The essay below, which forms the introduction to Dubnow’s Universal History and appears in its first volume, was written some time in the twenties. It is here given for the first time in English, translated directly from the Russian by Shlomo Katz. A part of Section III is omitted in this version.—Editor.
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The title Universal History of the Jewish People, is an unusual one. But, it fully corresponds to the content and scope of this unusual segment of the history of humanity. The term “universal” is applicable to the common history of the cultured nations of the world, as distinguished from the history of .the separate nations and countries. But the destiny of the Jews took such a turn that they possess their own-universal history, in the literal sense of that term, over nearly the entire area of the cultured world (save India and China) and throughout the historical life of humanity. Jewry represents a historical microcosm. It is thus possible to speak of a universal history of the Jewish people—Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes, or Histoire universal du peuple juif.
Just as in a universal history of humanity, synthesis is the method that should prevail in a universal history of the Jews. To reveal the common paths of the historical life through the changing centuries and lands, to establish the organic relationships between these fractions of time and space in the three-thousand-year-old evolution of the nation—such is the chief problem of the historian in this case. Although dealing with material already compiled and more or less worked over, the historian who employs the method of synthesis is not relieved of the duty of independent analysis., He must weigh the sources and check the facts, which could not but be defective in correctness and completeness (thus perhaps giving rise to false generalizations) since they cover such a long period of time.
But his main aim consists in revealing the common historical processes concealed under the mass of facts, in working out an exact architectural plan and constructing his many-storied structure of history on the basis of this plan. Before undertaking such a work of synthesis, one must have a clear conception of Jewish history, a definite image of its subject—the Jewish people—unclouded by dogmatic or scholastic notions. These will in their turn determine the scientific methods of research in this field.
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Until recently a correct understanding of the history of “the most historical” people encountered the greatest difficulties. In the ancient parts of this history—enjoying as they do the privileges of “sacred history”—a theological conception dominates even today the minds not only of the Orthodox, who accept completely the religious pragmatism of the historical books of the Bible, but also of the partisans of free Bible criticism.
Study of the history of the Jews in the Middle Ages and later periods is dominated by a one-sided spiritual conception based on the assumption that, having lost its government and country, the people could be an active subject of history on the spiritual plane, but on a social plane could appear only as a passive object of the history of the nations among which it lived. This is why the historiography of the schools of Zunz and Gieger adopted the theory of the existence of two factors in the history of the Diaspora: intellectual creation and the heroism of martyrdom (Geistesgeschichte und Liedensgeschichte). The main content of the life of the people is reduced to its literary history on the one hand and its martyrology on the other. The historical horizon is bounded by these limits.
To this one-sided understanding of the history there, was adapted a corresponding subdivision into epochs: Talmudic, Gaonic, Rabbinical, Mystic, Enlightened—epochs and divisions based on literary history and not on national-social factors in the broad sense.
Only recently has there become discernible a transition to a more thoroughly scientific conception of Jewish history that could be defined as sociological. It is based on the idea, emerging from the correlation of all the manifestations in our history, that the Jewish people at all times and in all countries has appeared as the subject, the creator, of its history, not only on the spiritual but also on the social plane.
During the period of its dispersion, as well as during its existence as a sovereign nation, the Jewish people represented a sharply defined nation, not just a religious group amid other nations. This ever vital nation always and everywhere defended its autonomous existence in a communal way as well as in the realms of culture. The Diaspora, which developed widely even while the Judean state still existed, everywhere had its autonomous communities, and in many places central organs of self-government and legislative and judicial establishments, too—Synhedrion, academies and patriarchs in Roman-Byzantine Palestine; Exilarchs, Gaons and law-making academies in Babylonia; Aljama and congresses of communal delegates in Spain; Kahals and Vaads, or parliaments of Kahals, in Poland and Lithuania, and many others.
As a logical successor in this historical process, the newest national movement among Jews, uniting autonomism with the contemporary principle of the “rights of national minorities,” bears witness to the indestructibility of the eternal force of Jewish history, which survives even in an age of assimilation and of major changes in the national milieu.
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The causes for the one-sided understanding of Jewish history in the recent past are quite clear. Our scientific historiography arose in Western Europe during the middle of the nineteenth century, in a place and time dominated by the dogma of assimilation: “Jewry is not a nation but a religious group.” The study of history succumbed to the views commonly held then, and devoted itself more to Judaism than to its living creator, the Jewish nation. Even such opponents of the accepted dogma as Graetz could not swim against the current.
