Читать книгу The Invention of the Jewish People - Shlomo Sand - Страница 18

Between Flavius Josephus and the modern era there were no attempts by Jewish authors to write a general history of their past. Although Jewish monotheism was born encased in theological-historical myth, no Jewish historiography was produced during the long period called the Middle Ages. Neither Christianity’s highly developed tradition of chronicles nor Islamic historical literature appealed to rabbinical Judaism, which, with rare exceptions, refused to examine either its near or distant past.⁴ The chronological sequence of events in secular time was alien to exilic time—a condition of constant alertness, attuned to the longed-for moment when the Messiah would appear. The distant past was a dim memory that ensured his coming.

Some sixteen centuries would pass before Jacques Basnage, a Normandy-born Huguenot theologian who settled in Rotterdam, undertook to continue the project of the Judean-born historian who had settled in Rome. The History of the Jews from Jesus Christ to the Present Time, Being a Supplement and Continuation of the History of Josephus was written in the early eighteenth century by this Protestant scholar, mainly as an attack on the detested Church of Rome.⁵ In this work, as in that of Josephus, writing about the past was designed to serve moral and religious purposes; it was not a work of research in the modern sense, and uses scarcely any Jewish documents.

Designed to extend the work of Josephus, Basnage’s book does not begin with Genesis, though obviously as a devout theologian he did not doubt the veracity of that biblical prologue. Indeed, following Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, it was the Protestants who gave the Old Testament the greater importance and prestige, noticeable especially in the Anglican Church and its dissidents. But like most critics of the Catholic Church, Basnage did not draw an unbroken line from the ancient Hebrews to the Jewish communities of his time. He thought that the Old Testament belonged to all the offspring of the “Children of Israel,” a term that embraced the Christians no less, and perhaps more, than the Jews, inasmuch as Christendom was the “true Israel.” While applying the term “nation” to the Jews, he did not intend its modern connotation, and he discussed their history mainly as a sect persecuted for its refusal to accept Christ as the savior. Basnage, who wrote about them with some sympathy, saw the Jews as having been, throughout the Middle Ages, the chosen victims of the corrupt papacy. Only the progress of enlightened Protestant reform would eventually lead the Jews to salvation—namely, the great day when they would at last convert to Christianity.⁶

About a hundred years later, when the German-Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost sat down to write a history of the Jews, he used Basnage’s writing as his model. Although he also criticized it, he preserved the structure of the Protestant historian’s work. The first of the nine volumes of Jost’s pioneering work—A History of the Israelites from the Time of the Maccabees to Our Time⁷—appeared in 1820. The term “Israelites” was adopted by German and French persons “of the religion of Moses,” who preferred it to “Jews,” a term charged with negative connotations.

This work would surprise today’s readers, because this first modern attempt to tell the complete history of the Jews, written by a historian who saw himself as a Jew, skipped over the biblical period. Jost’s long story opens with the kingdom of Judea under the Hasmoneans, followed by monographs reconstructing the histories of various Jewish communities up to modern times. This is a nonconsecutive narrative, broken into numerous stories, but its most memorable aspect is the fact that it lacks the “beginning” that would later be viewed as integral to the history of Jews in the world. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the time of nationalist formation, which saw the “restoration” of the Bible to many Jewish literati in Europe, this historiographic feature must have seemed strange.

To understand this first methodical study of the history of Jews through the ages, we must remember that its gifted author was not yet a national historian or, more precisely, not a national Jew. We have to look over Jost’s shoulder and appreciate his sensitivities as part of the new mental fabric of the young intelligentsia emerging from the old Jewish world. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the self-perception of German-Jewish intellectuals—even those who were “very Jewish”—was largely cultural and religious. At that time, the young Germany was not so much a political entity as a cultural-linguistic concept. This society of speakers of various dialects of German—a society of which the Jews constituted 1 percent—had recently begun the relative unification imposed by the French invader. Most of the intellectuals, whether of Jewish or of Christian background, had not yet fully responded to the political seduction of nationalism, though a few of them, including Jost, were already aware of its first hammer-blows. Most literati of Jewish background were gripped by the project of emancipation, namely, the process of achieving equal civil rights, that had begun to be implemented in part in various German principalities and kingdoms in the second decade of the century, and was a crucial element in the nationalization of politics. Everyone was hoping that the longed-for German state would break away from its clerical foundations and completely privatize all its religions.

