Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (review)

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T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 209–212 SHMUEL FEINER. Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness. Translated by Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002. Pp. x Ⳮ 404. In his seminal work on Jewish memory and Jewish history, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi posited a fundamental distinction between premodern Jewish consciousness of the past—what he referred to as collective memory— and the distinctly modern historical sensibility that is largely the province of professional historians and academics. The distinction was not simply a matter of the quantity or quality of the historical evidence, nor the commitment to certain research techniques and methods. At its core, what distinguished the historicist turn in modern Jewish thinking was the narrative and theological rejection, or at least evasion, of providential metahistory, including, as Yerushalmi noted, the move away from ‘‘the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself.’’1 Yerushalmi traced this development back to 1819 and the founding of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, pointedly stating that the earlier eighteenth -century German-Jewish Haskalah had little role in the shaping of this new historical consciousness. The Haskalah, in his words, ‘‘did not attain a conception of history fundamentally different from those that prevailed earlier.’’ Despite maskilic efforts to underscore the value and importance of historical study, Yerushalmi argued that in their hands, ‘‘it is clear that history has as yet no intrinsic value, but is still completely subordinate to traditional concerns.’’2 Shmuel Feiner’s Haskalah and History, which originally appeared in Hebrew in 1995, sets out to challenge this view of the Haskalah. Although Feiner virtually ignores Yerushalmi’s work, he argues that the maskilic ‘‘sense of the past’’ was distinct from traditional premodern history, and that the advent of a modern historical consciousness should properly be dated from the 1780s, some four decades before the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Feiner deftly traces what he refers to as ‘‘maskilic history’’ from its origins in Berlin and Königsberg to its nineteenth -century development by the Galician and then Russian Haskalah. A final and important chapter is devoted to the internal criticism of this 1. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York, 1989), 89. 2. Ibid., 83. 210 JQR 94:1 (2004) maskilic history at the hands of more radical Maskilim as well as the earliest proponents of the new nationalist thinking. Along the way, Feiner is able to demonstrate both the substantive continuities that connected the Haskalah movements across Europe as well as their distinct contexts and singularities. He shows how this historical consciousness continued to be a central feature of the Haskalah, and how it continued to develop and even thrive as a distinct cultural force parallel to and, in many ways, independent of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. As an intellectual history of the Haskalah, this book makes an important and lasting contribution to the study of modern Jewish history and culture. Feiner correctly seizes upon the maskilic sense of the past as an excellent means of illuminating its ideals and passions, its tensions and limitations. By tracing the manifold ways in which the Maskilim portrayed and imagined Jewish history, and by pointing to all manner of their literary selectivity and manipulation, Feiner is able to flesh out the whole complex of maskilic ideals, aspirations, and hopes for the Jewish future. In other words, precisely because the Maskilim used this history to inculcate new values and reshape Jewish identity and then to legitimate these very moves, the same body of historical writing could be turned around to illuminate their worldview. What emerges from these pages is a perspicacious elucidation of both the maskilic critique of contemporary Jewry and a rich account of the Haskalah’s attempt to navigate the shoals of modernity. Where Feiner’s book is more problematic is in its attempt to distinguish the modern, nonscientific—that is, the non-Wissenschaft—historical consciousness from premodern or traditional history. Let me state at the outset that the difficulties one finds...