The nationalist interest has inevitably been a major factor in the writing of history in many countries in recent decades—and it has increasingly been the pattern through which the long course of Jewish history has been viewed by Jewish historians. H. Schmidt here tries to evaluate the soundness of this approach, and suggests certain shortcomings of a rubric that overwhelmingly stresses Jewish homogeneity and Jewish self-determination, as against “external” and “alien” influences. As a lecturer on history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and assistant to Richard Koebner, professor of modern history, Mr. Schmidt has had a particularly good vantage point from which to observe the main trends in the writings of Jewish history.

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A glance at Jewish Jerusalem today reveals an astonishing variety of social groups that seem to live their lives in more or less separate compartments. Some-times this fact is brought into the limelight of the daily press, as when the ultra-orthodox Guardians of the Sabbath clash with other parts of the population; more often, the great gulf between the worlds existing side by side in the same city receives little attention. Yet engage a number of Jerusalemites on such subjects as education, religious tradition, or Arab refugees, and you will realize that the wide diversity in manners, customs, dress, and taste, is but the outer form of a disparity in spiritual approach and categories of thought.

Thus it is possible to come across German Jews with a conception of citizenship reminiscent of Prussian tradition, anxious to conform strictly to the official line taken by the authorities, as if they were still laboring under the dominance of Hitlerism and Wilhelmism; or Jews from Poland or Russia whose naive pride in rational philosophy and the demonstration of atheism serves as living evidence to the historian that for the Jews of Eastern Europe, Enlightenment came much later than in the West; or to find other communities, of Oriental Jews, whose life testifies to the fact that their period of Enlightenment is only just dawning. Leave Jerusalem for a trip to the collective settlements of the Emek, attend their meetings and visit their classrooms, and you can study not only the problems of 20th-century socialism but also those of 19th-century labor movements, for these problems have remained strangely preserved within the minds of many of the older pioneers.

If one passes from Israel to Italy, Morocco, France, England, and the United States, the picture Jewry presents today only increases in variety; a variety which is increased still more when we add the descendants of all Jews who are considered outside the Jewish pale but continue still to engage the attention of the sociologists and the historians. These could be found in German POW cages in Egypt and England as Judenstämmlinge, half-Aryans, Italian Fascists, and Communists.

In the face of this variegated panorama of modem Jewry, the trained observer cannot but be struck by the contrast between the evidence of the present and the customary description of the past. Where is the modem Jewish historian who has accounted for the enormous dissimilarity and contrast found among the Jews of our time? If we regard existing society as a cross-section of a fabric whose fibers run back into the past, the present social structure and position of any group is turned into a historical source of the first order. Conversely, if the present position of any people is not sufficiently accounted for by its historiography, the historian is forced to suspect that the method employed may be at fault.

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Modern Jewish historiography, as it has developed, has been dominated by one major school of thought which deliberately chooses an approach stressing the homogeneity of the Jewish people and its common identity and fate. This was the approach of Simon Dubnow (1860-1941), the historian of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and the author of the Universal History of the Jewish People (in German, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew: it is not yet translated into English); and it is the approach of Yitzhak F. Baer and Ben-Zion Dinaburg, two outstanding historians of modern Israel at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (Baer’s essay on Galut was published in an English translation by Schocken Books in 1947; his major works, on the Jews in Christian Spain, have not been translated. Dinaburg’s historical works are also not yet available in English.)

Dubnow himself called his outlook on Jewish history “national-autonomistic.” He postulated the existence of a Jewish nation as the shaper and creator of its own social and spiritual history; the struggle of that people for its existence, conceived in the form of a continuous dialectical process, is Dubnow’s chief theme. The history of the non-Jewish world interests Dubnow only to the extent that it means a real or potential threat to the survival of the national entity.

Dubnow—to illustrate his approach—is critical of the French Jewish Notables of 1806, who accepted the status of French citizenship offered them by Napoleon, because such an action called into question the national unity of the Jewish people. If French Jews were only Frenchmen, English Jews only Englishmen, and so on, where was the Jewish people? He records with approval how, against the background of a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France, before the First World War, Jews rallied around their own national movements. However, just as in the first case he will not be able to explain why the French Jewish Notables acted the way they did, so in the second case he will be at a loss to explain why the Jews, at the height of their national revival, responded with patriotic enthusiasm, in the First World War, to the call to arms of their respective countries.

