The Israel historian is only one of a number of specialists whose work, written in a language that is rarely studied in the West, is inaccessible to his non-Jewish—and many of his Jewish—colleagues. Yet in many areas, and not in Jewish history alone, Israeli scholars have made important contributions to historical knowledge. H. Schmidt, whose article “A Broader Approach to Jewish History” was published in this department in December 1949, here makes available a brief, but comprehensive as well as critical, survey of the work of Israeli scholars in post-Biblical, medieval, and modern history.
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In the Israel of today, a burned-out armored car, a Crusaders’ castle, a Bronze Age fortification, a cave of Paleolithic man—all these may be found along the same mountain trail. A valley made up of a few trees and thistles may carry the scars of the battles of three millennia. Upon this scene, in the 20’s and 30’s, came more than a few Jewish historians, trained and equipped in the great European universities, but with their spirit of inquiry whetted by Zionist convictions. The result has been a flowering of historical studies in Israel.
Though generally set down in Hebrew, the cast of this work is given by the traditions of political idealism and national romanticism deriving from the Eastern and Central European origins of the scholars involved. The beginnings of modern Jewish historiography, it must be remembered, are intimately connected with German history as it was written by German historians in the 19th century. These latter very often deliberately tried to instill a strong national consciousness in a nation that had hardly felt it before the 19th century. The giants of Jewish historiography, Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow, followed in the footsteps of the Germans. As a result, in Israel today the Jewish national identity is the fore-most object of historical interest, and the Jewish nation-state is regarded in terms of such ideas as history’s inner destiny. This also means that liberty is thought of as belonging to the nation rather than the individual, and that duty and morality are likewise matters more of nationality than individuality.
The Israeli outlook on Jewish and world history is in large measure the product of the work of two scholars, Ben Zion Dinaburg, the present Minister of Education, and Joseph Klausner. Also formidable in their influence—and achievement—are Yitzhak Baer and Gershom Scholem. All four are at one in viewing the events of the last century or two as part of a necessary and logical process by which the Jewish nation emerged from the ghetto and, after failing to integrate itself in an anti-Semitic Western society, gave rise to a national movement culminating in a national state.
In such an intellectual environment, with its ardent, all-pervasive nationalism, the study of history is assured of its importance. It is taken for granted that the young Israeli cannot fulfill his obligations as a citizen unless he has an awareness of the nation’s past and future and has plumbed the depths of the “historical mission of national redemption.” In other words, Israel stands today where many small states stood when they first knew national sovereignty. German and Slavonic historical thought, the mood of which is fixed by the haunting sense of an unfulfilled national mission, is paralleled at many points in modern Israel.
But the Israelis, being after all Jews, are not an isolated Balkan people, and not all Israeli scholars have abandoned their historic role as intellectual middlemen among the world’s cultures. There are those who rival a Treitschke in their passionate, patriotic enthusiasm, but there are also Israeli historians whose approach is closer to the factual, detached, and universal one of a Ranke. These latter refuse to accept the national consciousness as the sole starting point of Jewish historical inquiry, and they regard it as only one among other possible subjects of research. They view the history of the Jews as they would that of any other group—that is, chiefly in its significance for an understanding of the development of humanity in general. There exists no Jewish problem, they maintain, that is not also a problem of general history—and vice versa.
The nationalist historians, however, are by far in the majority in Israel; and they place one group, the Jews, and one country, Palestine, in the center of their stage, regarding world history as of real moment only insofar as it affects either. Most of the research and writing on Jewish history in Israel is the product of this outlook.1
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Historical scholarship in Israel is reported almost exclusively in Hebrew, though this denies the rest of the scholarly world access to important and original contributions. Such a defiant exclusiveness is certainly a consequence of the fact that the Hebraization of academic life was achieved only after long years of persistent endeavor. The Israeli historian has had to help create the language he was using; for Hebrew did not, until quite recently, have terms for such concepts as fief, guild, or enclosure, let alone equivalents for such words as dolichocephalic, mesolithic, and the rest of the newly swollen vocabulary of archeology and pre-history. And even when the scholar had successfully invented the desired Hebrew term, this did not mean that the printer understood it; in the early days of the Hebrew University, many a scholar sat with the printer, personally supervising the realization in Hebrew orthography of his innovations. Mistakes were inevitable. Even today some Israeli students believe East Anglia to be the eastern part of England.
