Chosenite Historical Interpretation

This book is an excellent and, in my opinion, necessary addition to Israel Shahak’s book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (Pluto Press, London). It is not enough to note that in Judaism a lot of things, if not everything, is quite different compared to anyone else’s world; this otherness is rooted in a different humanity, which has to do essentially with a different understanding of time, with a different existence in time. For those of us who are primarily concerned with so-called contemporary history, it can be useful to know how the same things are seen from the Jewish side, especially as this different perspective enjoys state protection, and is increasingly finding expression in the form of a “memorial culture” literally cast in concrete. Instead of a discussion, a series of quotations from this book will suffice to illustrate the Jewish understanding of time and history. Since we have learned that we should not generalize, however, it must remain open whether all Jews are thus characterized.

“The fact is that our way of experiencing time and history is unique and unprecedented.” (p. 13)

Chapter “Biblical and rabbinical foundations”:

“If Herodotus was the father of historiography, the Jews were the fathers of meaning in history. – In ancient Israel, history was given a decisive meaning for the first time; this gave rise to a new world view, whose decisive premises were later adopted by Christianity and then also by Islam.” (p. 20)

“We have seen that the meaning of history and the memory of the past are by no means to be equated with the writing of history.” (p. 27)

“[…] even in the Bible, historiography is only an expression of the awareness of the meaning of history and of the necessity of remembrance. Neither meaningfulness nor memory are ultimately dependent on historiography. The meaning of history is explored more directly and deeply in the prophets than in the actual historical accounts.” (pp. 27f.)

“Unlike the authors of the Bible, the rabbis seem to play with time as if it were an accordion that can be expanded and contracted at will.” (p. 30)

“It is obvious, of course, that the views and hermeneutics of the rabbis are often in stark contrast to those of the historian.” (p. 33)

Chapter “The Middle Ages”:

“When the Jews in the synagogue lamented the destruction of the Temple, they all knew the day and the month, but it may be assumed that most of them had no idea in what year and under what tactical-military circumstances the First or the Second Temple had been destroyed, and – that they did not care.” (p. 55)

“Most perplexing is the constant use of the first-person singular (‘when I moved out of Egypt’; ‘when I moved out of Jerusalem’) instead of ‘they’ or even the collective ‘we’. […] The conscious use of ‘I’ means more and refers to a broader phenomenon. Memories triggered by rituals and liturgies of remembrance – regardless of their content – were not aimed at rationality, but at evocation and identification. It can be shown that facts from the past were not suddenly evoked, about which one could make distanced observations, but situations into which one could somehow be drawn existentially. This can be seen most clearly in the Passover Seder, the exemplary ritual for activating Jewish group memory. At a family meal, ritual, liturgy and even cooking are orchestrated in such a way that the past, which is the basis of life, is passed on from one generation to the next. […] Remembrance here no longer means recollection, in which a sense of distance always remains, but renewed actualization. […] Nowhere, however, is the idea formulated more forcefully than in the Talmudic saying that is decisive for the entire Passover Hagadah: ‘In every single generation, a person is obliged to regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” (pp. 56f.)

Chapter “After the expulsion from Spain”:

“It was certainly no coincidence that a people who had still not thought to seek their self-understanding in profane historical categories should now find the key to their own history in a powerful meta-historical myth of a highly Gnostic character. This myth said that all evil, including the historical evil of the Jewish exile, had its roots before the beginning of history, before the creation of the Garden of Eden, before the existence of our world, in a tragic primordial evil that had already arisen in the creation of the cosmos itself.” (p. 83)

“The mass of Jews were clearly unwilling to accept history without transcendence.” (p. 84)

From the chapter “The unease with modern historiography” [!!!] (p. 85):

“[…] a completely new role then falls to history – it becomes the faith of unbelieving Jews. For the first time in questions of Judaism, history, instead of a sacred text, becomes the authority of appeal. Almost all Jewish ideologies of the 19th Century, from the Reform movement to Zionism, relied on history for legitimization. As was to be expected, ‘history’ provided the appellants with every desired conclusion.” (p. 92)

“Nothing has yet been able to take the place of the context of meaning that a powerful belief in the Messiah once gave to the Jewish past and future – perhaps there is no substitute at all.” (p. 102)

“Jews who are still under the spell of tradition, or who have returned to it, find the work of the historian irrelevant. They are not concerned with the historicity of the past, but with its eternal present. If the text speaks directly to them, the question of its development must seem secondary or completely meaningless to them.” (p. 103)

“Many Jews today are looking for a past, but the one the historian has to offer is obviously not what they want. The enormous current interest in Hasidism is not in the least concerned with the theoretical foundations and the richly disreputable history of this movement. The Holocaust has already sparked more historical research than any other event in Jewish history, but there is no doubt in my mind that its image is being formed not at the anvil of the historian but in the crucible of the novelist [note this well!] Much has changed since the 16th Century, but one thing has remained strangely the same: It seems that Jews then, as now, are unwilling to face history directly (if they don’t reject it altogether).” (p. 104)

So much for the Zakhor book. In the New York Times of June 26, 1999, page B9/B11, D. D. Gutenplan asks in reference to British Historian David Irving: “Is a Holocaust Skeptic Fit to Be a Historian?”, and concludes by quoting Mark Mazower, a historian at Princeton University:

“On whom do we bestow the hallowed title of historian?”

As if a historian had to obtain his legitimacy from Jewry first! Robert B. Goldmann, writer and ADL agent from New York confessed quite correctly:[1]

“It is characteristic of the basic attitude of American Jews that facts which contradict their emotional world make little, if any, impression.”

That this attitude is not limited to American Jews is confirmed by Polish-born German-Jewish journalist and author Henryk M. Broder:[2]

“Israelis are simply predominantly autistic, both individually and collectively. They only perceive their environment to a limited extent; the fact that there are other spaces outside their own experiential space in which people also live is often beyond their imagination. There is only one yardstick: their own experience. […] This attitude, which determines individual behavior, also leads to distortions of perception in politics.” (p. 13)

“[…] it is autism as a continuation of politics by other means.” (p. 14)

Nahum Goldmann, who prophesied victory for German militarism during the First World War and negotiated Germany’s tribute payments with Adenauer after the Second World War, described in his book The Jewish Paradox “how to earn millions with storytelling.”[3] If things continue as they are, a report on “How to achieve world domination with storytelling” will soon be due – or is it not already available?

To wrap this up, Yerushalmi quotes a thought from Nietzsche’s work On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life:[4]

“It is therefore possible to live almost without memory, indeed to live happily, as the animal shows. But it is quite impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to explain myself even more simply about my subject: there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense, in which the living is damaged and ultimately perishes, be it a person or a people or a culture.” (pp. 137f.)

Endnotes