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The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry

Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

“The list of contributors to this volume constitutes a virtual 'Who's Who' of contemporary Jewish historiography: Robert Chazan, Marc Saperstein and Talya Fishman write about the pre-modern period; Moshe Idel focuses on time and history in Kabbalah; Elliot Wolfson addresses the construction of history in the Zohar; Todd Endelman confronts the way that Jewish pasts continued to limit the possibilities of converts from Judaism to Christianity in the post-Emancipation world; and Michael Meyer reflects on Jewish modernization. Though written in academese, there are important insights in these writings.” — Tikkun

About the Editors

Elisheva Carlebach is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center CUNY.

John M. Efron is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Indiana University.

David N. Myers is Associate Professor of History, Center for Jewish Studies, UCLA.

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Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron and David M. Myers, eds.

1998 480 pp. Cloth, 0-87451-871-7

Jewish History

Jewish History is the sole English-language publication devoted exclusively to historical research on the Jews. It also aims to extend the disciplinary boundaries of Jewish historical writing by encouraging scholars of anthropology, art, law, literature, and sociology to share their research when it crosses paths with history. Thanks to the diverse personal backgrounds and professional training of Jewish History ’s contributors, the journal is able to publish innovative essays, often within the framework of special issues on subjects of broad interest. Topics of previous issues have included women and inheritance, the Jews of Latin America, Jewish self-imaging, new historical approaches to Hasidism, and the legacy of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, to name but a few.

• Jay R. Berkovitz,
• Ephraim Kanarfogel

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Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Jewish art in late antiquity and early byzantium.

Bowl Fragments with Menorah, Shofar, and Torah Ark

Bowl Base with Miracle Scenes

Lamp with Jewish Symbols

Bowl Base with Saints Peter and Paul Flanking a Column with the Christogram of Christ

Hexagonal Pilgrim's Jar with Jewish Symbol

Barbara Drake Boehm Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Melanie Holcomb Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the first centuries C.E., Jewish communities could be found in every corner of the Roman empire , from Sardis (Turkey) to Ostia (Italy), from Hamman Lif (Tunisia) to Intercisa (Hungary). The archaeological remnants and literary attestations of more than 150 synagogues throughout the empire make clear that Jews were integral to the urban landscape of late antiquity, well beyond the borders of Roman Palestine.

Asia Minor , in particular, boasted numerous, and often prosperous, Jewish communities. The third-century synagogue in the Roman garrison town of Dura-Europos, like the Christian meeting house and the shrine devoted to the Persian god Mithras that stood just yards away, was adorned with sumptuous painting . Splendid murals with narrative scenes from the Bible covered the synagogue’s walls; painted tiles of zodiacal symbols ornamented its ceiling. Plaques with dedicatory inscriptions give some indication of the individuals and families who funded the building of such synagogues.

In building their monuments, Jews often embraced the Greco-Roman practice of paving the floor with elaborate mosaics , many of which demonstrate an understanding of the second commandment injunction against image making that may surprise today’s viewer. In early Byzantine synagogues such as Hamman Lif in North Africa and Beth Alpha, Hammath Tiberias, and Sepphoris in Israel, specifically Jewish symbols—shofarot (ram’s horns), menorot (branched lamps), and Torah shrines—might appear alongside pomegranates, birds, lions , and fountains. Zodiac wheels with human figures also find a prominent place in the pavements of several synagogues, dated from the fourth to the sixth centuries, as do scenes drawn from the Bible or allegorized images of the River Nile .

After the destruction of the Second Temple by Roman emperor Titus in 70 C.E—an event commemorated on the Arch of Titus in Rome and in Jewish liturgy—images of the Temple’s furnishings, especially the celebrated gold menorah , or seven-branched lamp, became emblematic of Jewish religion. Marble sarcophagi favored by wealthy Romans were adapted for Jewish use by incorporating a stylized relief image of a menorah. In the catacombs of Rome , Jews placed gold glass disks representing the menorah and Torah arks at their tombs, as well as symbols of the festival of Sukkot ( 18.145.1a,b ), just as Christians placed glass disks showing saints ( 16.174.3 ). All these images reference the destroyed Temple and invoke a hoped-for messianic age when the Temple would be restored. So wide-ranging are the contexts for the menorot that it is clear the symbol frequently served merely to distinguish a Jewish monument or a Jewish patron. Seven-branched candlesticks appear in Roman and Byzantine art : in graffiti in the catacombs, inscribed on plaques, as a motif on seals , as decoration on glass bottles ( 1972.118.180 ) and on clay lamps ( 91.1.1621 ), all further testimony to the integration of Jews into late Roman and early Byzantine society.

Boehm, Barbara Drake, and Melanie Holcomb. “Jewish Art in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jewa/hd_jewa.htm (June 2008)

Further Reading

Bleiberg, Edward. Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire . Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 2005.

Dothan, Moshe. Hammath Tiberias . 2 vols. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1983.

Fine, Steven. Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Fine, Steven, ed. Sacred Realm: The Emergence of the Synagogue in the Ancient World . New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Additional Essays by Barbara Drake Boehm

• Boehm, Barbara Drake. “ The Age of Saint Louis (1226–1270) .” (October 2001)
• Boehm, Barbara Drake. “ Animals in Medieval Art .” (originally published October 2001, last revised January 2012)
• Boehm, Barbara Drake. “ Prague, 1347–1437 .” (February 2014)
• Boehm, Barbara Drake. “ Jews and the Arts in Medieval Europe .” (originally published June 2008, last revised August 2010)
• Boehm, Barbara Drake. “ Relics and Reliquaries in Medieval Christianity .” (originally published October 2001, last revised April 2011)
• Boehm, Barbara Drake. “ Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300–1500 .” (March 2009)

Additional Essays by Melanie Holcomb

• Holcomb, Melanie. “ Medieval European Sculpture for Buildings .” (October 2001)
• Holcomb, Melanie. “ Barbarians and Romans .” (October 2002)
• Holcomb, Melanie. “ Animals in Medieval Art .” (originally published October 2001, last revised January 2012)
• Holcomb, Melanie. “ Jews and the Arts in Medieval Europe .” (originally published June 2008, last revised August 2010)
• Holcomb, Melanie. “ Drawing in the Middle Ages .” (June 2009)

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Ancient Jewish Diaspora

Essays on hellenism, series:  supplements to the journal for the study of judaism , volume: 206.

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Acknowledgments, introduction, chapter 1 alexandria in pharaonic egypt: projections in de vita mosis, chapter 2 moses and the charlatans: on the charge of γόης καὶ ἀπατεών in contra apionem 2.145, 161, chapter 3 moses: motherless with two mothers, chapter 4 leaving home: philo of alexandria on the exodus, chapter 5 geography without territory: tacitus’s digression on the jews and its ethnographic context, chapter 6 show and tell: myth, tourism, and jewish hellenism, chapter 7 what if the temple of jerusalem had not been destroyed by the romans, chapter 8 philo’s struggle with jewish myth, chapter 9 part of the scene: jewish theater in antiquity, chapter 10 take your time: conversion, confidence and tranquility in joseph and aseneth, chapter 11 antisemitism and early scholarship on ancient antisemitism, chapter 12 a leap into the void: the philo-lexikon and jewish-german hellenism, chapter 13 tacitus’s excursus on the jews through the ages: an overview of its reception history, chapter 14 polytheism and monotheism in antiquity: on jan assmann’s critique of monotheism, chapter 15 testa incognita : the history of the pseudo-josephus bust in copenhagen, biographical note, table of contents, part 1 moses and exodus, part 2 places and ruins, part 3 theatre and myth, part 4 antisemitism and reception, share link with colleague or librarian, product details.

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Jewish history : essays in honour of Chimen Abramsky

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The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism

Essays on early jewish literature and history.

• Erich S. Gruen
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• Language: English
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• Copyright year: 2016
• Audience: Scholars of Classical Studies, Early Judaism, Religious Studies
• Front matter: 14
• Main content: 574
• Keywords: Identity ; Hellenism ; Judaism ; representations
• Published: September 12, 2016
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• ISBN: 9783110373028
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Two Paths for Jewish Politics

My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”

Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus , deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz,” the Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer declared at a hearing in May, urging a visit to D.C.’s Holocaust museum. “I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.” She gave no indication of knowing that one of the leaders she was addressing had been a victim of antisemitism or that another was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

It’s no accident that non-Jews talk about Jews as if we aren’t there. According to the historian David Nirenberg , talking about the Jews—not actual Jews but Jews in the abstract—is how Gentiles make sense of their world, from the largest questions of existence to the smallest questions of economics. Nirenberg’s focus is “anti-Judaism,” how negative ideas about Jews are woven into canons of Western thought. But as I learned that summer in Tennessee, and as we’re seeing today, concern can be as revealing as contempt. Often the two go hand in hand.

