A Flawed Prophecy? Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust

Abstract

WHEN IT FIRST APPEARED in 1982, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor seemed an anxious book-anxious about state of Jewish collective memory, about alleged role of professional historians m weakening it, and about future of Jewish historical consciousness overall. Twenty-five years later, it is clear that many of anxieties that underpinned Zakhor were unfounded. Much of what Yerushalmi explicitly viewed with foreboding-most notably, conquest of memory by history-has not come to pass. Ironically enough, reverse has proven to be case, as discipline of has faced an enormous challenge by emergence of what has been called memory boom.1 Relatedly, and perhaps more significantly, Yerushalmi failed to foresee one of controversial phenomena that has stood at center of memory boom: dramatic growth of Holocaust memory. Kspecially in light of concerns that these two trends have sparked within some Jewish circles in recent years, anxieties that informed Zakbor seem today far less pressing than they did when book first appeared. For these reasons, while Zakbor has retained its reputation as a perceptive and erudite work of it may be viewed as a flawed work of prophecy.As is well known, Zakhor offered a novel thesis about overarching trajectory of Jewish historical consciousness from biblical to modern age. According to Yerushalmi, Jewish view of was originally a unified one that combined a mundane view of Jewish people as active agents m along with a metahistorical, mythic view of Jews as a people whose historical experience was directly shaped by divine agency. During Antiquity, m other words, Jewish and memory were fused. The frequent biblical injunction to remember, and ways m which ritual and recital were meant to reinforce memory, Yerushalmi argued, were all devoted to preserving an awareness of God's acts of intervention in history, whether they be his liberation of Hebrews from Egyptian bondage or his granting of Mosaic Law.2With destruction of Second Temple, loss of national sovereignty, and onset of exile, however, two strands of Jewish historical consciousness became separated and the Jews virtually stopped writing history (p. 16). Now, when they experienced mundane historical events, Jews interpreted (but rarely recorded) them in strictly metahistorical terms. During rabbinic period, Jews displayed little interest in exploring recent history-for example, that of Rome or Second Temple period-and mstead preferred to perceive events as reflective of the continuing intervention of God m history (p. 25).3 In medieval Kurope, similarly, Jews tended to assimilate new historical events mto old and established conceptual frameworks and familiar archetypes (p. 36). As Yerushalmi memorably described it, Jews developed a typological perspective in whichthe latest oppressor is Haman, and court-Jew who tries to avoid disaster is Mordecai. Christendom is Hdom or Hsau, and Islam is Ishmael. Geographical names are blithely lifted from Bible and affixed to places Bible never knew, and so Spain is Sefarad, France is Zarefat, [and] Germany is Ashkenaz. (p. 36)Even radically new events, such as Crusades, were ultimately seen through older archetypes, such as binding of Isaac, and preserved in memory not through means of conventional historiography but religiously rooted vehicles like penitential prayers known as selihot, memorial books written for Yizkor services, and Second Purims, which celebrated deliverance of Jewish communities from harm (pp. 45-46).The only exception to this typological perspective, Yerushalmi pointed out, was a faint flame of Jewish historiographical activity that flickered m sixteenth-century m wake of Spanish expulsions, as Jews tried to make sense of what seemed to many like an unprecedented catastrophe. …