past in order to enforce order, empower authority, and record the traditions of their communities. In this way, Jews created community structure and projected that structure into the future. But Jews also used the past as a means to contest the marginalization threatened by broader developments in the Christian society in which they lived. As the Reformation threw into relief serious questions about authority and tradition and as Jews continued to suffer from anti-Jewish mentality and politics, narration of the past allowed Jews to re-inscribe themselves in history and contemporary society. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including chronicles, liturgical works, books of customs, memorybooks, biblical commentaries, rabbinic responsa and community ledgers, this study offers a timely reassessment of Jewish community and identity during a frequently turbulent era. It engages, but then redirects, important discussions by historians regarding the nature of time and the construction and role of history and memory in pre-modern Europe and pre-modern Jewish civilization. This book will be of significant value, not only to scholars of Jewish history, but anyone with an interest in the social and cultural aspects of religious history.

Chapter 1
Memory, History, and Jewish Identity

Before I turn to the early modern sources themselves, it is instructive to review the recent literature on memory and history for what such theoretical discussions may suggest generally about the understanding and function of the past. First we summarize the important work of Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora on memory and history. The work of these scholars and others serves as context for a discussion of recent approaches to Jewish memory and history, especially the work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. After a consideration of some of the responses to Halbwachs and Yerushalmi in particular I examine broadly the nature and use of history in the Middle Ages.

This quick overview indicates that despite their apparent theoretical differences, memory and history exist on a continuum of engagement with the past, which functions in several ways. The narration of this past—whether as memory or history—helps to dictate moral standards, it mediates politics and is itself a form of power, and it reinforces tradition while simultaneously offering the tools to bring about sweeping changes. The vast and growing scholarly literature on memory and history also argues for an important connection between discussions of the past and communal identity and suggests that many significant changes associated with the early modern period can be understood by examining early modern narratives of the past.

Memory and History

In a now classic study, first published in 1950 but discussed increasingly more recently, Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory and history have very different characteristics and are in a sense in opposition to each other.¹ In that work, Halbwachs set much of the current agenda for discussions about the relation of memory and history as well as the nature of collective memory.² His pioneering concepts have raised significant questions for historians and, as we will see below, the ire of some scholars who prefer less rigid oppositions.

According to Halbwachs there is an important distinction between memory and history. “General history,” he argued, “starts only when tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up. So long as a remembrance continues to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in memory. Likewise the need to write the history of a period, a society, or even a person is only aroused when the subject is already too distant in the past to allow for the testimony of those who preserve some remembrance of it.”³

History, in this interpretation, is written at points of social disintegration. It is a distant, written reflection of un-experienced events. Whereas memory is continuous and ongoing, history assumes, even demands, that everything is transformed from one period to the next. While memory is a depository and safeguard of tradition, history is merely a record of events. Memory is living, history a detached record of things no longer alive. Memory is particular in focus, but history has the capacity to treat the universal.⁴

According to Halbwachs, our memory of the past is composed of two kinds of elements: those from a common domain (a social or external memory) and those remembrances that are ours alone (personal and internal memory). This dichotomy is not so simple, for while individuals remember within a broader social context their memories may also vary based on their own experiences and orientations. According to Halbwachs:

While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. While these remembrances are mutually supportive of each other and common to all, individual members still vary in the intensity with which they experience them. I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint changes as my relationships to other milleus change. Therefore, it is not surprising that everyone does not draw on the same part of this common instrument. In accounting for that diversity, however, it is always necessary to revert to a combination of influences that are social in nature.⁵

In this assessment, there is a common memory base that is tapped into, processed, and experienced differently by different individuals within unique and varying contexts. Individual and communal memory, therefore, exist in a complex and multidirectional relationship, in which individual memory simultaneously is affected by and contributes to collective memory.⁶

The influential French historian Pierre Nora, in a seminal work examining French national history, has presented a similar tension between what he understands as memory and history.⁷ Nora argues for a differentiation between memory, which is concrete and so rooted in space and structure, and history, which is rooted in temporality and so is relative. History is about change and memory about continuity, albeit at times shifting continuity.