Consider the Antisemitism Awareness Act , which the House of Representatives recently passed by a vote of 320–91. The act purports to be a response to rising antisemitism in the United States. Yet the murder of Jews, synagogue shootings, and cries of “Jews will not replace us” are clearly not what the bill is designed to address. Nearly half of Republicans believe in the “great replacement theory,” after all, and their leader draws from the same well .

The bill will instead outfit the federal government with a new definition of antisemitism that would shield Israel from criticism and turn campus activism on behalf of Palestinians into acts of illegal discrimination. (Seven of the definition’s eleven examples of antisemitism involve opposition to the State of Israel.) Right-wingers who vocally oppose the bill—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz , Tucker Carlson , and Charlie Kirk—have little problem with its Zionist agenda. They just worry that it will implicate those who believe the Jews are Christ killers.

The G.O.P. is not the only party whose solicitude for the Jews betrays an underlying unease. President Biden has said repeatedly that without Israel no Jew in the world is safe. It sounds like a statement of solidarity, but it’s really a confession of bankruptcy, a disavowal of the democratic state’s obligation to protect its citizens equally. As Biden told a group of Jewish leaders in 2014, nine months before Trump announced his Presidential campaign, “You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States . . . there is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the State of Israel.” I’ve lived most of my life in the United States; three of my four grandparents were born here. If the President of my country—a liberal and a Democrat, no less—is saying that my government can’t protect me, where am I supposed to go? I’m Jewish, not Israeli.

Some Jews might feel cheered by Republican crusades against antisemitism or Democratic affirmations of Israel. But there is a long history to these special provisions and professions of concern. Repeating patterns from the ancient and medieval world—and abandoning the innovations pioneered by Jews in the United States—they are bad for democracy. And bad for the Jews.

Contrary to popular myth, the history of Jews and Gentiles is not one of unremitting hostility or eternal antisemitism. It is a chronicle of oscillation, Hannah Arendt argued , a cycle of “special discrimination” and “special favor,” with sovereigns bestowing—then revoking—power and privilege upon the Jews. Jewish leaders, lacking sovereignty of their own, eager to defend their brethren from twitchy neighbors, made themselves indispensable, providing resources to Popes and emperors, lords and kings. They used their favored status to create autonomous communities for their people. Despite their success, or perhaps because of it, they never erased the fine line that separates persecution from protection.

Texts sacred and secular tell the story. A seldom discussed chapter in Genesis lets slip that long before the Israelites were enslaved by Pharaoh, Joseph was ensconced in Pharaoh’s court. As Pharaoh’s right-hand man, Joseph compelled Egypt’s farmers to sell their land for food during a famine, effectively rendering them serfs of the state. Not long after, Exodus opens with a report that “there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” This new king turned the Egyptians against the Israelites.

After the Greeks conquered Egypt, the Jews of Alexandria were largely denied citizenship in the Hellenic empire. They still managed to curry favor with rulers, which placed them above native Egyptians in the social hierarchy. Centuries later, after the Romans took over, the new regime continued this tradition, adding the envy of the Greeks to the hatred of the Egyptians, stirring up a riotous stew.

Christianity, the child of Judaism, introduced a dangerously Oedipal ingredient to the mix. Despite Christian teaching that the Jews were responsible for Christ’s death, Augustine explained that the Jews should be treated as a people of witness, suitable for preservation rather than punishment. Alive, they testified to the truth of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels’ predecessor. Dispersed and miserable, they proved the peril of refusing Christ. It was the obligation of Christian rulers to look after the Jews, Augustine claimed , to maintain them “separate in their observance and unlike the rest of the world.”

By providing a theological gloss on an old idea, Augustine put Jews in the crosshairs of Christian politics. At moments of calm, they received privileges and charters granting them levels of autonomy, access, and security that not all groups enjoyed. In thirteenth-century Poland, the historian David Myers writes , Christians could even be fined if they “failed to heed the cries of Jews in the middle of the night.” At moments of change, they were targets of persecution and slaughter. Either way, their fortunes were tied to that of the sovereign, who could be accused of granting the Jews too much protection or not enough.

That left Jewish leaders forever scanning the horizon for trouble—usually from the sovereign or the Gentiles surrounding them, and sometimes from their own people, who were suspicious of their contacts outside the community. As they came to play the role of the “court Jew,” advising the rulers of the medieval era and financing the treasuries of early modern states, they accumulated power and incurred resentment. But with the consolidation of modern nation-states, which claimed to speak for peoples rather than through kings, the hard-won lessons of Jewish élite politics grew increasingly obsolete. Across the Atlantic, a new, more democratic, model beckoned.

Not a single Jew signed the Declaration of Independence or deliberated at the Constitutional Convention. That probably had more to do with numbers—they were a mere twenty-five hundred of 2.5 million people—than with animus. For long before America’s revolutionaries affixed their names to the ideals of freedom, equality, and republican governance, Jews in America had been learning the arts of democracy.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Jews petitioned colonial governments for the democratic rights of membership and participation, responding to leaders like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who saw the polity as “a receptacle for people of several Sorts and Opinions.” They built a coalition with the Huguenots of South Carolina to demand their rights. Even before the Revolution, they secured the right, with Quakers, to affirm their allegiance to the government without taking an oath of Christian faith. After the Revolution, they were primed to convert that victory into the right to hold government office. They avowed no special virtues, disavowed no special vices, invoked no high connections. They simply stood by the Constitution, which prohibits religious tests for federal office, and their service to the revolutionary cause.

In Europe, emancipation was often conditioned on cleaving the citizen from the Jew. “The Jews should be refused everything as a nation,” one delegate to the French National Assembly declared, “but granted everything as individuals.” Many American Jews sought to avoid that separation. Instead of abandoning Judaism or relegating it to the private sphere, they designed their institutions in the image of the democracy they were helping to build. As the historian Hasia Diner has shown , synagogues wrote their own constitutions, with democratic procedures, a bill of rights, and provisions for amendment. Government officials were invited to address congregations rather than negotiate with individual élites. Where Jews in modern Europe worked with states to anoint one body to represent them all, continuing the medieval tradition of a single interceding voice between sovereign and Jewry, Jews in America created a multiplicity of organizations, some more democratic than others, none with the power or authority to speak for the whole.

The climax of this distinctively modern approach to Jewish politics came not in defense of the Jews but in support of the New Deal and the Black Freedom struggle. This may seem paradoxical, instances of Jewish do-gooders acting on behalf of others. The protagonists saw things differently. As the Jewish Community Relations Council of Cincinnati declared in 1963, “The society in which Jews are most secure, is itself secure, only to the extent that citizens of all races and creeds enjoy full equality.” This was the opposite of the lesson that Jews had learned across the European millennia.

Although struggles for reform in the United States could provoke antisemitic backlashes, American Jews understood that only in a full and complete democracy could they live full and complete lives. After decades of splitting their votes between Democrats and Republicans, more than ninety per cent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944. Orthodox and Reform Jews alike united to welcome the Brown decision, declaring integration, in the words of one Jewish leader, “a veritable fulfillment of our own Jewish purpose and our American dream of destiny.”

In recent years, it’s become fashionable to argue that democracy cannot withstand antisemitism. At moments of intense polarization or economic insecurity, anxious voters look for scapegoats—immigrants, Blacks, Jews—and racist demagogues to get rid of them. In keeping with this waning faith in democracy, influential Jews have reverted to the European model. Instead of organizing or joining democratic movements to fight racism, defend immigration, and build social democracy, Jewish leaders and donors supplicate sovereigns or would-be sovereigns who are antisemitic , or aligned with antisemitism , yet promise special protection for the Jews at home or in Israel. The result is a curious coalition of Jew-lovers and Jew-haters, reminding us that, as Arendt wrote, “society always reacted first to a strong antisemitic movement with marked preference for Jews.”

A forgotten episode from the most polarizing moment in American history, compactly reconstructed by the historian Jonathan Sarna , suggests that democracy has more to offer us than special dispensations from the sovereign. On December 17, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the expulsion of all Jews living in his zone of command, which spanned parts of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. “The most sweeping anti-Jewish regulation in all American history,” Grant’s order had the potential to affect thousands of Jewish men, women, and children in the region, many of them recent immigrants.

