The Great War and Jewish Memory

Abstract

The impact of the 1914–1918 conflict was so great as to constitute a crisis in Jewish life and thought. One important outcome of this crisis was the collision of history and memory as languages through which Jews ascribed meaning to the violence of the First World War. Consequently, the celebrated distinction between history and memory, advanced by Yerushalmi thirty years ago, is in need of revision. Surveying the centripetal and the centrifugal effects of war on the Jewish world in Europe, Palestine and North America, alongside the efflorescence of Jewish philanthropy, this article shows how, already during the war and in its immediate aftermath, writers and scholars, among them Ansky and Dubnow, created an amalgam of history and memory in their reflections on the upheaval of war. I have termed this practice 'historical remembrance'.