On Reconciling the Histories of Two Chosen Peoples

Abstract

In 2003, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs invited me participate in a project called the International History Initiative, whose goal was engage scholars in reckoning with contested pasts ... in order transform his torical disputes from a cause of conflict a tool in long-term reconciliation and peace-building.1 Its premise was that there is a reciprocal linkage between con temporary intergroup relations and narratives about those relations in the past: not only are historical narratives shaped by contemporary events, but contemporary events can be shaped by historical narratives. Hence the project's operative assump tion: get historians from groups in conflict with one another reconcile their clash ing representations of their groups' past interactions, and possibilities for improving the tenor of present interactions might well be enhanced. The organizers of the project believed that the history of Polish-Jewish relations might offer a suitable test case for their hypothesis. Indeed, only a short while earlier, a historical work—Neighbors, Jan Gross's book implicating Poles in the massacre of Jews at Jedwabne in 1941—had aroused passionate contention among segments of Polish and Jewish communities throughout the world, yet it had done so in a way that suggested some observers that it was possible to move beyond strongly held, competing, and incompatible narratives of the past and reach some consensus that will be acceptable all people of goodwill.2 The organizers were thus keen gauge the extent of current disagreements and convergence among historians of Polish Jewish relations in Poland, North America, Western Europe, and Israel and assess the extent which scholars in these different regions reflected and related the specific public contexts in which they worked. To that end they convened an inter national workshop at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig, most of whose participants affirmed that a consensus narrative—based upon a veritable explosion of empirical work produced since the