Jost was born in Bernburg in central Germany, two years before the founder of critical historiography, Leopold von Ranke. He started his literary career as a typical Enlightenment liberal. He was raised as a Jew, attended a rabbinical school, and continued to cherish certain aspects of Jewish religious culture. Nevertheless, he favored the rising tide of reform, and believed that his life and the life of his community could be harmonized with the emerging historical-political vision of German citizenship.

With a number of friends and colleagues, all of Jewish background, he took part for a short while in creating a “science circle,” out of which would emerge the important current that would come to be known as “the science of Judaism”—Wissenschaft des Judentums, in German. is movement influenced all Jewish studies in modern times. The members of the circle and their successors were quite conflicted about their identity, and experienced some distress over this issue.⁸ These literati belonged to the first generation of German Jews to study at the universities, although their “exceptional” religious background barred them from academic posts. They subsisted as teachers, journalists or Reform rabbis and worked on their philosophical or historical studies in their spare time. As intellectuals whose symbolic capital lay principally in their Jewish heritage, they were unwilling to forgo their cultural distinction and sought to preserve whatever was best in it. At the same time, they longed to be integrated into the emerging Germany. They therefore set out on a complex and difficult intellectual journey, believing that to research the Jewish past and highlight its positive aspects would help build a bridge that could enable the Jewish community to participate in this future Germany.

Thus, at the early stages of writing Jewish history in modern times, the project was not characterized as a national discourse, which accounts for the writers’ ambivalence about including biblical history as part of that history. For Jost, as for Leopold Zunz, the second important historian in the early days of the science of Judaism, Jewish history began not with the conversion of Abraham, or the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai, but with the return of the exiles from Babylonia. It was only then, they argued, that historical-religious Judaism began, its culture having been forged by the experience of exile itself. The Old Testament had nurtured its birth, but it then grew into a universal property that would later inspire the birth of Christianity.⁹

Besides aspiring to civil emancipation, Jost, Zunz and, later, Abraham Geiger, and indeed most nineteenth-century supporters of reform, were guided by the non-Jewish biblical research that was gaining impetus at this time. Jost had been a pupil of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, one of the gifted pioneers of this critical trend, and was familiar with the new philological criticisms, most of which he willingly adopted.¹⁰ He knew that the Scriptures were written fairly late by various authors and, in addition, lacked external evidence that could substantiate them. This does not mean he doubted the truth of the myth about the rise of the Hebrews and the later consolidation of their kingdom. But he assumed that the period in question was too obscure to serve as the basis for a meaningful historical study. Moreover, the Hebrews in Canaan, despite having the laws of Moses imposed upon them, did not differ from the surrounding pagan peoples. Until their exile to Babylonia, they persistently rejected the divine commandments, which were followed only by a narrow stratum of priests and prophets. The Bible became the work that shaped identity and belief after it was edited and disseminated among a faithful public that truly needed it. “When the Children of Israel came out of Egypt they were primitive and ignorant,” writes Jost. “The Jews in Persia studied and learned from the Persians a new religious outlook, a civilized life, language and science.”¹¹ Hence, it was the period of exile, in the broadest sense, that ought to represent the start of Jewish history. The breach between ancient Hebraism and Jewish history came to be the underlying concept for most of the German pioneers of the science of Judaism.¹²