Recently, things have become somewhat easier. Such institutions as the Bialik Foundation, the Rav Kuk Foundation, and the Hebrew University Press (now called the Magnes Press) have taken a good part of the burden of standardizing scholarly language out of the hands of the writer. Four journals are devoted to the publication and criticism of historical work—Zion, edited by Baer, Dinaburg, and I. Halpern; Tarbiz, edited by J. N. Epstein; Sinai, edited by J. L. Maimon; and Kiryat Sefer, the chief bibliographical periodical of the National Library. And some scholarly books—such as Yehezkel Kaufmann’s history of the Jewish religion—have found a surprisingly large public in Israel.
The political convulsions of the last fifteen years have, however, added to the historian’s difficulties. Today archeologists and Oriental historians from Israel cannot travel and work in Arab countries; thus they have less freedom and opportunity than their Western colleagues. The National Library on Mt. Scopus cannot be entered, and one has to resort to the most desperate stratagems to get books for one’s work.
Nevertheless, a sizable amount of valuable historical literature has been produced in Israel. In surveying these achievements, this article must, however, confine itself to main trends and characteristics. Previous articles in this magazine by such competent authorities as W. F. Albright and H. L. Ginsberg have already appraised the contributions of Israeli scholars to our knowledge of the Biblical period (see “New Trends in Biblical Criticism” in the September 1950 issue, and “The Rediscovery of Civilization” in the December 1948 issue). Here we have chosen to limit ourselves to the work of Israeli scholars in post-Biblical history, Jewish and non-Jewish; this material, while inevitably less dramatic, offers an opportunity for observing how the two main orientations in Israeli historical study come to grips with the problem of the relations of Jews to the non-Jewish world.
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The Greek and Roman World
The struggle of the Jews against the West, first in the form of Hellenism and then in that of Roman imperialism, is one of the major themes of Israeli historians. It is the political and military rather than the spiritual side of these conflicts that is emphasized, and the issue is seen as involving less “the law of the state of God,” as Bickermann puts it, than the desire to maintain a territorial state and political power. This Zionist-motivated reaction to the predominating previous view, which saw the struggle between Israel and the Greco-Roman world in predominantly religious terms, does help right the balance, even though it is rather obviously affected by recent events in Palestine.
The period of the Second Temple has been treated afresh by Joseph Klausner, whose work on Jesus and Paul has already gained the attention of an international public. His recent five-volume study2 of the period from 586 B.C.E. to 73 C.E., which masterfully sums up the research of the last three decades, has not yet been translated, however. Klausner’s linguistic knowledge, ranging from Assyrian to Hellenistic Greek, and his command of studies in a multitude of fields, which have to be fitted like jigsaw-puzzle pieces into the over-all picture, are unique; only a scholar who gave this period forty years of devoted study could have written such a work.
But Klausner is also a political man and has never drawn a sharp line between agitation and scholarship. His hold on the general public—and particularly the younger part of it—has always been greater than his influence upon scholars; nor has he ever made any bones about the fact that he writes of the past with an eye to the present. There was a time when he said Rome, but meant Britain under the “consulships” of Churchill and Bevin—because, as he repeatedly taught, “there is no new thing under the sun.” Thus he lectures and writes as an enthusiastic Hebrew nationalist for other enthusiastic Hebrew nationalists. Jewry before the Babylonian Exile and after is, to him, the same nation, and one not radically different in temper and problems from the present Israel. The inevitable difficulties of this identification are ignored. If the national revival following the Babylonian Exile was so complete, and included a deliberate restoration of the Hebrew language, how is it that so many Babylonian customs, so many foreign words—Aramaic, Babylonian, Greek, and others—crept in? How is it that, not Hebrew, but Aramaic and, later, colloquial Greek became the vernacular language, even during the Maccabean period of “national” liberation? If national sentiment was really as strong as Klausner wants us to believe, how is it that in the Maccabean period a Jewish party allied itself with the Syrians and had to be subdued by foreign mercenaries hired by Alexander Jannaeus? Klausner’s answer—that such Jews were traitors to the fatherland—compels him to expand his list of traitors inordinately after the time when the little state came into the orbit of Rome.
