Subjective Objectivity

...Ben-Zion Dinur viewed history through the lens of Zionism more openly than anyone else belonging to the Jerusalem School...

...Regrettably, Myers fails to supply an answer, apparently in part because he is uncertain that historical objectivity can ever be attained...

...How successful were the Jerusalemites in presenting an objective picture of the Jewish past...

...He, too, is concerned with the relationship between Zionism and Jewish historical writing, but takes up the story at quite a different point...

...Myers aptly notes that one consequence of Baer's "sharp polemical tone" was a"countertriumphal-ism" that honored simple believers and denigrated cultural innovators...

...Scholem was convinced that the German Jewish historians had engaged in a form of self-censorship by ignoring the Jewish mystical tradition in order to present Judaism to the Gentile world as a model of rational religion...

...By his own account, his turning to this subject contributed to his becoming a committed Zionist and immigrating to Palestine...

...But its members did share a strong belief that Jewish historiography was being practiced inadequately in the Diaspora, and that Zionism could set it on a positive course...

...This revolution resulted from the combined effort of a number of preeminent scholars based at the fledgling Hebrew University, among them Simcha Assaf, Yitzchak Baer, Ben-Zion Dinaburg (later changed to Dinur), Joseph Klausner, and Gershom Scholem...

...others "integrated Zionism more directly into...

...He also details the evolving institutional setting of Jewish studies in two chapters devoted to academic trends at Hebrew University...

...To give the reader a nu-anced sense of the variety of standpoints within the School, Myers devotes a full chapter to each of its three leading figures—Baer, Dinur and Scholem...

...Nor was there ever a time when the Land did not serve as the focal point of Jewish historical consciousness...

...To an extent this was a simple function of "idiosyncratic personalities, who at times pursued their individual research projects with little regard for a shared national mission...

...Against this backdrop, David N. Myers' Re-Inventing the Jewish Past should prove of interest to a wide audience...

...All of his books (an English-language sample is available in Israel and the Diaspora) are avowedly "Palestinocentric," reflecting his central conviction that an "unceasing desire to return to the Land of Israel" was the fundamental inner dynamic of Jewish history...

...Myers does an excellent job of bringing the Jerusalem School into focus and delineating its members' approaches...

...In a telling anecdote, Myers recalls that when a chair in Yiddish language and literature was proposed in 1927 (to be funded by American Jews), "students began distributing black-bordered posters in the form of funeral announcements declaring that the 'chair in jargon is an idol in the Hebrew temple.'" What Re-Inventing the Jewish Past lacks—and it is a serious omission—is a final judgment on the accomplishments of the Jerusalem School, particularly as compared with Wissenschaft des Juden-tums...

...As Myers explains: "In [Dinur's] view, there never was a period in Jewish history when Jews ceased to live in, or immigrate to, the Land of Israel...

...Indeed, their most basic assumption was that, living in the Jewish homeland, they were uniquely positioned to achieve a true understanding of the Jewish past...

...Yitzchak Baer's area of expertise was medieval Spanish Jewry, brought vividly to life in his classic two-volume A History of the Jews in Christian Spain...

...in part it reflected a feeling of liberation from Christian-dominated Europe...

...Zionism, he maintained, was a "concrete historical force...

...In Jerusalem," Myers observes, "Scholem sought to apply what he saw as the liberating force of Zionism to a major revisionist undertaking in Jewish intellectual history: the recovery of the subterranean current of mysticism that infused Jewish culture from ancient to modern times...

...They were also taken to task for stressing the external factors shaping the Jewish experience and turning a blind eye to the elements of inner causality that made for continuity over time...

...Those historians were accused of speaking the language of science and objectivity while actually engaging in apologetics aimed at advancing Jewish assimilation...

...Myers does make it clear, though, that the Jerusalem School, whatever its uses of Zionist ideology, never questioned the validity of objectivity as the standard of historical inquiry...

...He concentrates on the period 1924-48, when a Zionist reading of Jewish history became the dominant trend...

...To help bring this about, a group of young historians has been systematically attacking the "myths" of the early Zionist enterprise...

...Indeed, the urge to reclaim the Land was the catalyst of Jewish history throughout the long period of Exile...