Jews had reasons to worry. Wars seldom go well for the Jews, and this one had stirred up all sorts of antisemitism, notably in the North. Jews held prominent positions in the Confederacy. Long identified with money and greed, they were associated in the northern mind with cotton speculators, gold smugglers, corruption, and illegal trade. Grant had his own demons when it came to the Jews, but, even if he hadn’t, he had a penchant for collective punishment. Expelling Jews as a wartime measure against smuggling—and that is what General Orders No. 11 was—was the least of it. Everything seemed primed for a repeat of expulsions past: from ancient Israel; from medieval England, France, and Spain; from cities and towns in Central and Eastern Europe; and now from the “Department of the Tennessee.”

But then that rarest thing in Jewish history happened: nothing. With a few exceptions, Grant’s order was hardly enforced. At least one commander initially defied it, claiming that “he was an officer of the army and not of a church.” As soon as President Lincoln learned of it, on January 3, 1863, he ordered it revoked, which Grant did three days later. “To condemn a class,” Lincoln said, “is, to say the least, to wrong the good with the bad. I do not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”

Of course, a lot happened between December 17th and January 6th, but it belongs to the history of democratic action, rather than Jewish suffering. As soon as a Union captain tried to implement Grant’s order, in Paducah, Kentucky, the Jews mobilized. A group of Paducah locals sent an angry telegram to Lincoln. They went to the national press, which reported the story, and many newspapers editorialized against the order. Isaac Mayer Wise, one of America’s leading rabbis, reminded his fellow-citizens that the order was “everybody’s business,” not just the Jews’. As a final step, the Jews marched on Washington (really, they just travelled in small delegations to the capital). With the help of a sympathetic former congressman, they met with Lincoln, who assured them of his opposition to the order.

It’s no accident that Lincoln’s revocation of Grant’s order came two days after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The war turned the battle against slavery into a more general struggle for freedom and equality, which continued long after the fighting was done. In 1868, the Presidential election pitted the Republican Grant against the Democrat Horatio Seymour, whose running mate was a firm opponent of Black equality. Though Reconstruction and Black suffrage were the main issues on the ballot, Jews played an unprecedented role in the election. Anticipating a close result, particularly in battleground states in the Midwest, both parties courted the Jewish vote. Democrats reminded Jewish voters that Grant had shown his true colors with General Orders No. 11. They also warned that Jews would be replaced by Black freedmen, who were Christian. Countering these narrow appeals to Jewish particularity, Jewish Republicans pointed out that Grant had atoned for his order, and that his party’s belief that “all men of all races should be equal” made him “the best man for us Israelites.”

After Grant won, he aggressively pursued the twin causes of Black and Jewish equality, which he saw as the cornerstones of human rights. He stood fast against various efforts to make the United States a Christian nation, pushing for a constitutional amendment that would create free public schools with no teaching of religion. His eight years in office saw the building of many new and beautiful synagogues. Grant appointed more Jews to government office than any President before him. Simon Wolf—who declared a triple identity for himself as “German by birth, an Israelite by faith, and . . . a thorough American by adoption”—was named Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. Affirming that “a Jew must not have any prejudice,” Wolf proclaimed to have appointed the first Black man to a clerkship in his office; that man was the son of Frederick Douglass. After James Garfield was elected President in 1880, he made Douglass Recorder of Deeds, a position continuously held by a Black person until 1952.

History seldom offers any lessons, but this one is clear. American Jews pioneered a new way of being Jewish and democratic. They did it in coalition with other subjugated groups. In the twentieth century, their lodestar was a multiracial egalitarian society. The fading of that vision is a symptom not of rising fascism or even increasing antisemitism but of regression—to an early, eerie, European way of doing things. It’s not good for democracy. And it’s never been good for the Jews. ♦

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Essays on Jews and Christians in late antiquity in honour of Oded Irshai

Andrew s. jacobs , harvard divinity school. [email protected].

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of this review.]

“The world of late antiquity” as a field of study since the 1970s is, perhaps, too often associated with a few specific Anglophone sites of elaboration and primarily with the intersections of early Christian studies (or, in another register, “patristics”) and post-Roman history (or, in another register, “classics”). The present volume, a Festschrift for Hebrew University professor Oded Irshai, is a salutary reminder that creative and generative thinking about late antiquity emerges from other, polyglot sites and can just as easily center Jews and Judaism alongside their Christian and “pagan” neighbors. Every contributor to the present volume (apart from co-editor and introduction author Martin Goodman) is a student, recent student, or faculty member in Israel and their offerings here traverse the same complicated grounds as the many works of Irshai himself: the social histories of religious contact, conflict, competition, and conquest in late antiquity, particularly among Jews and Christians, most notably in the fraught spaces of the “holy land.”

In an “ode to Oded” that opens the volume, Paula Fredriksen, who has co-written and co-taught with Irshai, along with one of Irshai’s students, Osnat Rance, explore Irshai’s “intellectual versatility,” engendered, in part, by a “late antiquicizing” postdoctorate year at Cambridge where he studied with, among others, Arnaldo Momigliano. Fredrisken and Rance then survey three primary areas of Irshai’s vast publications (sacred violence, eschatology, and local real estate and power politics) before dwelling with real warmth on Irshai’s “intellectual generosity” (which I, too, have experienced during my career).

Following a brief introduction by Martin Goodman, who co-edited the volume with Irshai’s Hebrew University colleague Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, the compact and uniformly smart set of essays unfolds in four uneven sections.

Three essays comprise the first section on “Religion and the Visual.” Yonatan Moss proposes a new solution to the riddle of the Helios mosaic found in Hammat Tiberias and other late ancient synagogues. Moss argues that the era of this mosaic’s construction was also one in which imperial imagery was uncoupled from its “pagan” associations with Sol Invictus and instead was seen as a secular echo of imperial imagery. On the one hand (a “minimalist” argument), this desacralization of the sun image made astrological representation more readily available to anti-idolatry mosaicists and synagogue heads. On the other hand (a “maximalist” argument) the de-divinized association between Constantinian emperors and sun imagery (as on coins) provided Jewish communities an opportunity to signal their affiliation with the imperial household, an opportunity that would become less available in the increasingly anti-Jewish fifth and sixth centuries.

Next, Noa Yuval-Hacham explores the brief emergence of a “hand of God” motif in Jewish art (a motif that would remain much more plentiful in Christian imagery of Late Antiquity). Beginning with the fulsome use of God’s hand in the paintings of the Dura Europos synagogue, Yuval-Hacham posits a Syrian origin for the motif, adopted by Jewish artists as it allowed them to find a representational “middle path between the hidden, formless God, and the God who is represented in human scale.” Yuval-Hacham then follows the path of the dual hands of God in the Dura scene of the parting of the Red Sea down various imagistic and interpretive byways of the fifth and sixth century.

In the final essay of this section, Zeev Weiss takes readers on a tour of late ancient Sepphoris, particularly its religious buildings (“a temple, two churches, and several synagogues”), with particular attention to how the Jews of Sepphoris might have lived in a typically multicultural urban space. While Moss’s essay in this section lacks any Helios images, Yuval-Hacham’s and Weiss’s essay each have several black-and-white images and reconstructions to help readers.

The longest section, on “Christian Perspectives,” comprises six essays. Yonatan Livneh revisits Cyril of Jerusalem’s promotion of his city’s interests; contra Jan Willem Drijvers’ argument that Cyril leveraged both the sacred sites of the city and its episcopal tradition stretching back to James, Livneh finds distinct reticence on the latter count, owing perhaps to rising anti-Judaism in the fourth century: “Jerusalem’s early history… remained a minefield.” Jacob Ashkenazi triangulates the efforts to establish a Christian capital between Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, and the empresses Eudocia and Pulcheria in the fifth century. Eudocia’s and Juvenal’s rival efforts in Jerusalem are placed in tension with Pulcheria’s efforts in Constantinople.

We move from episcopal politics to reinterpretations of sacred history. Osnat Rance (co-editor of the volume) gives a concise and persuasive summary of her argument to reassign the authorship and origins of an Encomium for the Martyrs found with other texts of Eusebius of Caesarea in a fifth-century Syriac manuscript. Per Rance, the particular sweep of martyrial history, from Old Testament martyrs to the third century CE, puts the text somewhere around Antioch after Eusebius’s death. In one of the more ambitious short offerings, Aryeh Kofsky and Serge Ruzer survey texts in Greek, Latin, and Syriac from Acts of the Apostles to the Cave of Treasures to trace diverse ideas about “Eschatological Ingathering of Israel in Early Christianity.” Oscillating between literal anticipation and spiritualized hesitation, this variety of texts from church orders to apocalypses to hagiographies index attitudes to Jews and Judaism among Christian thinkers.

