The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors

Abstract

THE STUDY OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY has had a growing appeal for contemporary scholars. Following Maurice Halbwachs's seminal work, which distinguished group memory from both historical and autobiographical memory,3 an expanding body of research has been devoted to the social and political dimensions of commemoration.4 Students of collective memory have shifted their attention from the historian's traditional preoccupation with the reconstruction of the past to explorations of how the past is actually remembered and understood by members of a certain group. With the growing interest in collective memory as a field of inquiry, the notion that group memory is a vanishing form of knowledge has often been advanced in theoretical discussions of the subject. Indeed, Halbwachs himself maintains that with the decline of tradition in modern society, history has emerged as the primary mode of knowledge of the past, taking the place of group memory. Depicting history and memory as two polar representations of the past, Halbwachs sees the scrutiny of historical records as an essentially superorganic science, detached from the pressures of immediate sociopolitical reality, while he regards collective memory as an organic part of social life, a continuously transforming body of knowledge that is being reshaped according to society's changing needs.5