Writing Jewish History after the Holocaust

Abstract

Writing Jewish History after the Holocaust Richard I. Cohen David Engel . Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 314. I. Amid the tremendous outpouring of Jewish historical studies in recent years, several works have appeared that contest the character, direction, and the very writing of Jewish history today.1 These books embark on different approaches and do not share many assumptions, but they all urge historians of the Jews in the modern period (though not exclusively) to take stock of their work and rethink its very foundations. Such is the case with David Engel's challenging book, whose premise is that modern historians (especially) must find a way to conceptually incorporate one of the central events of all of Jewish history—the Holocaust—into their studies. Such an approach, he maintains, will enrich both our understanding of Jewish history and the Holocaust. Engel contends that the Jewish historiography now being produced in its two most [End Page 96] important centers, the United States and Israel, has disengaged the study of modern Jewish history from the study of the Holocaust. He uses very strong language to depict the existing barrier between these fields: "The wall separating study of the Holocaust from study of all other aspects of the Jewish past" (p. 23); "historians of the Jews continue by and large to sequester the Holocaust not only rhetorically but in practice" (p. 27); "historians of the Jews have raised the demand to insulate themselves from the Holocaust's influence to the level of a vital principle from which deviation is to be condemned" (ibid.). He also asserts that the "Jewish historiographical school . . . has directed scholarly attention away from past suffering" (pp. 45-46). In other words, scholars of Jewish history have chosen to move "the Holocaust to the margins of their professional concern instead of the center" (p. 68) and basically to remove its presence from Jewish historical consciousness. Engel adroitly demonstrates how this approach developed among Jewish historians in both countries. His analysis is based on an original inquiry into some of the seminal works by significant Jewish historians of the twentieth century—led by Salo Baron in the United States and Ben Zion Dinur in Israel—and how their work was interpreted and pursued by later historians. Engel calls on contemporary historians to take cognizance of the flawed assumptions behind their work and urges them to develop new paradigms that will make the history of the Holocaust a cornerstone of their perspective on Jewish history. His plea recalls, in some ways, the dramatic and poetic entreaty made by the Israeli Marxist historian Raphael Mahler in 1952: The tragic blood lesson and the vision of the beginning of redemption that descended together at the same primordial time, must direct us to a new perspective on the scope of the entire Jewish history throughout the entire period of the Diaspora and especially on the history of our people in the modern period. What has changed and what has been renewed in the problematic of Jewish history in the nineteenth century, one hundred years of Emancipation, when seen from the hellish fire of the Nazi destructive ovens on the side, and from the other side from the pillar of dawn that cracks open and rises up, the dawn of a free people on the land of its forefathers.2 Mahler's call for a reorientation in the writing of Jewish history from two foci—the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel—is [End Page 97] not embraced by Engel, who does not argue for a reorientation of Jewish historiography to give expression to the founding of Israel. Nor did he consider whether the establishment of Israel has, like the Holocaust, been fenced off from the writing of Jewish history and removed from the consciousness of its authors.3 In two lengthy chapters, nearly half the book, Engel lays out what he regards as the prevailing attitude in the United States and Israel on the detachment of pre-Holocaust Jewish history from the history of the Holocaust. The first chapter is devoted to scholars in the...