Ora Limor brings her considerable expertise on relics and pilgrimage to the question of Jesus’s footprints at the Church of the Ascension, which began appearing in texts in Late Antiquity before being viewed by pilgrims, etched in stone, in the Middle Ages. Limor follows this trail from “text to texture”; what began as a marvel—footprints imprinted in sand that could never be wiped away—reported secondhand in literary texts in Rome and Gaul materialized as a stone monument centuries later witnessed by the pilgrims themselves. At issue, Limor suggests in her conclusion, may be internal Christian anxieties about divine embodiment as well as external competition, especially with Muslims, for proof of God’s ongoing presence in the holy land.

This section concludes with the most precise and focused of the essays: Daniel Schwartz’s correction of much modern interpretation of the verb ἐπηγάγετο in the Testimonium Flavianum as a pejorative reference to Jesus that might bolster the authenticity of the passage in question. Schwartz tracks this modern misinterpretation to a misreading of a parenthetical note in the nineteenth-century version of a sixteenth-century Greek lexicon. Nonetheless, Schwartz does not find in this correction an argument against the Testimonium ’s authenticity.

We turn to two essays from “Jewish Perspectives,” both of which assess Jewish (in both cases, rabbinic) views of Rome. Joshua Levinson plumbs the complexities of imperialized identity—through mimicry, magic, and diaspora refraction—in narratives of Palestinian rabbis sojourning in the Eternal City: “The journey to the heart of the other culture reveals that the very distinctions that enable identity are more unstable and porous than they may wish to acknowledge. Each side wears the other’s mask.” Levinson attempts a complex, even postcolonial read of rabbis considering Rome; Eyal Ben-Eliyahu’s aim is more concrete: to identify the two huts mentioned in rabbinic literature built by Romulus at the founding of the city in the actual landscape of late ancient Rome. Triangulating rabbinic and non-rabbinic evidence, Ben-Eliyahu lands on the “Casa Romuli” on the Palatine and Capitoline Hills.

The collection concludes with two essays on “Influence and Competition.” Hillel Newman brings us into the world of late ancient Jewish apocalypticism by placing the Sefer Eliyahu in literal dialogue (through juxtaposition of pertinent passages) with the Latin poet Commodian, particularly his apocalyptic Carmen de duo populis (which scholars date anywhere from the third through fifth centuries). Newman’s larger goal is to show that certain references to the apocalyptic “king from the East” may draw on common apocalyptic motifs dating long before the sixth century (he also adduces Lactantius to a lesser extent) and should not be taken as instances of vaticinia ex eventu that place the Sefer Eliyahu in a seventh-century context (Newman prefers the sixth century). The final essay, on “rest” in competitive Christian and Jewish contexts by Israel Jacob Yuval, comprises a vast sweep, both philosophical (“How did the idea of rest evolve?”) and historical, from Enūma Eliš to the Middle Ages, from Christian attempts to wrest rest from Saturday to Sunday to the deep—and perhaps very subtly anti-Christian—meditations of the Havdala liturgy.

Most of the essays are tightly focused on individual texts or images (or even on a single Greek word, in the case of Schwartz’s essay); only a few essays (by Kofsky and Ruzer, Limor, and Yuval) take a longer view of their subjects. They are all carefully argued and written (mistakes are few: a bishop’s death off by a decade, a passage ascribed to Genesis instead of Exodus) and they are refreshingly accessible, if not necessarily of immediate relevance, to all manner of students of late antiquity, no matter our particular specialization.

Readers will find that the essays cover a tremendous amount of ground, from divine imagery to ecclesiastical competition to pilgrimage to Jewish responses to empire. Should such a vast array of offerings seem too broad to those readers, it should be noted that these are topics all covered by Irshai himself, as the footnotes amply attest: as good Festschrifters , the authors here build on their honoree’s intellectual versatility and generosity.

Authors and Titles

PAULA FREDRIKSEN, with OSNAT RANCE — Ode to Oded

MARTIN GOODMAN — Introduction

Religion and the Visual

YONATAN MOSS — The Emperor’s New Clothes: the ‘Jewish Helios’ Enigma in its Christian Imperial Context

NOA YUVAL-HACHAM — Between Heaven and Earth: The Hand of God in Ancient Jewish Visuality

ZEEV WEISS — Shaping Religious Space: Pagans, Jews and Christians in Ancient Sepphoris

Christian Perspectives

YONATAN LIVNEH — Cyril’s New Jerusalem and His Omission of Local Church History

JACOB ASHKENAZI — Eudocia, Pulcheria, and Juvenal: Competition in the Field of Religion and the Built Environment of Jerusalem in the Fifth Century CE

OSNAT RANCE — ‘Although Their Names Escaped Me’: Local Patriotism and Saints Commemoration in Late Antique Syria

ARYEH KOFSKY and SERGE RUZER — Rethinking the Eschatological Ingathering of Israel in Early Christianity

ORA LIMOR —  Divina Vestigia : Tracking the Early History of Jesus’ Footprints at the Mount of Olives

DANIEL R. SCHWARTZ — Reinach and Stephanus, Philo and Josephus: A Note on the  Testimonium Flavianum

Jewish Perspectives

JOSHUA LEVINSON — When in Rome

EYAL BEN-ELIYAHU — Where were the Two Huts of Remus and Romulus in Rome?

Influence and Competition

HILLEL NEWMAN — The Hebrew  Book of Elijah  and Commodian’s  Carmen de duobus populis

ISRAEL JACOB YUVAL — And the Rest is History: Sabbath versus Sunday

What Is the Meaning of Jewish History?

A brief history of Jewish history-writing reveals an abundance of partial and competing narratives, all too often missing a key ingredient.

An ancient Egyptian figurine of a Semitic slave.  Wikipedia.

Eric Mechoulan is a professor of history and geography in Paris. He doesn’t eat meat.

J ews invented the very idea of a history that is not a simple succession of events but a progress of mankind toward an accomplished purpose. No idea of history as we know it would have ever been conceived without the rabbinic sages’ disregard for ancient chronicles and annals. As the 20th-century French historian Philippe Ariès once noted:

Neither Greeks nor Romans ever had the idea of a universal history, grasping as a whole all times and all spaces. It is thanks to its contact with Jewish tradition that the Roman world, once Christianized, discovered that all mankind shared an inclusive interdependent history: a crucial moment at which to identify the origin of the modern concept of history.

Nevertheless, neither the Talmud nor contemporary Jewish scholarship enables us to write the history of the Jewish contribution to the progress of mankind as a whole. Before the 18th-century Enlightenment, Jews mainly recalled the transmission of traditional Jewish learning through the generations (though also, as we shall see, taking note of its development over time) or chronicled their people’s vicissitudes and misfortunes. Isolated exceptions aside, only in the late-18th and 19th centuries did Jewish historians begin to adopt new academic standards in conformity with the latest European fashions of scholarship. Israeli history-writing today appears largely as a national variation on the same theme.

Meanwhile, the specifically Jewish relationship with times past has remained that of memory. Oral transmission always enabled Jewish children to reappropriate their parents’ emotions and ideas, and disciples their masters’ teachings. Memory is the realm of feelings and of life, a participatory collective enterprise in which time is processed through the categories of tradition. In this respect, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argued in his influential 1982 work Zakhor , there is a major divide between memory and history, the latter of which is a modern method of inquiry that uses rational rules to build an orderly accounting of causes and consequences, to decide on the admissibility or non-admissibility of evidence, and to render intelligible the otherwise inchoate-seeming mix of facts, events, and human calculations and passions.

Indeed, so great is the divide between these realms that Yerushalmi voiced a deep skepticism about the ability of modern historians to reconcile the rigorous methodology of their discipline with the resonant meanings derived from Jewish collective memory. Nor is that all. Along with the widening gap between history and memory, Jewish memory itself has become deeply fragmented, as the secular and the religious, the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the diaspora, Zionists and anti-Zionists (not to mention post-Zionists) have all adopted competing narratives of Jewish history, sometimes drawing on historical scholarship to support their views and sometimes deliberately spurning it. Such fragmentation bodes ill for a people in whom collective memory continues to hold so prominent a place.