A strong desire to demonstrate that the Jewish community in Palestine continued to exist and remain vigorous after the destruction of the Second Temple pervades the work of an-other Israeli historian studying the same period, M. Avi Yonah, who has devoted his attention to the economic and social history of the Jews in Palestine during the Roman and Byzantine periods. The same tendency to demonstrate the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine runs through an important collection of sources dealing with Jews in Palestine from the destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of modern Zionism. So far, two volumes of this basic collection, compiled under the sponsorship of the Jewish Historical and Ethnological Society, have been published, covering the period from 70 to 1099 C.E.
In this period the Jewish Diaspora grew, with its center in Egypt. V. Tcherikover has made the Jews of Egypt his particular province, and has greatly enriched our knowledge through his study of the hundreds of papyri and ostraca that have been uncovered of late and which refer to Egyptian Jewry in the Roman and Byzantine periods. These documents are to be published by him as a Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum, but his main conclusions from them are summed up in a work on the Jews of Hellenistic Egypt. We learn from this work, for example, that Jewish settlements were scattered all over Egypt in these periods, not only in Alexandria; and that Jews were active in agriculture, in administration, and in the army, and were not, as previously supposed, primarily merchants. The description of the Jewish struggle for full civil rights, culminating in a desperate uprising in 115-117 C.E. which threw the entire country into a state of war before being finally suppressed—all this, besides contributing to our historical knowledge, makes fascinating reading.
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Though political and economic conditions have been given special attention by Israeli historians, the significant cultural interpenetration of Hellenism and Judaism has by no means been ignored. A full appreciation of this phenomenon demands a thorough grounding in Greek and Jewish learning, together with a possession of the tools of philological textual criticism. This rare combination of competences is found in the work of I. Heinemann, who is a religious philosopher as well as a scholar, and has never been content to stake out a small preserve within which to concentrate his interests. Heinemann’s fame was established while he was still in Germany by a study of Philo’s Greek and Jewish cultural background, and he has continued, in Israel, to occupy himself with the influences of Greek thought on ancient and medieval Jewish writers and philosophers, such as Flavius Josephus (in Zion, 1939-40) and Judah Halevi (in Zion, 1944-45). His recent book on the Aggada analyzes its relation to the Bible, its historical philosophy, and its links with Greek literature, and offers an immense store of knowledge in which Torah, mystical and rabbinical thought, Kant and Nietzsche have all been assimilated without the loss in depth that generally accompanies such breadth. In such a work the reader breathes a religious rather than political atmosphere, for Heinemann’s mental image of Israel is centered on its religious ethos, as distinct from the territorial and political ethos so prominent in the works of other Israeli scholars.
Research on the Roman period has recently suffered from the untimely death of three scholars: H. J. Lewy, who was engaged in a comprehensive treatment—sections of which have been published—of the views of the Jews held by ancient peoples; A. Gulak, who was at work on the history of Jewish law in the Talmudic era, and had published a volume on the “law of obligation”; and G. Allon, who was exploring the social life of the Jews in Talmudic Palestine. Other work by Jewish scholars on this period that demands at least a brief reference includes A. Shalit’s introduction and notes to his Hebrew translation of Flavius Josephus, S. Yeivin’s study of Bar Kochba’s revolt, and the elaborate examination of the Greek inscriptions in Palestine by M. Schwabe demonstrating that the Jews in Palestine spoke colloquial Greek but did not know Greek literature. Besides the work of historians proper, there is, of course, a wealth of historical knowledge on the post-Biblical period in the reports of Israeli archeologists, which can be found in the Bulletin and Journal of the Israel Exploration Society, formerly the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, edited by A. Heifenberg, M. Avi Yonah, and B. Maisler.
