Modern Historians and Jewish Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

Modern Historians and Jewish Transnational Perspectives Eli Lederhendler (bio) The idea of reframing American Jewish history in a transnational perspective, as I understand it, aims chiefly to include Europe inside the frame. That, as I and a growing number of other writers have urged, is a most useful expansion of the classic focus by Jewish Americanists on the United States alone. In fact, this proposition no longer requires a novel and robust defense, since the transnational gaze is already a fairly established feature in some parts of American Jewish historiography. That is true with regard to the early American period of the Sephardi Atlantic diaspora and it holds true, as well, for the turn-of-the-twentieth-century mass Jewish migrations out of Eastern Europe.1 It has taken somewhat longer for a similar approach to develop in relation to Central Europe—Germany in particular—as yet another theater of an integrated Euro-American Jewish history, but that sphere is also beginning to find its way into the literature (though mainly propelled, I should add, by German-trained scholars and not yet integrated into American Jewish historical training and discourse).2 This recent burgeoning of transnationalism in Jewish historiography is actually an exercise in revisiting much earlier thematic and ideational paradigms. Moshe (Murray) Rosman and Nils Roemer, respectively, analyzed this layering effect in two useful discussions that were published [End Page 557] a decade ago. They historicized the process by which a wave of territorial-based studies succeeded an earlier genre of pan-Jewish historiography as the regnant form of Jewish social and cultural history. (Actually, Rosman used the term “hybridity” to inquire into the relationship between Jewish and co-territorial histories and cultures, whereas Roemer used “transnationalism” to analyze similar currents in Jewish historiographical development.) Focusing on national Jewries delineated by the political borders came to be seen, especially in the decades after 1950, as a better way to understand Jewish histories (in the plural). The national approach looked at Jewish populations in their natural habitats and in their wider, non-Jewish contexts. Before that national-territorial trend set in, however, pan-Jewish and wide-canvas approaches were far more common.3 Indeed, even in more recent decades, prominent Jewish historians persisted in addressing the cross-continental inter-relations that shaped modern Jewish life. Michael Meyer’s now-classic work on the history of Reform Judaism, for example, very aptly fits that description, as did Jonathan Frankel’s equally magisterial work on Russian Jewish politics before 1917, which included a portrait of left-wing and Jewish-national politics in the immigrant Jewish community in the United States. The sense of such works, and others like them, is that Jewish populations, communities, and movements retain an inherent complementarity—not simply a parallelism of coeval and roughly analogous phenomena, but rather a cluster of distinctive Jewish phenomena that find diverse expression across various geographies.4 Europeanists (I include here American-based scholars of European Jewry) have forged somewhat ahead of the Americanists in this regard. Seminal works on early modern and modern European Jewish life have departed from the national-boundary format and afford ample scope to cross-national and cross-cultural social, economic, and intellectual networks. One thinks here of scholars like Jonathan Israel, Yosef Kaplan, Lois Dubin, David Ruderman, Mitchell Hart, Derek Penslar, Abigail [End Page 558] Green, Francesca Trivellato, Lisa Moses Leff, and more recently Iris Idelson-Shein, to name just a few.5 Optimally, some critical synthesis between the two approaches or a dialectical scheme that sheds light on both types of historical narrative might possess the key. My guide, in this and in other, more general senses, has been the venerable American Jewish historian, Henry L. Feingold, who once reflected on the dualism in which the American Jewish past is caught, as it were, between two conceptual realms: the American social realm and the Jewish world-diasporic realm. “The two strands are so tied together that it is almost impossible to determine to whose history the American Jewish experience belongs.”6 Pursuing this thought a bit, I would add that there are, inevitably, some differences and some hurdles to be negotiated. For instance, the transnational historical...