This essay reverses Yerushalmi’s concern, asking instead whether and how Judaism and Jewish memory might enrich historical writing about the Jewish past—and whether such enriched study of the Jewish past might help the Jews of today better understand both the events of that past and the meanings that those events have taken on. A necessarily brief survey of Jewish writing about “history” will enable us to face the challenge posed by the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland: an event, pregnant with meaning, for which neither academic history nor sacral memory was fully prepared but which affords an opportunity to envisage a new comprehensive Jewish history.

I. A “Religion of Memory”—or Not

Judaism is wrongly pictured as wholly a “religion of memory.” In the Bible, the list of obligatory things to remember— zakhor— is limited to the deliverance from Egypt, the hardships experienced by the Israelites in the desert, the revelation at Sinai, the commandment concerning observance of the Sabbath, the depredations committed by the evil Amalek, and the punishment of Moses’ sister Miriam for improper speech. Later on in the Bible, except for Queen Esther’s order to remember the deliverance of the Persian Jews from the designs of the wicked Haman, Jews are not enjoined to recall their own history.

All of Judaism’s subsequent rites of memory were instead made possible only by the talmudic rabbis’ understanding of a verse from Jeremiah: “For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord; because they called thee an Outcast, saying, this is Zion, whom no man seeketh after” (30:17). Everything entailed by “Zion,” the rabbis say, deserves to be sought out, by memory if necessary.

In order to observe these multiple rites of memory, Jews needed a calendar, not a history. This is why the rabbis’ temporal conceptions differ so markedly from the Greek and modern conceptions of the flow of time ( chronos ). In that sense, Jews did not need to find historical chronology in the Torah, where the term that most closely approximates “history” is toldot —literally, generations or begettings.

In the books of Genesis and Exodus, the phrase “These are the toldot of . . .” sometimes introduces a story or biography and sometimes a genealogy. Thus, “These are the toldot of Noah” (Genesis 6:9) introduces the flood story, while “These are the toldot of the sons of Noah” (Genesis 10:1) is followed by lists of who begat whom. But the distinction between the two meanings of toldot is immaterial because the essence of biblical history is to convey the virtues (and the failings) of the earliest humans and the patriarchs as refined through their progeny, from one generation to the next.

The historical sections of the Hebrew Bible pursue these ends by telling more than the story of a family, a tribe, or a people. To the question “who are the Jews?,” Genesis answers with a book of ethnology. Above all, these passages make clear who God is, and who He can be seen to be, precisely through His involvement in history, which He has endowed with both a beginning (the creation) and an end (the messianic era). In the telling, these narratives provide role models—again, both positive and negative—for mankind throughout the ages.

Next, the Talmud, for its part, extends, embroiders, and reinforces the biblical approach in a variety of innovative ways. As we’ve seen, the talmudic sages were partial to a specific conception of time. To them, as described by Yerushalmi in Zakhor , the experiences of previous generations did not take place entirely in the past: the rabbis taught that the souls of all Jews yet to be born were present at Sinai, and that every Jew is “obligated to see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt.” Historical occurrences matter only insofar as they serve as sources of moral, spiritual, and legal meaning.

Take the Talmud’s account in Tractate Gittin of the reasons for the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. No mention is made there of the Judean revolt, of internal Jewish power struggles, or of Rome’s own strategic priorities and internal conflicts. Instead, the rabbis present a story of the public humiliation of a man named Bar Kamtsa, the failure of the sages to intervene in his behalf, and Bar Kamtsa’s subsequent decision to extract revenge by provoking the emperor’s wrath against the Jews. In this account the Talmud does give us a chain of causes and effects, but one entirely in the service of a spiritual lesson: namely, that what brought catastrophe to the Jews was the sin of gratuitous hatred. For the sages, the study of history was less a matter of making sense of chronology than of drawing a series of paradigms whose significance was at once halakhic and metaphysical (that is, related to the ultimate structure of being).

True, Greeks and Romans, like the French and the British centuries later, possessed founding myths comparable in their eyes to the biblical stories of Abraham and Isaac, or Moses and David. For these peoples, myths were a source of legitimation: without the myth of Troy and Aeneas’ escape, there would be no Rome, or, worse, Rome would just be a city of semi-barbarians with no connection to the gods—Aeneas, pointedly, was a son of Venus—or to ancient literary traditions (as, for the Greeks, in the works of Homer).

Yet there are differences as well: in contrast to Greeks and Romans, Jews never granted much value to “myths” at the expense of men and women who could serve as moral exemplars and archetypes. If Greeks and Romans saw their foundational stories as taking place in a long-ago age fundamentally different from their own, the Jewish sages insisted on unity between the “mythic” past and the present. The texture of present time is not different from the texture of patriarchal time—which is why latter-day Jews need to reenact events through their narration.

We can observe the importance of this undifferentiated view of history in the vidui bikurim , the few lines that every Israelite had to recite each year when bringing the first fruits to the Temple. The lines are a moral synopsis of Jewish history:

My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor. Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil, and oppression. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; and now I bring the first fruits of the soil that You, Lord, have given me.

Still, even though the sages assert that there is no chronology per se in the Torah, they were far from blind to historical development. Consider, for instance, the opening lines of the talmudic tractate Pirkei Avot: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and gave it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it over to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets gave it over to the men of the Great Assembly.” Similarly, the sages and their medieval epigones kept a meticulous record of halakhic innovations, taking pains to explain which extra-Sinaitic laws were promulgated by Moses, which by Ezra, which by Hillel, which by the sages who lived immediately after the Second Temple’s destruction, and so forth. In emphasizing the ahistorical aspects of talmudic thinking, Yerushalmi and historians after him have sometimes overlooked this attention to development.

What remains true, and fills out the picture, is that the talmudic rabbis and, again, their medieval epigones rarely endorsed a vision of historical progress like that to be found later in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers and eventually in the writings of Hegel and Marx. Rarely, but not never: an important exception in the medieval period was Maimonides (1138-1204), who regarded the rituals of the ancient Temple as a necessary intermediate stage between the world of pagan sacrifices and the spiritual elevation for which the Jews as a people were destined. In this sense, Maimonides may be said to have anticipated a much later phase of Jewish history-writing.

During the medieval and early-modern periods, Jews wrote updated accounts of the transmission of tradition, chronicles of the Crusades in Germany and of the expulsion from Spain, and, in the 17th century, narratives of the violence wrought by the Chmielnicki uprising in Poland. All of these are worthy of being called works of history, but again not in the modern sense. Only toward the end of the 18th century, as Western society gradually started to open its doors to them, did Jews, eager to enter, become convinced of the value of having a history that was recognizably part of “universal”—that is, whole and coherent—history as practiced by Europeans in the Age of Enlightenment.

The French, the British, and the Germans all had histories of their own. Edward Gibbon in the 18th century and Leopold von Ranke in the 19th were writing new histories of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Jews claiming to be part of European civilization needed a history, too. Thus, historians like Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) started writing it.

Graetz and the circle of German Jewish historians around him rejected both traditional rabbinic indifference to history and traditional rabbinic divisions of time marked by the giving of the Torah and the building and destruction of the two Temples. Instead, they imported and imposed the new chronological scheme that periodized the past into the essentially Christian but now-familiar categories of ancient, medieval, and modern. Simultaneously, their study of causes and consequences was largely stripped of the age-old premises of divine purpose and providence that characterized earlier Jewish historiography.

Graetz’s multivolume history of the Jews focused overwhelmingly on intellectual and literary activity. As European Christians could look backward to the cultural monuments of classical antiquity, Graetz felt Jews could look back to the grand legacy of the Bible and the Talmud. In addition, he and his colleagues greatly admired the Jews of early medieval Spain, who wrote in both Hebrew and Arabic, produced sophisticated secular and religious poetry, and studied classical philosophy and Aristotelian science. By contrast, they saw the later medieval and early-modern periods as riddled by decline and obscurantism, a Jewish dark age that was then followed—providentially, as it were—by a rebirth as Jews rediscovered European culture and became part of it.

This emphasis on the blessings of enlightenment, emancipation, and acculturation was indicative of a general viewpoint. Most of the era’s Jewish historians rejected the memory-laden concept of “exile,” whether metaphysical or geographical, favoring instead the fancier and seemingly neutral term diaspora . Moreover, to sever the Jews’ perduring bond with the land of Israel, they downplayed or jettisoned the old dreams of national redemption by supernatural means, pointing out instead that, at least at certain times, Jews had manifestly been able to survive and be productive without a state or a territory. In the same vein, the 19th-century founders of Reform Judaism—some of whom were themselves Jewish historians—deleted from the liturgy all references to the messiah, the return to Zion, and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.

