Recalling Zakhor : A Quarter-Century's Perspective

Abstract

THIS FORUM MARKS twenty-fifth anniversary of publication of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor: Jewith History and Jewith Memory. Based on Stroum Lectures at University of Washington, Yerushalmi's compact volume of 100 pages has had as significant an impact on field of Jewish studies as any book over past quarter-century. The book has attracted thousands of enthusiastic readers, many of them struck by rare combination of historical erudition and literary lyricism. Readers have been dazzled by Yerushalmi's masterful historical command and ability to visit diverse epochs and texts of Jewish past with mtimate familiarity. They have also been drawn, with more than a tinge of self-interest, to Yerushalmi's reflections m final chapter of Zakbor on condition of modern Jewish historian, that lonely figure who embodies, in his famous phrase, the faith of fallen Jews.For all book's many virtues, its impressive reception may be due most to a thesis that has engaged and provoked scholars for decades. Yerushalmi posited that while Jews became, relatively early in their collective existence, the fathers of meaning m history, they took no pride m and wasted no labor on writing of history as a self-contained enterprise. To extent that they related to past, it was not with an eye to recording what actually happened but rather to affirming uniqueness of their relationship with God. And they tended to do so not m form of event-based chronicles but m liturgical and ritual repositories that affirmed that unique relationship.Thus, for nearly two millennia, from Josephus to Jost, Jews abandoned quest for historical knowledge m favor of a search for meaning m history. The result, according to Yerushalmi, was a rich mosaic of collective that, when unraveled, depicted an indisputably sacred history. The clear foil m this story is modern historian, steadfastly devoted to pursuit of a profane historical truth at expense of meaning. In seeking out precise measurements of a particular datum in a discrete historical context, modern historian effectively dismantles mnemonic mosaic of old. At that point, collective and critical history-hinted at in Zakhors subtitle-are stretched to point of rupture.Yerushalmi's book has served as an important stimulus to both research and debate. A new generation of scholars followed m Yerushalmi's wake to analyze different modes of Jewish historical consciousness, and particularly, contours, functions, and Tendenzen of modern Jewish historians. At same time, leading historical practitioners challenged key features of Yerushalmi's argument. Whereas Robert Bonfil questioned Yerushalmi's explanation for brief flowering of Jewish historical writing m sixteenth century, Amos Funkenstein went even further m suggesting that Yerushalmi understated historical consciousness of premodern Jews and overstated detachment of modern historian from collective Jewish concerns.But whether one agrees with Yerushalmi or not, it is hard to deny that book introduced a new set of questions and concerns-in fact, an entirely new discourse-to field of Jewish studies and beyond. Indeed, keen interest in book evinced by figures such as Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, and A. B. Yehoshua, to mention but a few, attests to depth and breadth of its impact beyond precincts of Jewish history. To be sure, Yerushalmi's timmg was superb. His focus on question of collective coincided with a new wave of historical research (preeminently French) on idea of sites of memory (lieux de memoire), as well as a growing interest in nature and challenges of remembering and representing Holocaust. But it is Yerushalmi's bold formulation of antipodal relationship of collective and modern history that set in motion an ongoing intellectual conversation that has shaped and enriched Jewish studies-and humanistic inquiry more broadly. …