Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi Research Articles

The Lord of History in Cynthia Ozick’s “Ruth”

Abstract Cynthia Ozick has published widely on the categorization and definition of Jewish literature. This article reexamines her definition in “Toward a New Yiddish” in light of Ozick’s essay “Ruth,” published first in Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible (1987) and later in her essay collection Metaphor & Memory (1989). In “Ruth,” Ozick’s enigmatic definition of Jewish literature as carrying “the echo of the voice of the Lord of History” can be read as a transtemporal or Talmudic relationship with contradiction and paradox. Utilizing the Jewish approaches to time described in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor (1982) and Lynn Kaye’s Time in the Babylonian Talmud: Natural and Imagined Times in Jewish Law and Narrative (2018), this article examines how Ozick’s elliptical writing style underscores the Talmudic character of her writing. Moreover, “Ruth” exemplifies Ozick’s destabilization of linear time as she adopts the role of a modern-day rabbi who reinterprets ancient texts and illustrates how future readers might do the same.

Was There a Jerusalem School of Modern Jewish Politics? A Case Study in the Organization, Construction, Production, and Limits of Knowledge

This article examines how two central scholars based at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Jonathan Frankel, and Ezra Mendelsohn, conceived, created, and codified the academic sub-field of modern Jewish politics. The article begins by discussing studies by earlier historians of the Jews like Salo W. Baron, Shmuel Ettinger, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi whose work often touched upon the intersection between Jews and politics. While Mendelsohn and Frankel's research was based upon key concepts developed by these scholars, their focus on the centrality of Jewish agency, the role of the Jewish intelligentsia, and the turn to "the (Jewish) people" helped create a new scholarly framework for imagining, analyzing, and researching modern Jewish politics. Despite their many achievements, they both overlooked several important topics in modern Jewish history including the role of religion, the activities of Jewish women, the experiences of Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impact of Jewish politics on the Palestinians. By examining how these topics are dealt with in more recent works, the penultimate section in this article points to both the continuing influence of Mendelsohn and Frankel's scholarly paradigm as well as some of its inherent limits. In doing so, this analysis of modern Jewish politics makes for an intriguing case study regarding the organization, construction, and production of a particular field of knowledge while simultaneously raising critical questions regarding the very nature, limits, and future of Jewish studies.

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun

Reviewed by: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun Helene Sinnreich (bio) Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust By Natalia Aleksiun. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021. 329 pp. Natalia aleksiun's new monograph, conscious history: polish jewish Historians before the Holocaust, makes the compelling case that through an examination of the early historians of Polish Jewry, one gains an understanding of Jewish experience in the Second Polish Republic. According to Aleksiun, this is because not only were these scholars formed by the time in which they wrote and lived, but also that as scholar-activists they helped shape interwar Polish Jewry. Aleksiun begins and ends her analytical volume with storytelling, which wraps herself and contemporary scholars of Polish Jewry into the long history of Polish Jewish historians, which she canonizes in her important contribution to the field. She brings readers on a journey of the evolution of professional writing about the history of Polish Jews, starting with her chapter "Historical Beginnings," in which she provides a rich history of the scholars who preceded and influenced the post-World War I community of university-educated Jewish historians. This early group "embraced history as an important political and cultural tool for improving the status of the Jews and for strengthening communal self-awareness" (61). Aleksiun then introduces us in the aptly named chapter "The Making of Professional Polish Jewish Historians" to a new cohort of scholars, the main focus of the volume, whose university training led to their professional approach to the field of Polish Jewish history. They rejected Jewish apologetics and embraced "the creation of a national Jewish historiography in accordance with academic standards of critical scholarship" (63). As scholars in a freshly emerged state where nationalism helped forge the historical narrative being formed in Polish universities, these scholars created a place for Polish Jewry in the new national narratives. However, as Aleksiun informs, even as these academics saw themselves as part of the academic project of national history formation, their marginal status as Jews made placement in university positions difficult. This led these men to take positions in the public sphere and disseminate their conceptions of Polish Jewish history into the wider Jewish community. In their roles [End Page 206] as teachers, journalists, and religious leaders, they imbued those within their sphere of influence with their conception of collective Polish Jewish identity. They created curricula for Jewish schools; they discussed their conceptions of the history of Polish Jewry from the pages of newspapers and pulpits. As a result, these historians became extremely important in the formation of Jewish Polish identity in interwar Polish Jewish communities. As Aleksiun notes, Polish Jewish history, which was studied almost exclusively by Jews, ended up influencing those Jews and the members of their community. Aleksiun grapples with "the questions raised by historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, probing within the Polish context his idea that in modern times a secularizing and consciously Jewish intelligentsia takes on history-writing as a profoundly Jewish act" (11–12). These scholars became Jewish actors on their communities. Ultimately, however, it was these same Jewish historians equipped in university settings with the tools of professional historians who set to work to write the first histories of the Holocaust in Poland. In ghettos, in hiding, and in occupied cities, they compiled the documents utilized later to tell the story of their community's devastation. They composed the first narrative and analytical histories of Jewish experience during the Holocaust. Ultimately, many died during the war, but as Aleksiun informs in her "Epilogue," their work lives on as a deep influence on those writing on the Jews of Poland today. [End Page 207] Helene Sinnreich Helene Sinnreich is director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry. Sinnreich serves as the coeditor in chief of the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press) and was the founding editor of the Journal of Jewish Identities (Johns Hopkins University Press). Sinnreich obtained her PhD and MA from...

