A New Vision of Jewish History: The Early Historical Writings of Salo Baron

Abstract

While rejecting the traditional belief that Jewish fate was controlled by God, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the Jews maintained prior perceptions of post-70 Jewish history as a sequence of unmitigated disasters. Beginning in 1928, the young Salo Baron combatted this perspective on the Jewish past, which he dubbed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” In his well-known 1928 essay “Ghetto and Emancipation” and more substantially in the 1937 edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, Baron vigorously rejected this view. In the process, he formulated a new periodization of the Jewish past and moved beyond the ideologically grounded and programmatic reconstruction of Jewish history to a rigorously descriptive portrayal of the multi-faceted Jewish historical experience. In so doing, Baron laid the foundations of the flourishing contemporary Jewish historiographic enterprise.