Every historical corroboration depends on ideology, whether overt or hidden. Jost’s approach was consistently fair. His great work sought to convince German readers, Jewish and Christian alike, that despite the distinct faith of the “Israelites,” they were not an “alien” people in their far-flung habitations. Long before the destruction of the Second Temple, their forefathers preferred to live outside the Holy Land, and despite their traditional religious self-isolation, they were always an integral part of the peoples among whom they lived. “They remained Jews, although also members of other nations,” Jost reiterates. “They loved their brethren in Jerusalem and wished them peace and prosperity, but they cherished their new homeland more. They prayed with their blood brothers, but they went to war with their country brothers. They were friendly toward their blood brothers, but they shed their blood for their homeland.”¹³

In the distant past, their homeland had been Babylonia or Persia, whereas then it was mainly post-Napoleonic Germany. Jost was well aware of the early signs of German nationalism and, like most literate individuals of Jewish origin, looked for indirect ways to join it. This accounts for the creation of a historiographie work of amazing scope and originality, which remains utterly unlike all the Jewish histories that followed. In the nineteenth century, a person setting out to write a history of the collective of which he regarded himself to be a member usually did so from nationalist motives. Jost, however, was impelled by quite different intellectual and mental stimuli to reconstruct his history of the Israelites. His premise was that the Jews might share a common origin, but the different Jewish communities were not separate members of a single body. The communities differed widely from place to place in their cultures and ways of life, and were only linked by their distinctive deistic belief. No supra-Jewish political entity separated Jews from non-Jews; hence in the modern world they were entitled to the same civil rights as all the other communities and cultural groups that were rushing to enter the modern nation.

Writing to a friend when his first volume appeared, Jost revealed the political thinking that underlay and motivated his historiographic work:

The state cannot recognize Jews as legitimate as long as they will not marry the inhabitants of the country. The state exists only by virtue of its people and its people must constitute a unity. Why should it elevate an association whose main principle is that it alone possesses the truth and therefore must avoid all integration with the inhabitants of the country? … This is the way our children will reason and they will gladly abandon a coercive church to gain freedom, a sense of belonging to the Volk, love of the fatherland and service to the state—the highest possessions of earthly man.¹⁴

These plain statements show that Jost clearly identified the basic principles of his time’s surging nationalism. But he had doubts about the possibility of a symbiosis between Jews and non-Jews in the emerging German nation, and these doubts would intensify following the wave of conservatism during the 1830s with all its anti-Jewish currents.

The later writings of this pioneering historian show a number of developments. German identity politics would undergo a conceptual upheaval after midcentury, but the first signs of it were discernible even before the revolutions of 1848, and they affected the early reconstruction of the Jewish past. Already in his General History of the Israelite People, Jost’s short second book that appeared in 1832, the biblical period occupies a larger portion of the story, while the Jews are presented as a unit with a tighter historical sequence.¹⁵ From here on, the tone is rather political, though not yet nationalistic, and the Old Testament becomes a more legitimate source in the narrative of “the Israelite people.” In the following years Jost’s political opinions became more cautious and hesitant, and he also began to retreat from the biblical criticism he had followed in his first book. This change became manifest in the relative length of the eras he assigned to the early Hebrews and later Jews.

Thus, right from the start, there was a close connection between the perception of the Old Testament as a reliable historical source and the attempt to define modern Jewish identity in prenationalist or nationalist terms. The more nationalistic the author, the more he treats the Bible as history—as the birth certificate attesting to the common origin of the “people.” Some of the reformists were interested in the Bible for quite different reasons, such as opposition to the Orthodox rabbinical attachment to the Talmud, or in imitation of Protestant fashions. But from Isaak Jost, through some of the intellectuals who joined the second stage of the science of Judaism, to the appearance of the great innovator Heinrich Graetz, the Old Testament came to serve as the point of departure for the first historiographical exploration into the fascinating invention of the “Jewish nation,” an invention that would become increasingly important in the second half of the nineteenth century.