To put it in Yerushalmi’s terms, this was the moment when history replaced memory—with memory, hitherto a collective undertaking, now relegated to the realm of the personal and the private in order to clear room for history. If 18th- and 19th-century Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) could be said to have created a secular Jewish culture, the new Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) detached numerous Jews from their living past, turning their laws, customs, and memories into mere objects of study. What had been gained in terms of intellectual rigor was lost in terms of meaning or, worse, replaced by the service of new gods—especially the twin beliefs that ancient traditions need no longer be revered and that the inevitable forward march of history would lead to the perfection of society.

Most of all, by refusing to see historical events as a means for understanding the largest questions of Jewish existence, the new history-writing rendered impossible any way of accounting for the singular, extraordinary, and globally significant history of the Jewish people—let alone the possibility of so truly extraordinary an event as a rebirth of the Jewish nation in its ancestral homeland.

II. The Zionist Challenge to Jewish History

Yet that “miraculous” rebirth did happen, and in happening it presented a new challenge to the practice of Jewish history.

This is not to say that professional historians can’t explain or haven’t explained the dramatic and unforeseen course of events that culminated in the founding of the state of Israel. To the contrary, their job of connecting the dots was made easier by the conjunction of a variety of contributing factors, both intellectual and political: among them, the 18th-century Enlightenment, the emancipation of European Jews and the Haskalah, the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, and the post-World War II movement of rapid decolonization. In particular, anyone familiar with the history of European nationalism can see the parallels with Zionism—among which is the interrelationship, first pointed out by the great French scholar Ernest Renan in 1881, between the decline of religion and the rise of modern secular nationalism.

As if to prove Renan right, the first generations of Zionists sought to build a new, secular Jewish national identity. And with this new identity came a new Zionist view of Jewish history. In general, early Zionists were intent on casting into the shadow the extraordinary contributions of the Jewish people to human civilization throughout the previous centuries. Ancient sages and medieval martyrs were brushed aside and denigrated, their heroic place taken by modern-day pioneers and kibbutzniks.

Focused as they were on the needs of state-building and on creating a “new Jew,” very few Zionist historians, and fewer political figures, acknowledged how much they owed to what had come before them. Appeals to the previous millennium-and-a-half of Jewish history were psychologically off-limits; at most, Zionists located their relevant predecessors in the farthest reaches of the otherwise discarded past: in the biblical warrior-hero Gideon, in Judah the Maccabee who in the 2nd-century BCE led a victorious rebellion against the Seleucid Greeks, and in Shimon Bar Kokhba, who led the last Judean revolt against Rome in 132-135 CE.

Of course, most European nationalisms also dug selectively into the past to create national genealogies and traditions and a sense of the nation as an actor in history. Thus, French pupils during the Third Republic (1870-1940) would learn that their ancestors were Celtic Gauls, conveniently overlooking the Frankish, i.e. Germanic, origin of the country’s name. Their British counterparts, similarly, were taught that Henry Plantagenet’s reign in the 12th century was crucial to creating a genuinely English monarchy, even though Henry likely never spoke English and, as a descendant of William the Conqueror, was more French than anything else.

By contrast, the Jews were a long-established historical reality. Unlike Finns, Czechs, and Poles who had to invent or create national epics, Jewish nationalists not only possessed, in the Bible, a genuinely ancient epic to build on—and one that detailed the very creation of the Jewish “nation”—but a continuous millennia-old history of achievements and of stubborn attachment even in exile to their language and ancestral territory.

And yet here’s the paradox: while others had to delve deep into the past to find even a few fugitive fragments justifying their existence, Jews, the oldest literate living people, now seemed intent on anchoring their nation-state in a realm outside of that continuous sweep of Jewish history. For Zionist historians and politicians, at least until the 1960s, the past was divided into three discontinuous epochs, the first of which was characterized by national agency and activism until successive defeats at the hands of the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the second by 2,000 years of impotence and passivity in exile, the third by agency and activism regained with the advent of Zionism. In the first and third periods, Jews were masters of their destiny. In the long second epoch, the fate of the Jews was vested in a passive religious hope for redemption wholly dependent on a hidden divine will.

This attitude toward the diasporic past was vividly stereotyped by the Israeli novelist Haim Hazaz in his short story “The Sermon.” Hazaz’s protagonist, a simple kibbutznik named Yudka, is the embodiment of the new Jew. In an impassioned speech before his kibbutz’s council—the time is the early 1940s—Yudka rejects all of pre-Zionist Jewish history as a chronicle of unrelenting submissiveness; its greatest figures were those who maintained their dignity despite their suffering, not the kind who defeated their tormentors. Yudka does not want children to be taught anything about this history because a new one has started with him and his kind, who refuse to be victims any longer.

Yudka’s conclusion is that Jews clung to the messianic idea because they were too timid to try to redeem themselves by taking their destiny into their own hands and returning to their own land—thereby dooming themselves to pogroms and expulsions, blood libels and massacres. He himself has no interest in the events of the past; he prefers the pioneer’s national present to both history and memory.

Most Zionist thinkers, even as they faulted Emancipation-era historians for having inserted Jewish history into world history, thus cutting it off from the land of Israel, shared with those earlier historians (and with Yudka) a certain contempt for the Jewish “dark ages” when Jews lived in ghettos, were under the authority of rabbis who were themselves under the authority of Gentile regents, and did not participate in the history of nations. They disagreed, however, over when those dark ages began and ended. For Graetz and his colleagues, they ended with the opening of Christian cities to the Jews starting in the 17th and 18th centuries; for Zionists, they ended with the Love of Zion movement in the 1880s (more than a decade prior to the advent of Theodor Herzl) and were definitively repudiated by the heroic deeds of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine.

To jump forward somewhat, this helps explain the wide difference in Jewish attitudes toward the meaning of the Shoah in Jewish history.

In America, mainly secular Jews, in tandem with Jewish communal organizations, would in the late 20th century fashion a veritable cult of Holocaust memory that for some would become their only link to Jewish identity. This cult of memory, often connected to a vaguely defined need to “repair the world,” has been enabled partly by ignorance of both Judaism and Jewish history and partly by the amazing efforts developed by Sunday schools and Jewish organizations to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish victimization. For Jews who see less meaning in the establishment of Israel than in the gates of Auschwitz, the scantiness of the content prevents an understanding of, let alone participation in, the cultural, spiritual, and political rebirth of Jewish identity centered in the Jewish state. Some, clinging stubbornly to their investment in Jewish victimhood, have thereby become silent accomplices of  anti -Zionism (and in salient other cases active promoters of it).

Through the traditional rabbinic lens of memory, by contrast, the Nazi Holocaust represents another attempt to eradicate the Jewish people as the bearer of a specific message of its own; it is thus to be seen essentially as a pogrom—a monstrously immense pogrom but in the end one less meaningful than the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem. Many secular Israelis, for their part, steeped in the ideology of “negation of the diaspora,” tended to regard the Holocaust as but the culmination of a long, undifferentiated, and alien tale of Jewish passivity, and for a long while, at least until the Eichmann trial in 1960-61, found it difficult to sympathize with the many survivors in their midst, let alone to identify with their experience.

Yet in Israel this attitude was not general. Among proponents of a contrasting view, perhaps most notable was the historian and minister of education Ben-Zion Dinur, who saw Zionism itself not as a decisive break with the past but as “a huge river into which flowed all of the smaller streams and tributaries of the Jewish struggle down the ages.” Dinur stood at the apex of a new group of historians, loosely known as the Jerusalem school—its other leading figures in the first generation were Yitsḥak Baer and Gershom Scholem—who, instead of severing modern Zionism from the diasporic past, sought to find its roots in that past.

In the view of these historians, the revival of Hebrew by the poets and grammarians of medieval Spain had paved the way for the Hebrew literary renaissance of the 19th century, which in turn paved the way for the revival of spoken Hebrew. In the roster of those rediscovered proto-Zionists were not only the 12th-century rabbi and poet Judah Halevy, who left cosmopolitan Spain for Jerusalem, but also some early Ḥasidim and disciples of the Vilna Gaon who left Eastern Europe for Palestine. This conception of history featured its own inner drive forward, one that culminated in return to the Jewish land.