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred by François Soyer (review)

Reviewed by: Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred by François Soyer Claude B. Stuczynski François Soyer. Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xvi + 315 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942100026X Among the many myths spurred by the Covid-19 emergency is the false claim that Jews caused this pandemic to secretly dominate the world.1 Soyer's book confirms how often conspiracy theories entail a perception of Jews—whether openly professing or "hidden," through religious conversion or assimilation—as quintessential conspirators. Karl Popper has argued that conspiracy myths have proliferated since the French Revolution mostly because they offer simple nonreligious answers to complex realities in a secularized world. François Soyer's focus on earlier historical stages shows that conspiracy myths are indeed compatible with a belief in Divine Providence and with theodicy. In cases loaded with theological connotations, such as traditional anti-Jewish hatred, conspiracy myths reveal a dualistic perception of the world, understood as the arena of cosmological strife between the followers of light, good, and/or God and the agents of darkness, evil, and/or Satan. No wonder that Norman R. C. Cohn, a pioneering historian of anti-Jewish conspiracy myths in modern times, also studied the imprint of Christian eschatology and apocalyptic thought on medieval and early modern violence, and the origins of Europe's scapegoating obsessions, which led to witch-hunting.2 Soyer's book thus helps us understand Popper's explanation against the grain: less as an example of Weberian secularization as disenchantment of the world, and rather as a profane appropriation of the religious and the sacred. This implicitly political-theological perspective unifies those scholars who explicitly question the accuracy of the once-consensual periodization of premodern anti-Judaism, understood as theologically grounded, and of modern antisemitism, perceived as equivalent to pseudoscientific and nonreligious racism. [End Page 464] Perhaps Soyer's main contribution to the history of anti-Judaism in the West is precisely its focus. Late medieval and early modern Iberian anticonverso attitudes have already been treated by eminent historians such as Cecil Roth, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, and David Nirenberg, who identified astonishing analogies with later forms of racism and antisemitism.3 Soyer's contribution to this scholarship is twofold. First, he integrates early modern Iberian conspiracy myths with the better-known "purity of blood" exclusionary laws; second, he convincingly demonstrates that some of those old Iberian stories nurtured later Western myths. Oddly, the author makes no reference to Francisco de Quevedo's satiric episode The Monopantos' Island (La isla de los Monopantos), originally aimed against Count-Duke of Olivares's purported proconverso policies, as one of the probable indirect sources of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, via Hermann Goedsche's Biarritz (1868).4 According to Soyer, Jews and conversos were simply a means, and not the aim, in Quevedo's satirical fiction, which is why there is no single reference to The Monopantos' Island in later early modern Iberian antisemitic literature (82–83). At the same time, Soyer is fully aware of Quevedo's influence during Olivares's times; he identifies Quevedo's circulation of the belief in a converso and Jewish anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish conspiracy plan in a passage from his earlier pamphlet, Execración de los judíos (1633). In this vitriolic leaflet, Quevedo explicitly invoked "the correspondence between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople" to denounce Portuguese conversos as a dangerous fifth column in Iberia, although he expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of that epistolary exchange, as if anticipating sympathetic future readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.5 In chapter 2 (54–92) and in the epilogue (275–81), Soyer painstakingly probes the origins of these forged letters, which were initially used by Archbishop of Toledo Juan Martínez Silíceo (1477–1547) to support anticonverso exclusionary laws of "purity of blood." Soyer thus sheds light on the way these letters framed anticonverso conspiracy myths in early modern Iberia, and most surprisingly, on the fact that this spurious correspondence (along with a French variant) was still echoed in...