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In Baer and Dinaburg, the national approach to Jewish history takes the form of an endeavor to draw out the “unbroken chain from Abraham to our own time,” as Nahum Sokolow puts it in the introduction to his History of Zionism. Both concentrate on the forces arising from within the Jewish group during the two thousand years of Jewish Diaspora history. Emphasizing the continuity of the Jewish nation, they conceive its history as “bound together by a homogeneous unity which includes all periods of time and pervades all places, and all of which are interrelated in historical significance.” (In the Hebrew journal Zion, Volume I.) Seen from this angle, Jewish Diaspora history presents a pattern of alternating prosperity and catastrophe, adjustment to a new world and ultimate estrangement from it. Jewish suffering becomes a constantly recurring subject resulting from the “slavery of the Exile,” and the natural conclusion of Jewish history is the return to Palestine.

This wholly negative attitude towards the Exile is the upshot of Baer’s book Galut. There it is summed up in the words: “Galut remains what it has always been: political slavery, which has to be completely liquidated.” Persecution of the Jews on the one hand, and readiness to assimilate them on the other, are for Baer but two sides of the same coin—the attempt of the other nations to wipe out Israel which has persisted from the days of the Greeks down to our own time. This forms for him the thread by which he can unify the variety of Jewish history.

Both Baer and Dinaburg would like historical knowledge to serve as an important part of the spiritual basis of national consciousness and culture. They believe that the millennia-old continuity of Jewish history they demonstrate gives Jewish nationalism a more profound character than that possessed by its European counterparts. Jewish nationalism is hallowed by the Biblical tradition, which is now to become part of the Jewish life of Israel. In line with this program for Jewish history is the type of theme that the historians of this school have selected for emphasis. They have traced the link between the Diaspora and Palestine, and between the Jews of different countries. They have searched for, and analyzed, cases of the existence of Jewish autonomy within the larger community in different historical epochs. They have studied the influence of the messianic elements of the Jewish religion on everyday life, the history of messianic movements, and the emergence of the national movement out of messianic hopes. They have emphasized the growth and the important position of the Hebrew language.

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There is no school of Jewish historical thought which rivals what we may call the national school, either in the power of its outlook to introduce comprehensibility and order into Jewish history, or in the value of its scholarly achievement. Its conception of an internal Jewish development and Jewish continuity has helped us understand such important phenomena of Jewish history as Jewish mysticism, the Conversos, messianic movements, and Hasidism.

However, when we turn to modem Jewish history, and the themes that are characteristic for it, we discover that the insight gained by the homogeneous approach is less satisfactory, and that many features of the contemporary position of the Jews have eluded these historians. Their desire to see Jews autonomous and homogeneous in the future leads to a special interest in those aspects of the Jewish past which show the Jews as homogeneous and autonomous. However, since the dissolution of the ghetto and the emancipation of the Jews and up through the period of the Jewish struggle for an independent state, non-Jewish elements and influences—perforce breaking Jewish homogeneity and autonomy—have been most prominent in the determination of Jewish thought and action. Features of Judaism that were essential and typical in the past—such as monotheism, for instance—have become less important. And the non-Jewish features which can alone make a good deal of the present character of world Jewry intelligible are as-signed secondary rank by this group of historians.

If present-day Jewish society can only be understood by the combined study of the Jewish past on the one hand and the powerful forces of general world history on the other, or, to put the matter even more radically, by conceiving modern Jewish history as a specific instance of the major trends of modem world history, then Jewish historians of the national school can be said to have failed in their task.¹ They have written the history of the past 150 years as if they were writing the history of medieval Jewish ghettos. With this approach, they have been able to make some sense of East European Jewish history, with its comparatively great spiritual and social isolation almost down to modem times, but they have misunderstood many of the most important aspects of the history of West European Jewry. Both the rise of Jewish nationalism, and the rise of anti-Semitism, the two questions to which the historians of the national school have devoted the most energy, have only been half-understood because of their approach.