The preponderant concern of the Israeli historian in dealing with the Greek and Roman world is naturally with Palestine and the Jews, but there is an increasing interest in non-Jewish subjects too. Here two examples must stand for many more. A. Fuks, a pupil of M. Schwabe, has published studies on the politics of 5th-century Athens in Tarbiz, and Chaim Wirszubski, a pupil of V. Tcherikover, has studied the political concepts of early imperial Rome and analyzed the meaning of the word “liberty” in Tacitus. His work has appeared in England: Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome (Cambridge Classical Studies, 1950).
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The Middle Ages
The study of Jewish medieval history in Europe and the Moslem world demands a synthesis of Jewish and “non-Jewish” learning that was not to be found among Jewish scholars until recent times. Past generations have had to rely either on great rabbinic scholars, who had only a general knowledge of the history of the Church and the structure of medieval society, or on medieval scholars, to whom rabbinical and Cabalistic literature was a terra incognita, and one often considered beneath their dignity. Medieval research in Israel today demands this twofold competence and sets itself very high standards as regards both. No one feels that enough spadework has as yet been done to justify attempting a large-scale general narrative history, and a good deal of the present work in the field is being devoted to just this spade-work.
For example: S. Assaf has published over the years since 1927 important collections of sources on the history of Jewish education, and of Arabic sources and Gaonic responsa compiled from the Cairo Genizah. Yitzhak Baer, recognized as Israel’s foremost historian of medieval Jewry, has made available two volumes of documents selected from Spanish archives. I. Halpern has collected the regulations governing Jewish life issued by the Council of the Four Lands, the central organization of Polish Jewry from the 16th to the 18th centuries. A. Yaari has collected letters, memoirs, and accounts of medieval travelers in Palestine, and published them in a pleasing modern Hebrew that spares the reader the many obscure phrases—some of them even of Mongol and Tartar origin—that are to be found in the original material. New critical editions of such medieval chronicles and histories as Shevet Yehuda, Sipur David Reubeni, and Megilat Ahimaaz have been published.
Israeli historical study of the Jewish Middle Ages stresses the theme of national continuity by emphasizing the autonomy of the Jewish communities, their close relations with Palestine, the common form taken by their basic institutions, and the emotional strength of mystical and Messianic movements.
Baer’s history of the Jews in Christian Spain tells their story from the beginning up to the final crisis in 1492. Whereas the American work on the same subject written by A. Neumann (Philadelphia, 1944) emphasized the social and economic side of Jewish life in Spain, Baer shows greater interest in its spiritual and intellectual aspects, using the poetry of the Spanish Jews as a fruitful historical source. We thus learn more than we ever knew of the non-rationalistic forces influencing Spanish Jewry—its mystical thought and religious conflicts, and the impact of the approaching crisis of the expulsion. Baer’s work on the medieval Jewish community and its origin (the latest article on this topic was published in Zion, 1950) reveals a constant awareness of the history of non-Jewish institutions, especially those of the early medieval city. The identity of development between the Jewish community and the early medieval city is often too striking to be overlooked; occasionally the Jewish institution preceded the Christian by some generations. Can it be that the medieval Christian town took a leaf from the book of the Jewish community in laying its foundations? Baer confines himself to drawing attention to this question without attempting a final answer.
The other large work of synthesis in the field of Jewish medieval studies deals with mystical thought, which is the particular province of Gershom Scholem, whose Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is available in English (his other works remain for the most part untranslated). Scholem has traced the course of mystical thought from the teachers of the Mishnah in the and century C.E. to the Hasidim, and has established a continuity throughout this long stretch of time that had never been suspected before. The great Jewish historians of the 19th century, Graetz, Zunz, and Jost, were handicapped by their rationalistic bias in understanding Jewish mysticism; they considered the false messiahs, Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, as simply swindlers. But Scholem tries to explain how it was that they could move masses and become a historical factor in the 16th and 17th centuries. He finds his answer, first, in a significant underground current of Jewish mystical thought that had absorbed Gnostic elements and showed points of contact with other Christian heresies; and, second, in the striving for deliverance from the ghetto, for freedom in which to lead a constructive life; this impulse, after the discrediting of the last remnants of Sabbatianism and Frankism among the Jewish populace, was to find its outlet in the Haskalah and Zionism.