Writing and Risk: Gambles, Wagers, Speculations

What does it mean to take a risk when I write? Can I? Should I? The idea of risk has preoccupied a number of scholars recently, including those interested in discourse, writing and education (e.g. McWilliam 2009 and Thesen and Cooper 2014). This paper attempts to trace a concept of risk in academic writing, by asking questions about what “belongs” in academic texts and making use of bodies of knowledge that seem to be beyond the pale of academic discourse – magic, the occult, exorcisms. By thinking of risk as a side-effect of genres and traditions, I use the language of magic and the occult as a device to apprehend what academic reading cannot usually perceive, when there may be more in a text than academic reading can deal with. I draw examples from three inventive academic writers (Mary Scott, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Nick Sousanis) to think about the benefits and consequences of risk in academic writing, and the limits of what Karen Bennett (2007) calls English Academic Discourse (EAD). I argue for a kind of writing that might, in the words of Jacques Derrida, anticipate the future ‘in the form of an absolute danger’ (1997: 5).

Invisible Concealment of Invisibility Crypto-Judaism as a Theological Paradigm of Racial Anti-Semitism

The motif of secret, crypto-Judaism has a history that reaches further back into the theological tradition. It no doubt structurally arises from or closely related to the epistemo-political challenges posed by the unworldliness and absolutely inner being of faith, which in the political or inter-subjective dimension immediately raises the question of evidence. The question of evidence, i.e., for the invisible faith, becomes acute in the case of conversion, where the basic premise is the initial absence of faith. Paradoxically, conversion is consequently the establishment of the convert’s fundamental faithlessness, of her originally non-Christian element, which the convert, in the very same act of conversion, claims no longer exists. It is easy to see the conceptual constellation that would present the convert as structural deception. At the Iberian threshold of modernity, in the face of mass Jewish conversion and assimilation, this paradox appeared in the image of the “new Christians”, the marranos, structurally suspected to be crypto-Jews, to the effect that the ultimate evidence of faith was a certificate of limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood”. This paper will follow the historian Yosef HayimYerushalmi in tracing the conceptual link between the Inquisition’s notion of crypto-Jews and the racialized figure of the Jew in modern anti-Semitism.

From “Jewish Memory” to Jewish History

In his influential Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi analyzed brilliantly the transition in Jewish conceptions of Jewish history from premodern to modern times. The present paper discusses a number of alternative perspectives on this transition. Yerushalmi argued convincingly the importance of the traditional conception of Jewish history, which he labeled “Jewish memory,” for Jewish survival. This paper challenges the terminology, agrees with the role played by the traditional Jewish thinking in Jewish survival, and emphasizes the premodern circumstances that made the traditional thinking so vital and effective. With respect to modern conceptions of Jewish history, which Yerushalmi associates with Jewish history writing, this paper argues that an examination of the circumstances of modernity reveals the creativity of this altered view of the Jewish past and the ways in which it in turn has fostered Jewish survival in the face of radically new challenges.

Arnold Schoenberg’s Contribution to Pro Zion or Looking at Pre-Holocaust European Jewish History with its “Sideshadows”