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The history of Zionism, to begin with, is explained in purely Jewish terms, and the background of world politics of which it forms so vital a part is either ignored, improperly reported, or not given its full weight. In Adolph Boehm’s The Zionist Movement (in German, Tel Aviv, 1935), for example, a study in which the treatment of the Zionist material as such is beyond reproach, we find the following sentence: “Incidentally, critics [of Herd’s policy toward Germany] forget . . . that the relations between Germany and Great Britain at the time of Herzl’s political activity were very intimate: between 1898 and 1904, Great Britain made three offers of alliance to Germany, which, however, were all tumed down.” The student of the international relations of that period will fail to discover any marked intimacy in Anglo-German relations, or any three British offers of alliance. It is true that Joseph Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister (whom Boehm gives the doubtful title of “The Creator of British Neo-Imperialism”), was attracted to the notion of a Teutonic Triple Alliance (Germany, Great Britain, and the United States), but he was never able to win over the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. While we can understand the source of Boehm’s error, it nevertheless destroys our confidence in his understanding of the diplomatic background of Herzl’s activity.

The handling of the El Arish offer of 1903 by Jewish historians also illustrates their naivety in understanding general history. In 1903 Herzl was negotiating with the British over the possibility of settling Jews in the desert area between Egypt and Palestine. After the discussions had been carried on for a while, the British dropped the scheme. Jewish historians—with the exception of A. Bein, in his biography of Herzl—have contented themselves with the official British explanation: that the Egyptian government refused to allot the necessary amount of Nile water for irrigation. Margolis and Marx, in A History of the Jewish People (Philadelphia, 1927), go farther and explain that Lord Cromer, the British Political Resident, was favorably disposed, but the opposition of the Egyptians could not be overcome. Yet at this time, as the student of history knows, the Egyptian government could make no decision which was not approved by the British Resident, and Lord Cromer was the de facto ruler of Egypt.

Indeed, far from being favorable to the scheme, Lord Cromer had convinced the English government that the influx of thousands of Russian and “cosmopolitan” subjects who could claim the protection of their governments might lead to foreign intervention and complications. This argument was very effective, particularly as Herzl never ceased to claim for the new immigrants the rights to the Capitulations and special status for privileged Europeans in the Ottoman Empire. Jewish immigration would have meant increased Russian, Austrian, and possibly German influence in the Middle East. All these considerations, and others of a like order, have remained outside the field of vision of Jewish writers.

The important fact that around this time Jewish organizations were being used to support the expansionist program of the European powers is also ignored by Jewish historians. Elbogen (A Century of Jewish Life) mentions that the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden served German interests in the Ottoman Empire and enjoyed the support of the German government, but he does not follow up his point. And he confines himself to the historically barren statement that the most conciliatory attitude of certain people could not bring about an agreement between the Hilfsverein and the Alliance Israe’lite Universelle, without mentioning that the rivalry of France and Germany helps explain that fact.

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The weakness in general historical background trips up Margolis and Marx at another point, in their discussion of the Damascus Libel of 1840 (in which Jews were accused of ritual murders), an incident which rivaled the Dreyfus case as an international cause célèbre. They are unable to explain why England and Austria took up a pro-Jewish position, and France an anti-Jewish position. However, at this very time, Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, was organizing a coalition to support the Ottoman Empire against France, which was supporting the independent power of Mehemet Ali in Egypt and Syria. It is only against this background that the positions taken by the great powers have any meaning in this case.