The deep change in the field of national consciousness that characterizes the present period should arouse a corresponding change in the understanding of historical processes. The secularization of Jewish national thought should be followed by a secularization of the study of history; its liberation from the tight vise of theology should be attended by a similar liberation from spiritual and scholastic approaches.
A new understanding of Jewish history more in conformity with its actual content and scope is indeed ripening. It is becoming clear that in the course of thousands of years the nation not only “thought and suffered” but also molded its own life as a distinct social unit under every condition possible. To reveal this process is the chief problem of the historian. The object of our scientific historiography should be the people, the national unit, its appearance on the scene of history, its growth and struggle for existence.
In the course of many centuries, the national embryo, formless at first, assumed shape in the tribal environment of the ancient East; it acquired a definite national image, established and lost a kingdom; it adopted and in its own way adapted elements of the common culture, and finally rose in spiritual creativeness to the peak of Prophetism. The moment of the final formation of the national type coincided with political catastrophe—the Babylonian Exile. Following epochs—Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman—were marked by competition between theocratic and secular sovereignty.
The second political destruction under the blows of Rome provoked within the atomized nation new forms of struggle for national unity. The irresistible drive toward an autonomous life and toward the maximum of social and cultural individuality among the nations continued under circumstances other than those of sovereignty. The entire spiritual activity of the nation was applied to the attainment of this goal. Judaism is molded in the image of the social existence of the nation, and not the other way round.
From a realistic sociological conception of Jewish history there emerges the need to re-evaluate many of its significant manifestations that were incorrectly explained from the theological or-scholastic point of view. Let us cite several examples of the difference between the new conception and the old in this illumination of some of the weightiest problems of Jewish history.
The old historiography became hopelessly confused on the question of the Pharisee and the Saduccee parties, whose common activities governed Jewish national life during the Hasmonean and Roman eras. Even historians emancipated from theology explained the emergence of these parties on the grounds of their religious and dogmatic differences. Basing themselves on Josephus Flavius’ Hellenic-philosophical embellishments and on later Talmudic legends from which the political element had vanished, historians transformed into a battle of “sects” and “schools” what had originally been the greatest national dispute, a dispute over the very nature of the nation: whether the Jews should be a secular or clerical nation, an ordinary or an exceptional member of the family of nations.
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The dispute between the two parties also had a social undercurrent. It was a struggle between the Saduccee aristocracy, which clung to state power, and the Pharisee democracy, which treasured its spiritual domination over the mass of the people. This sociological view of the rise and activities of these parties, which is brought out in the present History, emerges from a study of all the instances of conflict between the Saduccees and Pharisees in the political and social arena and from all their activities from the epoch of the Hasmoneans until the fall of the Jewish state. Their differences on religion and customs were additional to the fundamental national and social conflicts that divided them. Their differing attitudes toward the “oral Law” grew out of their different views on the question of the desirability of Jewish cultural isolation and exceptionalism in the Greco-Roman world.
Another example of the distortion of the historical perspective can be seen in the usual evaluation of the Synhedrion in Jabneh. At the moment of the greatest crisis in Jewish history, following upon the destruction of the Jewish state by the Romans, there arose a center of self-rule in a city near destroyed Jerusalem. Trusting the naive if beautiful legend about Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, who with the permission of the Romans fled from besieged Jerusalem and in Jabneh established an academy for the study of the Torah, historians have variously evaluated the significance of this academy for the future destiny of the Jews. Some praise this exploit, which raised the banner of learning on the ruins of statehood; others see in it the beginning of the national death of Jewry and the petrifaction of Judaism within the letter of the Law. Both are mistaken, because the fundamental view taken of the academic center in Jabneh is incorrect.
Actually, there occurred here a major act of national-social reorganization. Not a theoretical school was established in Jabneh, but a center of nomocracy—rule by the discipline of the Law. The institution that interpreted the Law was here merged with the legislative establishment, the Synhedrion; which, after the destruction of the state, was called upon to fuse the scattered segments of the people with the cement of homogeneous laws that would regulate their entire inner life along autonomous lines. From this issued the slogan for the reorganization of the defeated national army: the establishment of a new communal discipline instead of the statehood that had been lost. This is a page, primarily, from the history of national life and only secondarily a part of the history of religion, scholarship and literature.
In the light of the sociological conception, other confused historical problems become clear. We begin to understand the antinomy of nationalism and universalism and the conflict between the political and spiritual factors in the activities of the biblical prophets. This conflict between two origins, evoked by Israel’s position among the countries of the ancient East, culminated in the great synthesis of Prophetism—the nation as the kernel, the state as only a shell. The shell may break but the kernel remains. If the kernel is healthy, the nation will always be able to resist heteronomy imposed by the surrounding environment and stand as a “banner unto the nations”—an example of spiritual stability.