Arnold Schoenberg’s Contribution to Pro Zion or Looking at Pre-Holocaust European Jewish History with its “Sideshadows” Klára Móricz (bio) In his book Language and Silence, George Steiner reads Kafka’s surrealist nightmares as foreshadows of horrors to come. Kafka, Steiner claims, was a prophet who “was possessed of a fearful premonition,” “saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering,” and “prophesized the actual form of that disaster of Western humanism which Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,” other perceptive prophets, “had seen like an uncertain blackness on the horizon.” Steiner asserts that: Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, which was understood by those who first heard the tale to be a monstrous dream, was to be the literal fate of millions of human beings. The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis were to designate the gassed. “In the Penal Colony” foreshadows not only the technology of the death factories, but that special paradox of the totalitarian regime—the subtle, obscene collaboration of victim and torturer. Nothing written on the inward roots of Nazism is comparable, in exact perception, to Kafka’s image of the tormentor plunging, suicidally, into the cogs of the torture-engine.1 Steiner admits that “Kafka’s nightmare-vision may well have derived from private hurt and neurosis,” but insists that it nevertheless proves “the great artist’s possession of antennae which reach beyond the rim of the present and make darkness visible.” To intensify the emotional effect of his point, Steiner adds: “Members of Kafka’s immediate family perished in the gas ovens; Milena and Miss Grete B. (who may have borne Kafka’s child) died in concentration camps.”2 Steiner thus turns literature into a sensitive device that can foreshadow the future. But was it Kafka’s fiction that foreshadowed the future, or Steiner’s post-Holocaust perspective that retroactively cast its shadow back on Kafka’s literary work? Steiner, like many post-Holocaust writers, deliberately blurs the boundaries between literary narrative and history in order to intensify the rhetorical effect. Literary scholar Michael André Bernstein called Steiner’s [End Page 61] technique “backshadowing,” a narrative device that, in Bernstein’s formulation, “endows the past with the coherence of an inevitable and linear unfolding.” According to Bernstein, backshadowing “works by a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come.”3 Backshadowing is not only a literary device—historical and literary narratives are frequently governed by the same underlying principles.4 As studies of historical narratives attest, backshadowing is often seen as an indispensable tool for organizing historical events into a logical story.5 The telling of European Jewish history, culminating in the Holocaust, is especially susceptible to backshadowing. As historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi declared, the image of the Holocaust is shaped “not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”6 Because of the trauma of the Holocaust, the pre-Holocaust past recreated in our historical imagination is full of the shadows of the horrific future that awaited European Jewry. Inadvertently, then, we construct a unified past for those forced to partake in a unified tragic future. But in our effort to keep the memory of the Holocaust and those who perished in it alive, do we not also eliminate parts of the past that do not fit neatly into the historical narrative culminating in the Holocaust? Should we not try to resist the rhetorically effective technique of backshadowing to reestablish what the literary scholar Gary Saul Morson calls the “sideshadows” of the past, the unrealized possibilities eradicated by what actually happened?7 In this essay I demonstrate the hazards of backshadowing by illuminating a sideshadow of the pre-Holocaust past through an episode in the life of Arnold Schoenberg, a composer whose life and work has been frequently interpreted through a lens shaped by the Holocaust.8 My aim here is not to revisit Schoenberg’s complicated relationship to his Jewish identity, or to repeat the oft-told story...

Derrida's Archive Fever: From Debt to Inheritance

This article reads Derrida's Archive Fever (1995) as a sustained reflection on the influence of psychoanalysis on deconstruction. It examines the text's deployment of two financial figures — debt and inheritance — as contrasting ways of coming to terms with the intellectual legacy of psychoanalysis. Derrida's reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses exposes the historian's reliance on a ‘classical’ concept of the archive as the depository of a self-identical past, a concept which underpins Yerushalmi's thesis of Freud's unpaid debt to Jewish culture. This conception gives rise to several aporias identified in Derrida's analysis of Yerushalmi's methodological procedure. A more positive and productive notion of inheritance characterizes Derrida's exploration of his own relationship to Freud, allowing him to move beyond the burden of a calculable indebtedness to the past towards an incalculable inheritance for the future. Deconstruction inherits from Freud's theoretical legacy (the ‘impression’ left by Freud on deconstruction), reaffirming and transforming psychoanalytic insights in its own account of our collective mal d'archive, our feverish desire both to preserve and destroy the archive.

The History of Race, the Race of History

Mitchell B. Hart, editor. and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880-1940. Tauber Institute for Study of European Jewry Series. Brandeis Library of Modern Thought. Waltham, Mass., Brandeis University Press, 2011. Pp. xxxix + 281.Iris Idelson-Shein. Difference of a Different Kind: Constructions of Race during Long Eighteenth Century. Cultures and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 267.Eliza Slavet. Racial Fever: Freud and Question. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 300.IT SEEMS ONLY RIGHT to oppose histoiy to race, to historicize where some had wanted to racialize. Was there -prior to twentieth - a more virulent form of negationism (as French would come to call it) than that which sought to confine entire populations to extracting history out of them, making them into stagnant or unchanging races, before erasing them from history altogether?It also seems right to point out that have not only been among the primary victims of racialist or racist thought (Idelson-Shein, p. 3) but that Jewish scholars and writers [have been] actively engaged in debates over histoiy and identity of Jews (Hart, p. xvii): have taken part in history of race and of racism. Indeed, juxtaposition of these terms (Jews, race, history) carries an aura of inevitability, even of necessity. Their entanglement is, at very least, such that we could hardly speak of one without recalling, wondering about, or considering others. We might argue, for example, that contribution to history is, if not quite writing of at least notion of a historical revelation, even emergence of historical con- sciousness.1 We could also signal, as Carlo Ginzburg has, the conception of historical truth that remains -and here I deliberately use an allembracing term - our own, thus pointing to central, and centrally ambivalent, place of in (Christian and modern) construction of history.2 From other end of that triune conceptual scheme, we might reflect on particular function of in emergence, and perdurance, of category of race, or role attributed to in invention of blood purity or racial superiority (the election-envy of master race, in Steven Spielberg's popular rendering, collapse of race and genealogy in Eliza Slavet's).3 We could mention Aryans and Semites - latter persisting in different circles from former - and think finally of other examples from nineteenth-century France, England, and Germany (as both Hart and Idelson-Shein document) or from contemporary Israel, whether with regard to the return to history, or to Mizrahi or Ethiopian Jews, or, obviously, with regard to Palestinians.4Jews, race, history. We, here, now (Hegel would translate). Whether meant to restore agency or to explore complexities of acculturation (or, more accurately I think, Christianization), studying evolving connections between these terms as Mitchell Hart has done for some time now, and as Eliza Slavet and Iris Idelson-Shein propose anew, is therefore more than commendable, it is unavoidable. The enduring rift between studies and race (or ethnic) studies would otherwise continue unabated. Still, there are difficulties. Let me call them, here and now, historical difficulties.First there is matter of relation of race thinking to history. If history is a counter to race (as Maurice Olender persuasively argued), it is because race first emerges as a counter to history.5 Modern historical consciousness, whether one traces it to Giambattista Vico or to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi dates his professional lineage as a historian to second decade of nineteenth century and to work of Jacques Basnage, a contemporary of Vico),6 7 is articulated against nonhistorical, savage, or arrested. …

