Major Trends in the Historiography of European Ashkenazic Jews from the 1970s to the Present

Abstract

This article focuses on shifts in Jewish historiography of Ashkenazic Jews in Europe of the pre-modern period. It describes the denouement of traditional historiography— which generally assumes that more often than not Jews and non-Jews lived separate from one another—and compares it to two trends that I denominate exchange and interaction historiography that have gained momentum from the last third of the twentieth century. In contrast to scholars working in the traditional vein, exchange and interaction historians view Jews and non-Jews as interconnected and entangled. Exchange historians deal primarily with Jewish and non-Jewish cultural interrelatedness, whereas interaction historians overwhelmingly focus on interpersonal contacts. I use the terms exchange and interaction historiography because they comprehensibly flag as well as qualify distinctions in post-traditional historiography’s conception of Jewish and non-Jewish relations. Methodologically, however, there is considerable overlap between these three historiographical approaches insofar as they all employ the concept of difference as a central analytical tool. The notion of difference prompts scholars to focus first and foremost on what distinguished Jews and non-Jews instead of what they shared, and consequently to depict their relations as dichotomous. In this article, I argue that the insistence on the Jewish/non-Jewish binary forestalls possible innovations that exchange and interaction historians might otherwise pioneer in their approaches. The proposed remedy for this predicament is to replace difference with similarity as an analytical instrument and to focus on intercultural commonalities rather than distinctions. Various scholars have already made efforts to transcend the Jewish/non-Jewish binary but have fallen short of achieving their goal by failing to base their work on a sufficiently rigorous conceptual framework, such as similarity.