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Israel is a natural center for the study of Arabic thought and history. The School of Oriental Studies of the Hebrew University, directed by S. D. Goitein, is today doing some extremely important research in Middle Eastern history. It is, for example, engaged in the compilation of a concordance of ancient Arabic poetry and is in process of publishing the 9th-century historical masterpiece of the Arab Al-Baladhuri. A. N. Poliak, a graduate of the school, has written a history of the Arabs in Hebrew and a detailed study of feudalism in the Levant in English (Feudalism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the Lebanon, London, 1939)· Special mention must be made, too, of Professor Goitein’s studies in the periodical Islamic Culture—published in Hyderabad, India—on the social aspects of the Moslem state and on the origins of the vizierate, which he finds in the household of the primitive Arab chieftain.
The Mamelukes, who ruled Palestine from 1291 to 1516, have so far remained relatively obscure, but we know more about their warrior state today because of the work of three Israeli historians: L. A. Mayer, who studied and collected their heraldry and coins; D. Ayalon, who studied their military system; and E. Strauss, who on the basis of Arabic sources has put together a coherent picture of the social status of non-Moslem minorities under their rule. Combining these with Jewish and Christian medieval sources, Strauss has also just presented us with a two-volume History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria, 1250-1517, which is certain to remain a basic work for a long time. It may be asked whether the lives of the Jews under Mameluke rule in those obscure centuries is of sufficient significance to merit such an exhaustive study. Strauss answers the question in the affirmative; for at the beginning of this period he finds flourishing and productive Jewish communities, while at the end there are only those petrified Oriental Jewries that had to wait for Zionism before re-entering history. The causes of their decline raise an important historical problem to whose solution Strauss has devoted himself.
Israel is also an unrivaled center for the study of the Jewish communities of the Middle East. S. D. Goitein’s work on the Jews of Yemen, W. Fischel’s, H. Polotsky’s, and J. Rivlin’s work on the Jews of Persia and Central Asia, and H. S. Hirschberg’s history of the Jews of Arabia during the first thousand years of the Christian Era have opened up the still little-surveyed continent of Oriental Jewry. These Jews already make up one half of Israel and, especially in view of recent events, are bound to attract ever increasing attention from Western Jews and Israeli historians.
One of the most interesting phases of Palestine’s history is those scant two centuries from 1099 to 1291 C.E., in which it formed the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, ruled by the Crusaders and their descendants. Their castles and fortresses, their churches, and especially their documents can hardly leave the historian indifferent. Ever since Baer began teaching medieval history at the Hebrew University, this period has been accorded special prominence because it possesses the great educational value of serving as an introduction to medieval Europe for the Hebrew student. J. Prawer’s history of the Latin Kingdom, inspired by Baer’s teaching, presents an account of its administration, commercial relations, provincial borders, population, army, churches, and agriculture, illustrated with maps, photographs, and drawings; all these show that Palestine in those days exhibited one of the purest examples of European feudal structure.
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Modern History
Though in the present mental climate of Israel most of the work on modern Jewish history is invariably written from a strong Zionist interest, no good over-all history of Zionism has as yet been produced in Hebrew. Important mono-graphic work has, however, been published by Dinaburg, the leading student of modern Jewish history in Israel, who has taught and written on Hasidism, on the forerunners of Zionism, on such figures as Ber Borochov and M. Ussishkin, and on the ideological motives of the successive waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Modern Jewish history, as seen by Dinaburg, presents one main line leading to a single inevitable and logical end: the State of Israel. The five million Jews of America have no place at all in his story, and the student brought up on the logic of such a history does not find it easy to understand how it is that many millions of Jews have preferred to live outside of Palestine even when they had the chance to go there. What kind of Jews, he asks, are those who choose to stay in “Exile” out of their own free will? The Israeli historian who can answer that question in such a way as to heal rather than widen the present breach between Israel and the Diaspora is yet to be found.