Finally, a group of non-Zionist historians, mostly East Europeans who broke with Graetz in important ways, focused on the political and social achievements of the Jews in exile and in particular their ingenious structures of communal organization. Here the foremost figure was Simon Dubnov (1860-1941), an ardent diaspora nationalist. In America, the Polish-born Salo Baron (1895-1989) would famously denounce the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” that had focused on exile and persecutions, stressing instead the periods of relative tranquility, adaptation, and above all cultural flourishing in his seminal Social and Religious History of the Jews .

For all their departures from tradition, Zionist historians of all schools and tendencies, acutely aware as they were of the bloodbaths that attended the birth of other modern nation-states, were convinced of the moral superiority both of the Zionist cause and of the means by which it was pursued. It was this bedrock conviction that a group of Israeli scholars who emerged in the 1980s would deny emphatically.

Presenting themselves as scholars setting out to debunk counterfactual myths and reestablish historical truth, these “new historians”—their number prominently included Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappé—sought to show instead that, in becoming a state, Israel not only behaved immorally but had committed an “original sin” against the Palestinians: a sin that forever invalidated the state’s claim to legitimacy. Through some minor corrections of the record of the 1948-49 War of Independence, minimal use of Arab sources, abundant misinterpretation, numerous doctored quotes, and possibly some forgery, they declared, for example, that the British mandatory power, far from trying to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state, had tried instead to prevent the establishment of an Arab one; that most Arabs, rather than fleeing the hostilities of their own free will or at the behest of attacking Arab leaders and propagandists, were uprooted and expelled from their homes by Israeli forces; that the balance of armed power in the war favored the Jews rather than the invading Arab states; that the Arabs did not actually intend to prevent the creation of the Jewish state in the first place; and finally, that in ensuing decades the one party responsible for the failure of peace in the region was the state of Israel.

In truth, there are no old and new historians, only honest and dishonest ones. For evidence in support of their conclusions, the new historians mainly drew on calumnies that had been employed for decades in the propaganda of Arab dictators. Apart from Benny Morris, who would later reverse many of his earlier conclusions, the new historians did little to expand or advance knowledge of the 1948-9 war. They were not even particularly new, or original: their approach fit perfectly into the ideological trends of the 1970s, especially the disparagement of all non-Third World nationalisms and above all, as in the 1975 UN resolution branding Zionism as a form of racism, the nationalism embodied in the state of Israel.

Unfortunately, in blazing a trail, the new historians inspired others to follow. For the next generation of would-be iconoclasts, attacking the birth of the Jewish state was not enough. To delegitimize the Zionist enterprise, it was necessary to tear apart the notion of Jewish peoplehood itself—the very foundation of the state. Enter Shlomo Sand, who in The Invention of the Jewish People famously concluded that Jews were not a people at all: they did not share the same genetic origin, were never exiled from Palestine, and were today considered a single people only because Zionist historiographers managed to suppress the fact that European and especially East European Jews arose from conversions among various genuine peoples in medieval Europe.

A book declaring that Napoleon never existed would have trouble finding a publisher, but Sand’s wild imaginings were an editor’s dream come true. His book is better seen as a successor, though a much less ingenious and entertaining one, to a 1974 volume by the right-wing French Catholic writer Marc Dem that identified the Jews as, to cite the title of the English edition, The Lost Tribes from Outer Space . In it, YHWH appears as a technologically advanced space traveler, the Jews are extraterrestrial creatures, miracles are evidence of alien technology, and Noah’s ark is a hospital ship designed to preserve healthy specimens in the aftermath of the failed first version of the Jewish people.

To be fair, however, the new historians, unlike Sand, can also be given a certain measure of credit. At the very least, their underlying impulse—to move beyond and away from a historiography designed to support a national political vision—was a healthy one. Their work obliged all subsequent Israeli historians to avoid the kind of epic and apologetic Zionist historiography that at its extremes could sometimes resemble a mirror image of medieval Crusade chronicles, with self-gratulation substituting for the medievals’ misery and tears.

The need for a suitable alternative historiography—one that can take the place of classic Zionist narratives but without attacking Judaism or the Jewish state, and without abandoning intellectual honesty—is no less pressing today.

III. Toward a New Jewish History

Neither rabbinic, academic, nor Zionist history exhausts the dimensions of Jewish historiography. But, although some have tried, no one has succeeded in creating a “usable past” that is both faithful to the facts and able to serve as a source of meaning and inspiration for the Jewish people.

Between the birth of Israel and the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, those who tried the hardest to create such a synthesis were the religious Zionists. Rooted deeply in traditional understandings of Jewish history, they felt no need to mimic the tropes of Western nation-building or to truckle to the Israeli secular left’s penchant for disconnecting Israeli identity from Jewishness. Religious Zionists conceived of Israel’s national project as connected to a Jewish idea of man, “embracing a luminous theory of life and an explicit code of morality and social converse,” in the words of Simon Dubnov, for whom Jewish “nationalism” was essentially rooted in ethics.

But this attempted synthesis of history and memory, of Zionist and religious historiography, never managed to provide a common ground. Part of the responsibility lies in the failed attempts of religious Zionists themselves to grapple with the fact that the redemption of the Jewish people had been jumpstarted not by God-fearers but by ardent secularists.

The problem was an old one. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the 20th-century Jewish thinker widely regarded as the ideologue of religious Zionism, had squared the circle thus:

Secular Zionists may think they [are engineering the return to the promised land] for political, national, or socialist reasons, but in fact the actual reason for them coming to resettle in Israel is a religious Jewish spark in their souls, planted by God. Without their knowledge, they are contributing to the divine scheme . . . . In the end, they will understand that the laws of Torah are the key to true harmony and a socialist state (not in the Marxist meaning) that will be a light for the nations and bring salvation to the world.

For many Israelis, needless to say, this conception of history and its endpoint rankled, illegitimately transforming Zionist efforts into providential instruments in the exclusive service of Orthodox Jews, whose ideas and institutions were being promoted as the future shapers of the Jewish state. Secular Zionists would be the donkey, religious fundamentalists its riders. Hence, the success of the journalist Sefi Rachlevsky’s denunciatory book The Messiah’s Donkey (1998).

But secular Israelis were not and are not the only Jews primed to reject Kook’s approach or refusing to hope for “next year in Jerusalem.” Many Ḥaredim have declined to ascribe any historical meaning whatsoever to human actions, electing instead to safeguard Jewish values outside of time—including by wearing the garb of 18th-century East European nobles in order to stress their self-segregation from the post-Emancipation present. As a result, many ḥaredi Jews have withheld their wisdom from discussions of Israel’s place in Jewish history even as many secular Israelis have resolved not to listen to them in the first place.

In fact, however, Israelis trying to understand and “place” their own history could benefit greatly from what Jewish texts and traditions have to say. For one thing, these texts can serve as a reminder that today’s Jewish state is not, and should not be seen as, the direct heir to the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah—most of whose kings after Solomon were idolatrous tyrants ruling populations that likewise worshipped Baal and Asherah. The Bible might better be read not solely as a heroic text—an approach favored by David Ben-Gurion among others—than as, also, a cautionary tale. Ḥaredim might even be particularly well-positioned to guard against certain Baals and Asherahs of our own day, including those manifested in the excesses of religious nationalism—for instance, in the dangerous way the Gush Emunim movement took the “miraculous” victory of 1967 as its cue to build Jewish settlements in the newly acquired territories not for the sake of improved security but as a means to hasten the coming of the messiah, believing at the same time in peaceful co-existence with the local Arab population.

Today’s successors of Gush Emunim are the “hilltop youth” who leave their houses of study to establish outposts in the West Bank and who claim to be heirs to Joshua’s warriors, conquering the land of Israel as they tote rifles and build their makeshift houses—all contrary to Israeli law. Like earlier radicals, they have broken with the traditions of their elders, deeming them too passive. Not only do many of them mistake geography for history, but in valuing rocks over people they also turn a means—the conquest of the land—into an end. Worse, they have support: after the debacle of the Oslo Accords, Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza and displacement of the communities at Yamit and Gush Katif, and the use of the IDF to remove illegal settlements on the West Bank, many religious Zionists have begun to see secular Zionists, far from being unwitting instruments of the divine will, as instead their enemies.

For their part, secular Israelis have sins of their own to confront. Cut off from their spiritual roots, and seduced in the 1970s by the promise of a sudden peace, many found yet another idol: the fanciful notion of immediately normalizing relations with their Arab neighbors. Thus did “Peace Now” become a legitimizing slogan for those advocating unconditional negotiations with Israel’s sworn enemies while condemning the settlements as a threat to Israel’s moral existence and political survival. In fact, “Peace Now” was and is as disdainful of history as is the “Messiah Now” of the hilltop youth.

