Historical Memory in Abraham Geiger's Account of Modern Jewish Identity

Abstract

n Jan Assmann's study of the biblical Moses in European memory, he distinguishes between in its radical form of positivism and mnemohistory as the study of a remembered past.' Although memory certainly related to history, Assmann opens new questions about how we imagine the past and its heroes while setting aside factual issues concerning what really happened. If history for Assmann a discussion of events, then memory uses features of those events to form a bridge of meaning for contemporary portrayals of identity. Assmann by no means alone in this turn toward memory in historical studies. Beginning with Maurice Halbwachs's distinction between collective memory and history, together with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's influential Zakhor and Freud's Moses, new works have canvassed the varied terrain of historical memory and have resurrected forgotten texts that deserve the historian's attention.2 For many historians of memory, discovering what really happened in the past either unfathomable or simply unnecessary for understanding how persons narrate and imagine that past. Assmann, for example, not worried about whether Moses ever existed, or even if he had been an Egyptian. Those are historical questions. Moses as a figure of memory is modeled, invented, reinvented, and reconstructed by the present and for the present.3 Assmann shows that a remembered past not an innocent memory but a motivated projecting of contemporary debates about identity onto a past. Through memory, the past becomes a usable history, and its heroes become sources for modern identity.