The Jewish Historical Sense
Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science.
Volume I. New York, Yiddish Scientific Institute—Yivo, 1946. 319 pp.

 

The activities of the Yiddish Scientific Institute have long been of interest to students of the social sciences concerned with problems that touch upon the Jews, the more so since its headquarters moved to New York in 1939. Yet the barriers of language have kept its publications from receiving either the full measure of appreciation due them, or the mature and comprehensive criticism essential to the maintenance of contacts with other lines of scholarly development. The projected series of annual volumes in which representative selections of the work of the organization will appear in English translation will certainly be gratifying to those hitherto deprived of access by ignorance of Yiddish and, no doubt, profitable to the members of Yivo themselves.

The first of these annual volumes contains several papers excellent in their own rights, Elias Tcherikower’s analysis of Jewish historiography, for instance, and A. J. Heschel’s eloquent account of the “Eastern European Era in Jewish History.” And Abraham A. Golumb’s study of Jewish self-hatred appears appropriately at a moment when it can find in Koestler’s recent novel a long confirmatory footnote.

But an anthology of this sort is more valuable for the opportunity to assess the achievements of the group as a whole than for the occasion to deal with individual contributions. Milton R. Konvitz’s description in January’s Commentary of the origin and development of the Institute points to its historic function, the transfer into secular social science of traditional Jewish cultural values. The varied articles before us display, in their strength and weaknesses, signs of the provisional character of that process.

The selection of subjects reveals at first glance two omissions and one inclusion of significance. Linguistics, generally counted one of the humanities as an aspect of literature, here assumes the role of a social science, a treatment which mirrors the part played by Yiddish as a social element in the Jewish life of Eastern Europe.

Conversely, political science is not represented at all. The alienation of the Jew from the state in Eastern Europe probably accounts for the lack of interest in the techniques of government and of the exercise of power. The absence of economics, as it is understood in America, also reflects Yivo’s background. There is a great deal of stress upon economic and social factors in history, for instance the illuminating introduction of Raphael Mahler’s “Social and Political Aspects of the Haskalah in Galicia,” but there is no concern with “pure economics,” with the functioning of the system of production as such. This bias may spring from the concrete situation of Eastern European Jews, for whom the process of earning a livelihood was so thoroughly overridden by political and social implications or complications as to be meaningless in the abstract.

The impact of traditional sources upon the basic conceptions of social science may best be gauged in the sections which fall into the broad categories of social psychology and history. Concern with the former field is to be expected, since much of the recent thinking on that subject by Jews and non-Jews alike has centered about the definition of national or ethnic traits and the examination of the sources of group consciousness. The studies here follow the pattern of current work in the area. They are up to the level of what is being done elsewhere. But they offer no new departure, and they share the general limitations of the approach. Lehrer’s study of the psychology of the Jewish child in America, and Greenberg’s study of the attitudes of the Jewish students at Yale, thus rest heavily on statistical data, depersonalized and dehumanized and set forth in an uninspired manner that raises serious doubts as to the fruitfulness of this line of inquiry.

The failure of integration here is more striking by contrast to the development of the historical essays. In the Jewish tradition, historical thinking, even the sense of chronology, is of comparatively recent origin. The work of the Jewish historians, in method, is largely derivative from the 19th-century German scientific schools. Yet the application to materials specifically Jewish has evoked a transformation. For to the Eastern European Jew, culture was “the style of life of a people.” Those who dealt with this culture could not limit their narratives to a succession of rulers, or even to the development of institutional, artistic, and philosophic forms. They had to reach back to the style of life of the whole people, a conception of social history towards which, significantly, American historians have been groping in the past few decades.

The Eastern European Jew had a broad tradition, rooted in Talmudic discipline, of concern with problems that now form the substance of the social studies. That concern was unformulated in terms of modern conceptual categories, and unscientific in terms of modern methods, but rich in its concentration upon the reality of the individual in society, and upon the concreteness of phenomena in their context. The scholars of Yivo can perform a valuable service by preserving in their work a measure of continuity with that tradition.

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