More recently, in their desire to make Israel part of a globalized world, many secular Israelis have also tended to worship their own versions of Baal and Asherah—Consumerism, Hedonism, Cosmopolitanism Now!—thus further detaching themselves from both history and memory.

Outside of Israel, especially in the United States, there are significant numbers of Reform and unaffiliated Jews who nurture a general indifference or even hostility toward the land and state of Israel and who thereby recapitulate the role of the Hebrews who stayed in Egypt at the time of Moses, or the ten northern tribes who separated themselves from Jerusalem, the Temple, and the Davidic monarchy, or those who preferred to stay in Babylon at the time of Ezra’s return in the 5th century BCE. By denouncing the Zionist message, refusing the adventure of Israel, or cherishing assimilation and their own selective memories, they form strange bedfellows with non-Zionist “Orthodox” Jews incapable of living in a Jewish history. All of these “families” have remained mentally in Egypt or Babylon.

The consequence is that many Jews today, rather than being united by a shared past, are divided by their differing historical consciousnesses. Each in their own way, neither Ḥaredim nor religious nationalists nor secular Jews seem willing to acknowledge that Jewish history (to quote Dubnov again) “presents a phenomenon of undeniable uniqueness” and that the rebuilding of the state means not mere physical relocation but the resumption of the millennia-old project of creating an ethical Jewish society.

Fortunately, there are some countervailing trends. Numerous secular Israelis have become better acquainted with their Hebrew past through new projects like “secular yeshivot” and such institutions as the Alma Home for Jewish Culture. When a secular politician like Ruth Calderon gives a Talmud lesson in the Knesset, or Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, completely secular in her personal life, becomes a leading figure and major intellectual force in the old religious-Zionist party, one senses a shift in the winds of fashion. Even Yudka, at the end of Hazaz’s story, undergoes a sudden change of perspective and, to his horror, finds himself wondering aloud whether the Zionists were wrong—whether the real truth was that “Judaism could manage to survive somehow in exile, but here in the Land of Israel it’s doubtful.”

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron—no religious fundamentalist, he—once quipped that “human beings make history, but they do not know what kind of history they are making.” A century earlier, Edmond Michelet, the chronicler of the French Revolution, claimed for all historians the right to say what historical actors really meant and wanted, since, without the benefit of hindsight, they could not possibly understand the events in which they played a part.

Jews, whether religious or secular, whether in Israel or in the diaspora, might take the words of Aron and Michelet to heart and acknowledge that to understand Jewish history properly, we need historians. But Jewish history cannot be written like the history of any other people. It resists both the “religious” approach of prophets and rabbis and the “scientific” approach of academics. These days, too many Jewish historians, lest they open themselves to accusations of ethnic or religious particularism, have abandoned any pretense of finding meaning in what they study, insisting instead that there is no such thing as Judaism, only “Judaisms”—that is, the randomly constructed Jewish identity of given communities at given times in given places. This is not only self-defeating; it nullifies any quest for the inner meaning of Jewish history.

It is time to reclaim the field of meaning, which is to say of purport. To complete the task, needed are historians who can reconcile collective Jewish memory with scholarly Jewish history, the sages’ approach with the secular Zionists’ approach, who are proficient at detecting universality in chronology, honest enough to record that Jewish history has both its victors and its vanquished, inspired enough to breathe a Jewish spirit into “mere” fact-finding, and wise enough to render contemporary Israel as both a return to the origins of the Jewish people and the successor and heir to the exile.

Tsey ul’mad : “go out and learn,” says the Talmud (Shabbat 31a), a sentiment echoed in the Passover Haggadah. In this case, the relevant advice is: go out of history to learn history’s meaning.

More about: History & Ideas , Jewish history

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For Some Jewish Democrats, Heightened Worries About Antisemitism

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish, was subjected to intense opposition as Vice President Kamala Harris considered him for running mate.

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By Jennifer Medina and Katie Glueck

For many American Jews, the prospect of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation — a balm for the feelings of alienation and anger they have harbored amid a wave of anti-Israel sentiment and rising antisemitism .

But the process ended as abruptly as it began, leaving many Jewish Democrats with a heightened sense of anxiety. Their concerns were not with Ms. Harris’s choice — Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, an affable Midwesterner who has warm relationships with the Jewish community in his state — but with an activist-driven campaign against Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish.

For some, it confirmed or inflamed simmering fears about antisemitism on the left.

Jews have been a loyal Democratic constituency dating back at least to the 1930s. But after an extraordinarily challenging 10 months following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Israel’s devastating military response in Gaza and an explosion of antisemitism, some are warning that in corners of the Jewish community, close ties to the Democratic Party may be fraying.

The worries intensified during the vice-presidential search process as left-leaning activists pilloried Mr. Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel and overly and unfairly critical of campus Gaza-war protests, among other concerns unrelated to foreign policy . But Mr. Shapiro’s defenders noted that he holds mainstream Democratic views on the Middle East that were generally seen as in line with the other — non-Jewish — top contenders.

“There’s a kind of suspicion that was in the back of our minds, and it’s creeping more to the center of our minds, that maybe it had something to do with the Jewishness of Governor Shapiro,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, who leads the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West Side, stressing that he was not making any critique of Ms. Harris. (As a clergy member, he declined to discuss his personal views of the election.)

“Even if it didn’t,” he added, as he detailed concerns about antisemitism and anti-Zionism, “that perception is not healthy for the Democratic Party, and it is not healthy for the well-being of the American polity.”

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Harris campaign taps Israeli-born former peace negotiator Ilan Goldenberg as liaison to Jewish community

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has named Ilan Goldenberg, an Israeli-born former peace negotiator, as its liaison to the Jewish community, sources say.

Three people with close ties to the organized Jewish community and the Harris campaign confirmed the pick to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The campaign did not return a request for comment.

Goldenberg, who has served as Vice President Kamala Harris’ adviser on Middle East issues, has previously been an acerbic critic of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership. He formed close ties with the organized Jewish community during the failed 2013-2014 Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, when he was a lead on the Obama administration’s negotiating team.

The pick comes as Harris refines her approach to discussing Israel on the campaign trail at a time when the Israel-Hamas war elevates the issue’s prominence. While Harris has expressed unwavering support for Israel, she has also been more critical than Biden of its military campaign in Gaza.

The Jewish liaison is the campaign’s representative to Jewish communities, answering questions about the candidate’s policies on Israel and other issues of Jewish concern and otherwise taking the lead in making the campaign’s case to Jewish voters, including by organizing events in Jewish communities.

Goldenberg, 46, was born in Jerusalem and grew up in New Jersey, where he attended Jewish day school and belonged with his family to a Conservative synagogue. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. He’s spent decades working on Middle East affairs, both in government roles and at think tanks.

He renounced his Israeli citizenship to work in the U.S. government and worked on the Iran file at the Pentagon in President Barack Obama’s first term before switching to the peace process at the State Department in Obama’s second term. In 2020, before returning to government under the Biden administration, he advised Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.

After the failed talks in 2014, which were followed closely by a war in Gaza, Goldenberg authored a 22-page analysis indicting fundamental distrust between Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas , then as now the Palestinian Authority president, as the chief cause of the collapse. “These guys can never do it together,” he told JTA at the time. “That’s for sure.”

After his time on the negotiating team, Goldenberg worked at the Center for a New American Security and was an advisor at the Israel Policy Forum, both of which support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He was highly critical of the Trump administration’s Israel policy and, in 2018 and 2019, wrote essays urging more of a focus on diplomacy in Gaza to prevent an escalation of violence there. He also wrote an essay in 2019 imagining how a war with Iran would play out .

In a 2018 Haaretz essay titled “Will Israel Be Forced to Invade and Reoccupy Gaza?” Goldenberg wrote that the cycle of conflicts between Hamas and Israel could explode if regional players did not take steps to dial down tensions.

“With every crisis, the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens. There will come a moment when basic order collapses altogether, or Israel is forced to invade and retake Gaza,” he wrote. “The only way to avoid this terrible outcome in the long-term is a sustainable political arrangement that should include both a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that includes major economic opening of Gaza combined with a Palestinian reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas that slowly brings the Palestinian Authority back into Gaza.”

Goldenberg also wrote an essay in 2019 about donating a kidney to his father.

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