An exactly opposite view was later preached by the Christian Apostles: the religious individual is valuable in himself, not the collective historical entity that is a nation. These new prophets pushed the Jewish nation toward the brink of extinction at the very moment when it was desperately fighting for its life against the universal despoiler, Rome. A healthy instinct of self-preservation compelled the people to shy away from these heralds of national suicide. The meaning of Talmudism, with its iron national discipline beneath a wrapping of religion, thus becomes clear in later history. The Talmud appears, first of all, as the written monument of the national hegemony of the Jewish autonomous centers in Roman-ruled Palestine and Persian-ruled Babylonia, a monument to the age-long efforts of the leaders of the people to build a hard shell of laws around the dispersed national kernel.
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The conception here outlined appears to be the only foundation for an objectively scientific method of dealing with Jewish history. It leads our historiography out of the labyrinth of theological and metaphysical opinions and puts it on a firm bio-sociological basis. The object of our study appears not as an abstraction, but as a living organism that has developed from the initial biological embryo of the “tribe” into a complex cultural and historical being, the nation.
The method of study is based on a firm adherence to the principle of evolution. First the period of the formation of the nation is examined, then the struggle of the strengthened entity for its independent existence, for the preservation and development of its characteristic national traits and accumulated culture. Describing this dual process of the formation of the entity and of its struggle for individuality, we assume it to be an axiom that a sharply developed national personality produced by history is not just a natural phenomenon but also represents a great cultural value.
But this does not imply that the historian should consider as valuable all the paths;, straight as well as devious, that led to the preservation of the collective personality. For instance, although we regard the normal accentuation of individual traits as a normal condition of national life, the historian is bound to point out those cases in which cultural isolationism was pushed to sad extremes—often out of necessity, for the sake of self-defense. This process, however, sometimes went to the point where the people became completely estranged from the best achievements of human culture. The historian should describe the inescapable conflict in every national organism between centrifugal and centripetal forces, and the tragic clashes they cause in the depths of national life. It is self-evident that, starting from the premise of the cultural value of a national identity, the historian should evaluate differently the results of the centripetal creative forces and of the centrifugal destructive ones.
The sociological method naturally compels the historian to assign a proper role not only to communal and national factors, but also to socio-economic forces which the old school of history disdained. Nor does this imply bending over in the direction of “historical materialism,” which interprets all the manifestations of history in the light of the evolution of the economic order. We should not abandon the old historical spiritualism only to be caught in the vise of the opposite doctrine of historical materialism, which is no less one-sided in its distortion of the perspective of the past. The economic order is just as much a product of the natural and social conditions of national life as the spiritual and cultural order. All the social and spiritual factors created by the nation regulate its life. They compete with as well as reciprocate each other; but all the various functions of national life cannot be subordinated to any one function.
The full meaning of this new conception of Jewish history can be appreciated especially by those who, like the author of this book, once wandered in the maze of the old paths of Jewish historiography. At one time I, too, paid tribute to commonly accepted “axioms.” In the search for a synthesis of Jewish history, which occupied me from the first day of my scientific activity, I passed through all the above-mentioned phases of historical thought. My immature youthful debut, embellished by a definite religious-reformist tendency, represented an application of the theological method wrong-side-out.
In a series of later works, in which the tendency toward the secularization of Jewish history became marked, I still could not free myself from the ideological approach of the school of Zunz and Geiger. My innovation consisted in the attempt to force the national-social approach into the framework of previous historical conceptions.
Only after many years of detailed study of general Jewish history from its sources—when I myself had to write it as the history of a people and not of a literature—did the shortcomings of the old methods become clear, the framework and integration broaden, the historical horizon expand and there come to the fore factors formerly hidden in the fog of scholasticism. The conclusions I reached by the inductive method I later verified by deduction. Starting out with these as premises, I found them confirmed when applied to the historical material.
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Subdivision of The Material
The new sociological conception involves a fresh approach to the subdivision of the material of Jewish history and a new classification of its epochs, i. e. periodization. The definition of the periods and epochs in the history of a nation should be based on socionational features and not on religious or literary ones. These features are determined by the historical environment in which the people finds itself at a given moment and by the hegemony of one or another sector of the nation in one of the changing national centers.
The history of the period of national sovereignty—which to this day is frequently divided into “the epoch of the First Temple,” and “the epoch of the Second Temple”—should be subdivided according to political landmarks connected with the situation of Palestine between the great monarchies of the ancient East: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, and, finally, the Roman Empire. In the post-sovereignty era, when the Jewish people lacked a single center, the subdivision must of necessity follow geographic lines in accordance with the alternating hegemonies of the various centers of Jewry. In every epoch the dispersed people had one main center, sometimes two, which by reason of the extent of their national autonomy and the level of their cultural accomplishments gained leadership over the other parts of the Diaspora.