A. Bein’s study of Herzl, his history of Zionist settlement in Palestine, and M. Medsini’s and N. M. Gelber’s work on Zionist diplomacy and policy will all be very useful for a future general appraisal of Zionism. At the moment, however, its historians are chiefly concerned with safeguarding archives and collecting and editing the most important source documents. In this area the Zionist Central Archives, under the direction of G. Herlitz and A. Bein, stands out as an invaluable research center where a vast array of documents, records, and newspapers can be found. In it are also the private papers of Herzl, Nordau, Zangwill, Ben Yehuda, Arlosoroff, Ussishkin, and many other important figures in the history of Zionism.
While the modern historians mentioned up to this point write mainly for a Jewish and Zionist public, the aforementioned Israeli historians who reject the division of history into national compartments have been gaining an increasing audience in the Western world at large because—and this is no accident—most of their work is published in English.
The leading figure of this group is R. Koebner, known to the historians of Western Europe for his comprehensive chapter on the settlement of Europe that opens the Cambridge Economic History. Recently, he has addressed himself to the problem of the rise of such universal concepts and ideas as “modern” and “Western.” These terms are so much a part of our language today that it is a little startling to have Koebner ask, as he recently has in an article in the Cambridge Journal (January 1951), so basic a query as where the term “Western civilization” originated—and how and why it has become popular. This study is the second of a series he plans to publish on the historical and political concepts of modern times (the first, on “Imperialism,” appeared in the British Economic History Review, September 1949).
Koebner’s many students, like himself, orient their researches toward the major forces shaping our world today rather than to the problems of Israel and Jews alone. Y. Talmon’s The Origin of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952) traces the features of a “democracy” that is abstract, messianic, and intolerant of individual liberty back to the French Revolution. The book has been very well received in England and will appear shortly in America. M. Seliger has dealt in a Hebrew study with the role of the great powers in the Middle East at the time of Mehemet Ali, the adventurer who ruled Egypt in the first half of the 19th century, and is engaged in work on the French historians of the 19th century. U. Heyd has studied the ideological and cultural background of Kemalism in modern Turkey (Foundations of Turkish Nationalism, London, 1950). All in all, the work of Koebner and his students gives promise of the rise of a significant school of modern historians in Israel, who will be free from the strong nationalism that inevitably makes so much of Israeli scholarship parochial, and who will be capable of taking their place beside the best historians of Western Europe.
At this juncture, the future tasks of the Israeli historian stretch out in the mind’s eye as both numerous and attractive. A comprehensive history of Zionism will demand a team of devoted scholars; the history of Palestine under the Man-date, on the basis of all the available documents and sources, still remains to be written; the struggle for the Jewish state and the war with the Arab nations has been treated journalistically many times, mostly with a pro-Zionist bias, but has not yet been the subject of serious history. All this, quite aside from the work in ancient and medieval history that remains to be done.
Finally, a word must be said about the Israeli student of history. Without that student, the historical scholar would be deprived of the encouraging and enthusiastic response that has sustained him in his work despite the crippling research conditions of the last four years. The student’s lot is much harder than that of his counterpart in Europe or America, but he possesses a devotion and talent that are sufficient not only to spur him on but to serve as a constant inspiration to his teachers, who are able to feel that their lectures and work are worth all the hardships that scholarly work entails in a struggling state, where even the sheets of paper on which to write a lecture are hard to come by. There are not enough books and there is not enough money in Israel, but there are enough young minds in which a vision of the human past and future may be planted, and who may be counted on to pass on this vision to their own pupils. This, in the extreme austerity of present-day Israel, is the historian’s chief compensation.
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1 For a more complete characterization of these two different approaches, see an earlier article by the same author published in COMMENTARY in the December 1949 issue.
2 The works referred to in this article, unless otherwise noted, are in Hebrew, and have been published in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in the past few years. Full titles and bibliographical information are available at COMMENTARY to interested readers.