...Most strikingly, he unfavorably compared the "impious Sephardim" of Spain to the "pious Ashkenazim" of Germany, praising the latter for their "unadulterated allegiances to Jewish religion" and "heroic martyrdom...

...On the one hand, he criticizes Baer for abandoning "strict historical empiricism in favor of ancient typologies" and Dinur for a "transparent attempt to reconfigure Jewish history to Zionist criteria...

...He did not shy away from presenting the Jewish experience in Spain as a "relentless series of persecutions...

...The sharpest barbs were aimed at their 19th-century German Jewish predecessors, who laid the foundations for critical examination of the Jewish past (the so-called Wissenschaft des Juden-tums...

...capable of restoring Jews to an active and normal role in determining their own national destiny...

...The confidence of these scholars had much to do as well with the fact that at Hebrew University, Jewish studies had at long last secured a solid institutional base...

...An activist and Israel's Minister of Education in the 1950s, he doggedly sought in this way to foster a strong sense of national identity...

...Not surprisingly, the fields that were closest to the Zionist endeavor?Jewish history, Bible studies, Hebrew literature, and the historical geography of Palestine—made the most rapid headway...

...Within the bounds of their shared determination to end Jewish "cultural self-abnegation," the scholars moved in a multiplicity of directions: Some pioneered "innovations that they attributed to the liberating force of Zionism...

...Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" THE HOT TICKET in Israeli intellectual circles these days is "post-Zionism," which sees the Jewish state's founding ideology happily yielding to a Middle Eastern normalcy...

...In part this was a romantic affirmation rooted in a return to the Land...

...Although the scholarship of these Jeremiahs may easily be faulted, there is no arguing that to prepare for the new it is necessary to clear away the old...

...The fruits of his labors were a series of books—Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, to name a few—remarkable for their intellectual reach, psychological depth and interpretive richness...

...their research by developing models of Jewish history in which the impulse to return to Zion was the primary catalyst...

...On the other hand, he draws attention to the "unref lexive discourse of objectivity that linked Berlin to Jerusalem" and to the "opacity to bias" that characterized the Jerusalem School...

...Collectively these individuals became known as the "Jerusalem School," and it is their tale that the book chronicles...

...This may meet the standards of postmodernism, but it does not provide a firm footing for the historian's craft...

...Myers takes pains to point out that the School was hardly monolithic...

...Gershom Scholem's subtlety matched Dunur's directness...

...As a Zionist historian, he was determined to break with "past biases and taboos," and to reach, as he famously put it, a "historic point of view from within...

...In addition, they were charged with ignoring Jewish peoplehood, thus reducing Judaism to a mere religion...

...At the opposite extreme, the study of Yiddish was banned prior to 1947, because the language was perceived as the corrupt embodiment of a discredited Diaspora culture...

...The most conspicuous feature of his work was its starkly negative evaluation of what has usually been depicted as a "Golden Age...

...Israel, these revisionists submit, is a nation born in sin—sin compounded by aggression against the Arabs and indifference to the Holocaust's victims...

...still others "called attention to the political and military glories of the Jewish people in antiquity...

...The key factor, however, was that Zionism itself carried no single meaning: its substance was hotly contested...

...They were poised," writes Myers, "to replace the predominant emphasis of 19th-century Jewish scholars on Judaism the religion with a new accent on the Jewish nation...

...To those detecting a form of Zionist special pleading, Dinur's response was unabashed and unequivocal...

...And he portrayed the Jewish community's leaders as arrogant aristocrats who paved the way for "national betrayal (via conversion...

...The Hebrew University scholars consciously sought to shape "a new historical memory for the Jewish public," but no "single master narrative" emerged from their labors...

...Especially important in this regard is the issue of objectivity that the Hebrew University scholars placed at the center of their critique of the 19th-century German Jewish historians...

...as such, it guaranteed "utter clarity in apprehending the past...

...That is very different from the stand of today's post-Zionist historians, who take interpretive bias as a given and loudly proclaim their revisionist aims...

...Yet even as the Jerusalem School's members mocked the claims of objectivity put forth by the Germans, they remained committed to that very ideal...

...A world-renowned figure when he died in 1982, Scholem was that rare scholar who can be said to have single-handedly created a new academic discipline—in his case, the study of Jewish mysticism...

...In the end, the matter is left hanging...