Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (review)

Abstract

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 253 pp. $29.95. Ever since he wrote his dissertation under Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, author of Zakhor, a meditation on Jewish history and historians, historian David N. Myers has been intrigued by this subject and tensions between modern history and its methodology (historicism) and faith. During nineteenth century, these tensions escalated as scientific study of past threatened to reduce historical to individual units linked in causal relationships that transformed human history into a long, undulating but ultimately chartable current...[rather than] a vast Divine terrain whose design eludes full human comprehension (p. 5). As Myers' book amply demonstrates, reactions to this reduction from super-naturalism to naturalism were swift. Though by no means limited to Jewish philosophers and theologians, this book focuses on German-Jewish thinkers who sought to reverse what they considered corrosive effects of historicism on modern life in general but in particular. Myers limits his study to late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany (1870-1933), a complex, dynamic milieu alive with articulate debates on what German Protestant historian Ernst Troeltsch called Crisis of Historicism. Myers' 1995 publication, Reinventing Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and Zionist Return to History, was dedicated to founders of Institute of Jewish Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a group of German Jews who after leaving Germany applied their historicist training and expertise to the nurture of a new Zionist collective memory rooted in soul of ancestral Jewish homeland (p. 6). Resisting History, its counterpart, explores German-Jewish anti-historicism, which has not yet received sustained scholarly attention. Together, lives of four German-Jewish scholars whose and/or objections to historicism Myers chose to examine span entire period of 1870-1933 and reflect its major spiritual, social, political, and intellectual currents, which together with each man's personal beliefs and experiences inform their anti-historicist positions. Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Professor of Philosophy in Marburg, launched his anti-historicist critique to reestablish primacy of philosophy, the science of reason, over history in hierarchy of liberal arts. His to Judaism in 1880 culminated in a vision of modern beyond grasp of historicism. Concluding that and his beloved neo-Kantian philosophy are both rational systems devoted to advancement of ethics, he constructed a grand ethical lineage of Judeo-German spirit over and through time, beginning with prophets and including Plato and Martin Luther as well as his most admired philosophers, Moses Maimonides and Immanuel Kant. His student Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) started out as a historian in historicist tradition of his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke but eventually also became intent on overthrowing reign of history in German-Jewish thought (p. 81). Myers places him into context of theological anti-historicism rather than philosophical anti-historicism epitomized by Rosenzweig's contemporary Martin Heidegger. Like Cohen, Rosenzweig had strong ties to Protestantism. Yet his radical return (teshuvah) to in midst of contemplating conversion did not produce an ecumenical theology akin to Cohen's, for he came to regard as separate from all other religions and Jewish people as existing outside normal flow of events (p. …