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In this volume contemporary historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and made the Jewish past. Probing the ideology and methodology of their professional predecessors, they offer perspectives on some of the central figures of 20th-century Jewish historiography.
A leading scholar of Jewish history's bracing and challenging case for the role of the historian today Why do we study history? What is the role of the historian in the contemporary world? These questions prompted David N. Myers's illuminating and poignant call for the relevance of historical research and writing. His inquiry identifies a number of key themes around which modern Jewish historians have wrapped their labors: liberation, consolation, and witnessing. Through these portraits, Myers revisits the chasm between history and memory, revealing the middle space occupied by modern Jewish historians as they work between the poles of empathic storytelling and the critical sifting of sources. History, properly applied, can both destroy ideologically rooted myths that breed group hatred and create new memories that are sustaining of life. Alive in these investigations is Myers's belief that the historian today can and should attend to questions of political and moral urgency. Historical knowledge is not a luxury to society but an essential requirement for informed civic engagement, as well as a vital tool in policy making, conflict resolution, and restorative justice.
This brilliant collection of essays examines the dialogue between Jewish history and historiography in terms of changing national and popular myths, folk memory, and historical consciousness of Jews in modern times. From essays dealing with the origins of Jewish historiography in the nineteenth century, to its contemporary perspectives and methodologies, this book provides a great overview and varied insights into the field.
Holocaust history written and researched by the Yiddish scholars who lived it.
Apart from an opening survey of modern study of ancient Jewish history, which emphasizes the foundational role of German-Jewish scholars, the studies united in this volume apply philological methods to the writings of four of them: Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Heinemann, Elias Bickerman(n), and Abraham Schalit. In each case, it is argued that some seemingly trivial anomaly or infelicity, in a publication about such ancient characters as Antiochus Epiphanes, Herod, and Josephus, points to the way in which the historian constructed, and revised, his understanding of the Jews' situation under Greeks or Romans in light of his perception of the Jews' situation under the Second or Third Reich. The collection also includes a study that focuses on a Jewish medievalist, Philipp Jaffé, and unravels the indirect but inexorable process that led from a scholarly feud about the editing of medieval Latin texts, in the 1860s, to the "Berlin Antisemitism Dispute" (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit) of 1879-1881, which is commonly viewed as the opening act of modern German antisemitism.
Moshe Rosman cogently and critically presents the considerations that must be brought to bear on the writing of Jewish history in the light of post-modernist thinking.
The major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.
Despite the vicissitudes of their anomalous historical experience, the Jews survive as am identifiable entity. They have withstood one challenge after another - both physical and intellectual - somehow maintaining an historical continuity. How Jewish writers have dealt with this enigma serves as the subject of this volume. With these words from the Preface, Michael A. Meyer characterizes the scope of his Ideas of Jewish History. As the only volume of readings in the area of Jewish historiography and the philosophy of Jewish history, Ideas of Jewish History acquaints the reader with both the universal and the particular challenges inherent in the writing of Jewish history.
From its modest beginnings in 1818 Berlin, Wissenschaft des Judentums has burgeoned into a scholarly discipline pursued by a vast cadre of scholars. Now constituting a global community, these scholars continue to draw their inspiration from the determined pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth and twentieth Germany. Beyond setting the highest standards of philological and historiographical research, German Wissenschaft des Judentums had a seminal role in creating modern Jewish discourse in which cultural memory supplemented traditional Jewish learning. The secular character of modern Jewish Studies, initially pursued largely in German and subsequently in other vernacular langua...