Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought by David N. Myers (review)

Abstract

264 Max Weber Studies single reference to the relevant literature. A full delineation of Schluchter's points of view therefore awaits the publication of his larger study. The book's second part is shorter and has a different flavour to it. Here the reader finds ample references to present scholarly discussions, and each essay includes frank observations concerning current socio-political conditions and developments. Two essays deal with German political and cultural topics, namely, half-baked institutional attempts at what is commonly referred to as the 'Ameri canization' of Germany's university system ('Europeanization' might be a more apt characterization) and on the socio-politico transformation of eastern parts of Germany after unification. While these topics might be of somewhat lesser interest to his non-German audience, Schluchter also takes on global issues. One chapter deals with the well-trodden topic of Samuel Huntington's (in)famous argument of confrontation between civilizations on the basis of fundamental religious dif ferences, which Schluchter criticizes on the basis of insights gained from Weber's sociology of religion. Another chapter addresses values and value judgments in Weber's depiction of Western rationalism, reflecting a point of view held by Weber that Schluchter, unlike James Blaut in a recent book, characterizes as heuristically but not normatively Eurocentric. In all, the book continues the trend in Schluchter's more recent writings, to use a familiar term, to a fragmented oeuvre that does not evince the cohesive ness (and heft) characteristic of his earlier studies translated into English. Still, even if Schluchter's essays, at least in some parts, make for extraordinarily difficult reading—particularly, I should add, for readers whose native language is not Ger man — they still, also at least in parts, constitute Weberian analytic studies at their very best. Lutz Kaelber University of Vermont David N. Myers, Resisting History. Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jew ish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003), pp. xi + 253. ISBN 0-69111-593-1. £22.50 (hbk). Professional historians do not generally spend a lot of time thinking about pro found critiques of their endeavour. Unlike the more reflexively oriented social sci ences, history as a discipline is nowadays, for the most part, unreflectively secure in its status and indispensability. However, as David Myers reminds us in this pithy, closely-argued and stimulating book, this has not always been the case. If historical analysis is one of the key hallmarks of modernity, then unease with 'historicism'—a totalizing term itself redolent of critique—has been a central strand of resistance to the apparent threat to transcendental beliefs and commitments posed by the relent less contextualism of history. This sentiment, Myers argues, reached a crescendo in the years of upheaval during and after the First World War, and particularly amidst the febrile uncertainty of Weimar Germany, diagnosed by Ernst Troelsch in 1922 as experiencing a 'crisis of historicism'. For Christians, angst over historicism has focused on the need to articulate a response to the figure of the 'historical Jesus', read against the context of first-century Palestine. Myers' attention, however, is focused not on Christians but on German© Max Weber Studies 2008. Book Reviews 265 Jews, for whom the stakes of historicism were particularly high. Prior to the process of 'Jewish Emancipation' unleashed by the French Revolution, no people were imag ined to be more utterly outside history than the Jews. Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire routinely conflated the biblical Hebrews with the Jews of the eighteenth century, while Vico, widely regarded as an early anticipator of nineteenth-century historicism, in his New Science (1725) sharply sealed off Jewish (or 'sacred') history from his sweeping theorization of historical development. The transformations of the early nineteenth century catapulted western European Jews into history, and inaugurated a new Jewish tradition of secular study of the Jewish past. For the early nineteenth-century German-Jewish scholars of Wissenschaft des Judenthums, and their intellectual successors such as Heinrich Graetz, the contextual study of Jewish history served to assert the intellectual rigour of their subject of study, and also to seal the incorporation of Jews both past and present into the intellectual ambit of modernity. What, though, did this turn to...