Indeed, we find that the history of anti-Semitism, as well as the history of Zionism, is treated as much as possible like a closed Jewish affair. Baer himself takes this approach in his History of the Jews in Christian Spain, when writing of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain—an event that does not properly belong to modem Jewish history, but which is worth examining for the light it throws on the way in which Jewish historians approach anti-Semitism. For Baer, the expulsion from Spain is an expression of a “Judeo-Christian conflict,” which has taken many forms. True enough that when viewed through Jewish eyes alone, the Spanish persecution of the Jews appears as part of the chain of expulsions which affected the Jews elsewhere in Western Christendom. Indeed, it can be seen as part of the red thread of suffering that stretches through Jewish history from Pharaoh to Adolph Hitler. Yet, when the political and social conditions of Spain in the 15th century are assessed with a non-Jewish, a European eye, a different line of interpretation becomes apparent. We see Jewish persecution as part of the struggle of the rising central political powers in Europe against all the non-conforming political forces that threatened the unity of the new states. Just as we observe in the course of the unification of Spain a struggle against the political power of the neo-Christians, the Moriscoes, and the Jews, we discover all over Europe similar conflicts, beginning with the persecution of the Hussites in Bohemia, the Protestants in some parts of Germany, the Catholics and Puritans in later Tudor and early Stuart England, and the persecution of the Huguenots in France. Everywhere religious conformity was demanded in the interest of political unity; the attacks on Jews were not simply, therefore, an expression of Judeo-Christian conflict.

The question arises, reading modem Jewish history, in which anti-Semitism looms so large, how indeed we may write the history of Jews in Western lands, and what we are to do with the bursts of Jewish creativity we sometimes find. Dubnow, writing of the group of German Jewish scholars who founded the “Science of Judaism,” the Wissenschaft des Judentums, considers them the product of German reaction and anti-Semitism, and, true to his methods, singles out the simple desire to fight anti-Semitism as the sole motive which aroused interest in the new scientific approach to Judaism. Marx and Margolis, on the other hand, present Zunz and German Jewish scholarship as a meteoric phenomenon, offering no explanation at all.

However, a rather different approach is possible, and one which has been illustrated by the contemporary German Jewish historians Eugen Täubler and Selma Stern. Both of these writers stress the fact that the history of German Jewry in the last two centuries must be viewed as part of German history, and cannot be approached purely from the point of view of an intemal history of the German Jewish community. If we look at Zunz and his school with the background of German history in mind, we can see clearly reflected the spiritual ferment of Prussia, and of Berlin, and particularly the impact of the writings of Niebuhr (1776-1831), who, in the words of Hamack, “roused the spirit of history in the shape of science and for the first time realized what great powers were inherent in historical criticism.” There can be no doubt that Zunz was directly or indirectly influenced by his milieu: by the neo-humanist Wilhelm v. Hum-boldt (1767-1835), the grammarian Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), and the jurist F. K. Savigny (1779-1861), the German scholars who laid the foundation for the Geisteswissen-schaften, of which the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden of Berlin is a clear offspring.

Täubler considers the main theme of Jewish history in the Diaspora to be the problems arising from the constant contact of the Jewish with the non-Jewish world (Über das Stadium der jüdischen Geschichte,” Mitteilungen des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden 1911, Volume III) and believes that the study of general history must be made a cardinal starting point for the understanding of Jewish history. To be sure, that principle has not been ignored by the historians we have discussed, for the dominant school of historical thought headed by Baer and Dinaburg frankly acknowledges the debt it owes to Eugen Täubler. Where it differs from him, however, is in the evaluation of non-Jewish influences. Whereas the national school regards non-Jewish forces as external and secondary, Täubler and Selma Stern assign to them primary importance. A historical approach cannot be judged by whether it is right or wrong, but by whether it permits the fullest and most accurate picture. And, in general, Jewish scholars and students, we have tried to show, have not yet sufficiently realized that modem Jewish society, in its present manifold variety, as well as its history during the last two centuries, can only stand out in plastic relief when examined “stereoscopically,” from a Jewish and non-Jewish angle at the same time.

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Were this approach to be adopted, many important and exciting subjects that are as yet unbroached by Jewish historians would come into their field of attention and interest. For example:

1. the history of Jewish emancipation in the light of the rise and fall of the middle class;
2. the influence of Christianity on Jewish thought and institutions;
3. the origins of political Zionism, viewed within the context of the intemal and extemal policy of the Great Powers;
4. the history of German Jewry, studied as the history of a Jewish-European symbiosis;
5. anti-Semitism, seen as an aspect of a general European crisis;
6. a comparative study of Jewish and European nationalism;
7. a comparative study of the Jewish and intemational labor movements;
8. Anglo-Jewish relations since the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine, seen as a chapter of British decline in Asia;
9. the development of modem Jewish political parties;
10. the reflection of contemporary historical thought in Jewish history-writing.