Nora posits a distinction between memory and history that revolves around a divide between the sacred and non-religious. Memory situates remembrance in a sacred context. History is critical, analytical, and so nonreligious. It is not simply that being critical and analytical are at odds with religion or that history is related to, or a part of a process of, secularization. More significantly, for Nora, is the observation that history has to do with an external reflection as opposed to a true core. Nora writes that “We no longer celebrate the nation, but we study the nation’s celebrations.”⁸ The less we are able to experience from within, the more we need “external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory.”⁹ “The trace,” Nora writes, “negates the sacred but retains its aura,”¹⁰ so as history is more “critical,” it is simultaneously also more detached. Memory, while steeped in hazy impressions, symbolic details, emotion, and magic, holds the key to the core, the true or real society that history only knows by separation and reflection.

But Nora reads modern memory as more akin to history than traditional memory. He sounds a note of concern, consequently, when he writes that “the ‘acceleration of history’ thus brings us face to face with the enormous distance that separates real memory … from history” and an integrated memory from “our form of memory, which is nothing but history, a matter of sifting and sorting.”¹¹ Indeed, for Nora, the modern transformation of memory “marks a decisive shift from the historical to the psychological, from the social to the individual, from the concrete message to its subjective representation, from repetition to remembrance.”¹² Modernity, in this representation, becomes shorn of collectivity, the past, and in a certain sense, reality itself. This interpretation rings of a tone of modern alienation. Similarly, Nora’s concepts of history, modernity, and the nineteenth-century nation state fundamentally shape his argument, and lead us to ask how his assessment might or might not work for societies or communities that were not formed in the same national context.

It is important to note, however, that for Nora there is some similarity between memory and history. Both are subject to manipulation. Memory can be appropriated and refashioned and is selective. History can be problematic and incomplete reconstruction; different motives and perspectives affect the nature and scope of the representation we call history.

Approaches to Jewish Memory and History

How have memory and history been assessed in Jewish historiography? Traditionally, the role of memory throughout Jewish history has been seen as important; formal history, however, has been cast as unimportant and often non-existent. Bernard Lewis, the renowned historian of Jews under Islam, for example, some thirty years ago noted that Jewish historiographic literature in the Middle Ages was sparse and poor.¹³ The purpose of “historical” writing—in the form of martyrologies, heroic narratives,¹⁴ commemorations,¹⁵ surviving custom and law,¹⁶ the history of scholarship and the succession of rabbis and pupils and teachers—was to give medieval Jews the ability to “stiffen the endurance of the survivors” and to legitimize the authority of the rabbis.¹⁷ Lewis contended that with no country, state, or dynastic focus, Jews lacked any real need to write history: the vital history was already fixed in Scripture, literature, and the calendar, and so the poverty of Jewish historiography was due not to neglect but to positive rejection.¹⁸ According to this line of thinking, critical history would develop only with the disaffection with the past and the desire to control the future.¹⁹ Medieval Jewish historiography was, for Lewis, poor, reactionary and intended as a means by which to continue religious traditions.

The very topic of Jewish memory and history has received a great deal of attention since the Shoah. In the last quarter century in particular the floodgates opened for the production of a variety of scholarly investigations into the broader ways and purposes for which Jews remember the past. With some of the same assumptions as those forwarded by Lewis, and steeped in the theoretical orientation of Halbwachs and the emerging discussions surrounding Nora and his school, the prominent and ground-breaking historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in a slender volume of published lectures from the early 1980s, set the stage for much of the subsequent discussion of Jewish memory and history. Yerushalmi concretized some general observations about Jewish historiography and the relationship between memory and history, while forwarding an outline of the production and role of history and historiographical writing in Jewish tradition. In the pages that follow, I will restate Yerushalmi’s position, review some of the criticism and implications of his arguments, and then set a broader context—a context in which Yerushalmi was both participant and product—for the consideration of early modern German Jewish memory and history.

For Yerushalmi, it was ancient Israel that “first assigned a decisive significance to history and thus forged a new world-view …”.²⁰ The new perception was based in Israelite faith, by wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Memory, History, and Jewish Identity
• 2 Reconsidering Early Modern German Jewish Memory and History
• 3 Community, Memory, and Governance
• 4 Jewish Social Organization: The Role of Memory, Power, and Honor
• 5 Politics, Polemics, and History: Assessing Jewish Identity
• 6 From Law to Legend: Narrating Jewish and Christian Encounters
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index