Out of the universal history of the Jewish people there emerge first of all two major periods: a) the Oriental Period, when the main centers of the nation were located in the Fertile Crescent and North Africa—Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and (b) the Western Period, when these centers were shifted to Europe. . . .
Within the limits of the Oriental Period three separate epochs must be distinguished, from the viewpoint of the political and cultural environments in which they ran their course: 1) the purely Oriental epoch, the period of the conquest of Canaan, of the Judean and Israelite kings, and of the subsequent domination of three world empires—the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian (circa 1200-332 B.C.E.); 2) the epoch of a mixed Oriental and Western environment and of Greco-Roman domination, interrupted by the interval of Jewish independence under the Hasmoneans, until the fall of the Jewish state (332 B.C.E.—73 C.E.); 3) the epoch of the two hegemonies; Roman-Byzantine Palestine and Persian-Arab Babylonia.
In this last era following the fall of Judea in the struggle against Rome, we note the successive hegemonies of different dominant centers. The Palestinian hegemony of the pagan-Roman period (2nd and 3rd centuries C.E.) gave way to the dual leadership of Palestine and Babylonia during the concurrent dominance of Byzantium and New Persia in the East (4th to 6th centuries). These were in turn followed by the sole hegemony of Babylonian Jewry under the great Arab Caliphate (7th to 9th centuries). It is by means of such universal historical crises that the changing epochs of the second millenium of Jewish history should be defined; whereas in earlier historiography this entire period was presented as a unit under the general title of “The Talmudic Period,” and was scholastically subdivided into the epochs of the Mishnah and Gemarah, the Tannaim, the Amoraim, the Saboraim and Gaonim.
The second millenium of the Oriental Period of Jewish history, which coincides with the first millenium of the Christian era, was the period of the colonization of the European Diaspora and prepared the way for the transfer of national hegemony from East to West. The 11th century of the Christian era appears as the dividing line between the great Oriental and Western periods in Jewish history. National leadership began to move in the direction of the greatest accumulation of Jewish masses in Europe.
In the Middle Ages this hegemony was shared first by Moorish and later by Christian Spain (11th to 4th centuries), by Southern and Northern France (11th to 13th centuries) and finally by Germany (13th to 15th centuries). From the 6th to the 8th century Germany shared it with the autonomous Jewish center that existed in Poland.
Under the influence of the rising tide of enlightenment a dual cultural hegemony arises. German Jewry takes the lead of the Western, progressive movement, while Polish-Russian Jewry remains the citadel of the old, independent culture until the middle of the g9th century, when it too is drawn into the vortex of modem history.
All of modern history (1789-1914) passes amid profound social and cultural crises provoked by brief recurring epochs of emancipation and reaction in political life and a parallel struggle between assimilation and nationalism in the internal life of the Jews of both Eastern and Western Europe. The very latest phase of the modern period (1881-1914), the epoch of growing anti-Semitism on the one hand, and of the Jewish national movement on the other, witnesses a radical change in the fate of the people—an exodus from Europe begins.
One part of the emigration in the course of three decades establishes a large Diaspora center in America; the other, the considerably smaller part, lays the foundation for a renewed national center in the old homeland, Palestine. The devastating [First] World War and the Russian Revolution (1914-1920) delivers a blow to the largest of all former Jewish centers—the one in Russia—and now, on a new threshold of history we are confronted by a Janus-headed sphinx, one face of which looks to the East and the other to the West.
Following the two great periods of Jewish history, the Oriental and the Western, it is possible that the future will bring a dual hegemony of the East and the West, of Palestine and European-American Jewry, if not the full hegemony of the East in the form of a rejuvenated Palestine. The historian of our time should stop at this threshold stained by the bloody deluge of the World War. Our history is therefore brought only up to this fateful limit.
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Great difficulties are encountered in assigning a proper place to the material accumulated over many centuries by the history of a universal people. These difficulties are not very great in ancient history, in which we are concerned only with the synchronization of the Judean and Israelite kingdoms and deal with the small Diaspora of the epoch of Persian domination. But they mount correspondingly as the Diaspora grows first in the East and later in the West. Even during the Greco-Roman period the attention of the historian is divided between Judea and a large Diaspora, while in the Roman-Byzantine and Persian-Arab periods he must deal with two centers of hegemony—Palestine and Babylonia—in addition to a growing European Diaspora.