All these topics have in common a double aspect: a typical trend of recent world history is found combined with a specific case from Jewish history, and both strands can be woven into one fabric.

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We may illustrate the potentialities of this approach by considering the last subject suggested, that concerning historical thought—which would not have been listed had it not been for the series of stimulating lectures by Richard Koebner at the Hebrew University in 1946-7. Dinaburg, in the introduction to his Israel in Exile, had mentioned the link between the aims of Jewish history and the main lines of contemporary Jewish thought. But whereas Dinaburg merely desires to make of Jewish history-writing one significant stream of contemporary Jewish thought—forming, together with streams arising from politics, religion, and so on, an intellectual milieu—in Koebner’s investigation, history is not seen as an independent contributor to contemporary thought (Jewish and non-Jewish), but as its very product.

Thus, Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) wrote under the influence of the contemporary German version of the Enlightenment; Joseph Salvador (1796-1873) reflects the ideas of the French Revolution; Heinrich Graetz and Moses Hess, German idealism; Dubnow mirrors the dense Jewish population of Eastem Europe, while Baer and Dinaburg clearly testify to the national revival focussed round Palestine. If our conceptions of history are seen as an intrinsic part of our social consciousness, as R. G. CoUingwood’s philosophy of history seems to suggest, this is only what we might expect.

If this interrelation is as close as these examples suggest, then the conception of “assimilation,” which plays such an important part in Jewish historical writing, is an obstacle rather than a help for the understanding of the historical process. For the term “assimilation,” and the negative, almost treasonable, significance attached to it by the national school, pre-judges and confuses a primary theme of modem Jewish history, namely that very interrelation between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds which has as yet been left unexplored. When Dubnow writes: “The current of assimilation gradually gives way to the modem form of national movement, which for the 20th century promises to be as significant as assimilation was for the 19th” (Volume VIII of his Universal History, German edition), he thereby implies that what he calls “the modem form of national movement” represents the very opposite of assimilation, its antithesis. Yet modem Jewish nationalism contains as many elements of assimilation as any other form of social adjustment.

Adaptation to the prevailing circumstances is a biological and social necessity no individual or group can dispense with. It is this kind of inevitable accommodation to the non-Jewish social and political environment which is the clue to the present position of Jewry and to the history of its recent past. The negative use of the term “assimilation” as a master concept is, therefore, apt to blur the field of vision where it ought to be clearest. We cannot reject or dispense with the process of “assimilation”; more profitably, we ought to tum our study to describing, analyzing, and evaluating the nature and fruits of the particular assimilation of a specific time or place.

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There is one last consideration we must bring forward in urging the writing of Jewish history as a strand of modern history, and that has to do with education. At no period of modem history did the Jews form an isolated body in the history of mankind; and particularly for the last century or so the fate of nations has been closely interdependent and interwoven. Today, the weal or woe of one may spell the prosperity or misfortune of others. Just as it proved most unfortunate for the Germans to have been taught their national history in an atmosphere of mental and political isolation and “encirclement,” it would be equally disastrous if Jewish youth were to be taught a pattern of Jewish history limited to the Jewish-persecuting nations of the Diaspora on the one hand, and the revived Jewish nation in Palestine, on the other. Such a history could foster a paranoid outlook toward a world seen as an anti-Jewish conspiracy by the Gentiles.

The tendency toward group-hatred and group-isolationism is a recognized feature of modern collective pathology. Future historians will probably find that we have all caught a good deal of it from the Germans. The way history is being taught and written may either spread the disease or immunize people against it. We must not lose sight of this in the writing and teaching of modem Jewish history.

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¹ Those historians of contemporary Jewry who have not, like Dubnow, Baer, and Dínaburg, emphasized the tracing of a continuous thread of Jewish history, are characterized by a special defect: their presentation is fragmentary, as they have found no way of unifying the variety of material they must present, and their volumes consequently lose in clarity and interest. This is true of Ismar Elbogen’s A Century of Jewish Life (Philadelphia, 1944), and the modem portions of Salo Baron’s Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1937).