Writing the history of the Western period, the historian must keep his eye on a multitude of countries in which the fate of the Jews is bound up with varying political and cultural environments. Here the historian is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory methods. Either he writes the history of the Jewish people in each country separately, in which case the result is a mechanically connected series of monographs, or he tells the history of the Jews in all countries concurrently.
In the latter case historiography is transformed into mere chronicling, presenting an inventory of events coinciding in point of time but completely different from each other in terms of local conditions. The first architect of our historiography, Graetz, usually preferred the latter method. In his broad study one is often struck by unexpected jumps—kefitzoth haderekh—from one country into another within the limits of one chapter. Such an artificial joining of distant events may have synoptic informative value, but it lacks the vital element necessary for scientific synthesis: the relation of events to local conditions. In chronicle form these conditions are scarcely discernible. In Graetz’s account the confusion is even more confounding because in one and the same chapter political, social and literary facts are mingled.
To avoid these shortcomings it is necessary to divide the material according to a triple pattern—time, place and subject matter. The history of each epoch should be told by countries, and in each country attention should be paid to the sequence of internal and external events in the life of the people and the causal relationships between them. Within the limits of a given epoch the history of the various parts of the Jewish people is presented—first of the chief center of hegemony and then of the various other countries in the order of their importance for the general history of the people.
Sometimes it is necessary to begin with an account of the central event of a period, a political or social movement that swept several countries and left its imprint on the entire epoch. Such events, for instance, are the first Crusades in France and Germany, the migration of the Sephardic Jews after their expulsion from Spain, the Messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi which spread from Turkey, the first French Revolution and the beginning of the emancipation of Jews, German anti-Semitism of the last decades of the 19th century. In the present History a general review is devoted to each epoch, stating briefly its outstanding characteristics in the center as well as in the periphery. So far as possible, external political events, internal social manifestations and literary developments are kept apart. The material contained in a chapter dealing with one specific country is generally arranged in the following manner: the political situation, self-rule in the Jewish communities, spiritual life and literature.
Literary history enters into the composition of The History of the Jewish Nation only to the extent that literary manifestations influenced the social dynamism or were themselves products of social movements. We are not concerned so much with individual literary creations as with literary trends that characterized the direction of social thought. The plan of this history, however, does not include a special history of literature in the narrow sense of the word.
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History of This History
. . . So far as my general conception is concerned, I have explained before why I consider it the only scientific one, and the honest critic can check the correctness of my opinion in the light of historical facts. In judging individual manifestations I cling to principles stemming from the one universal, all-compelling criterion: the ethical.
The old aphorism declaring that “History should inform, not prove” (scribitur historia ad narrandum, non ad probandum) should be complemented by the remark: “but it has the right to judge.” The historian appears simultaneously as investigator and judge. First he severely cross-questions the witnesses of the past, he checks the historical material in order to extract the truth from it. But having reached a definite conclusion, he is within his rights in weighing and judging manifestations or actions. Actions can be judged in two ways: according to their motives and by their results. Having clarified the true causes of a given historical manifestation, or having established the motives behind the actions of a given historical personality, the historian is duty-bound to evaluate them from the point of view of the epoch described. But he is free to judge their results as he sees their reflection in events of later epochs.
A historian may thus recognize as wrong many opinions and dogmas that were held to be above doubt in the course of centuries, since he sees their negative consequences in later times. At the same time he may recognize them as legitimate with respect to the motives of the epoch in which they arose, provided that these motives were not clearly unethical. The ethical criterion in evaluating facts and personages of the past is compulsory for the historian since he is a judge of conscience and the spokesman of “the court of history.” A poor historian is one who “looks with indifference on both good and evil,” whose attitude is the same toward persecutor and victim, inquisitor and martyr, despot and fighter for freedom, militarist and pacifist . . .
There exists an ethical decalogue whose clear commandments are binding on the truthful and honest historian. Biblical Prophetism, the fruit of the Jewish national genius, gave us this ethical philosophy of history, which will always accompany scientific historiography. The prophet Amos outlined the historical fate of the nations according to their moral qualities, and when listing the vices of Aramea, Moab and Edom he did not fail to mention the vices of Israel and Judah. The substance of Prophetism consisted in its application of higher ethical norms to all the manifestations of history, in advancing the idea that moral law reigns in historical life, that breaking this law is punishable by ultimate national destruction, after a long reign of violence—but obedience to it endows peoples with an indestructible power of the spirit. Even a contemporary Jewish historian has no right to abandon this ethical conception of history, especially since it is fully compatible with a scientific conception of Jewish history.