“The Benevolent Self Was a Disgrace beyond Measure for Every Argentine Jew”: Between the Need to Remember and the Desire to Forget in Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases

Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots. One of them is the tragedy of the desaparecidos — the disappeared — that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing María Estela Martínez de Perón; until early 1981 Videla’s junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship. The other plot is the contradictory personal life of Kaddish Poznan, a Jew who, during the day, tries to keep alive the memory of his mother Favorita’s Argentine-Jewish past but at night works to destroy it by chiseling names off the gravestones of former members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, such as Favorita. Unlike Poznan, his wife Lillian, who has been laying a glass and a plate on the dinner table for her son Pato since his disappearance, refuses to acknowledge his death, In order to address the implications of this traumatic event in her life, I will resort to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). This article draws upon the significance of collective memory throughout Jewish history as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), explores the struggle between memory and forgetting, and ponders the dangers of forgetting — and erasing — the past and of transforming one’s identity.

Between Paradigm Shift Judaism and Neo-Hasidism

Between Paradigm Shift Judaism and Neo-Hasidism

Palestine and Sovereign Violence

Sacks’s essay offers a reading of Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to argue that it offers a critique of sovereign violence. Taking as a point of departure the hermeneutic and interpretive violence occasioned in Israel’s “Operation Pillars of Defense” in November 2012, and the statement offered by Israeli Minister Eli Yishai that “the goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years,” this article considers that violence in relation to the older European, philological legacies it receives and imparts. By considering and drawing upon the readings of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism pursued by Edward W. Said, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, and others, Sacks argues that Freud’s text both repeats and teaches us to place in question the categories that operate and render legible acts of sovereign violence in the institution of the colonial state.

Yerushalmi and the Conversos

In his work on Iberian Jews—openly practicing ones and conversos, on and off the peninsula, before 1492 and 1497 and after—Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi made few explicit methodological statements. But from his earliest work, he made his historiosophical commitments clear and rarely wavered from them. Those commitments included basic trust in inquisitorial sources, the investigation of both marginal and normative Jewish practices, interest in the history of mentalities, and, above all, a focus on the relationship between “immanent” and external causes in Jewish history. This article traces the influence of several mid-twentieth-century historians on Yerushalmi’s work and examines his place in twentieth-century debates on conversos and the Inquisition; it also discusses his relationship to microhistory and the problem of historical distance and perspective. The article concludes by considering the apparent contradiction between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on the agency and subjectivity of Jews and his trust in the records of an institution that some have characterized as pervasively anti-Jewish.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Royal Alliance, and Jewish Political Theory

This article examines Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s views of the realities and myths of the “royal alliance” in medieval and modern Jewish history as a seminal contribution to Jewish political history and theory as well as a revealing entree into his overall historiographical approach. Elaborating the ideas of his teacher Salo Baron and drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s insights into the relationship between Jews and modern states, Yerushalmi ultimately used his own understanding of Jewish political experience to argue against her indictment of wartime Jewish leaders. For Yerushalmi, Jews’ awareness of their tendencies to forge vertical alliances with the highest authorities served to fortify and console them; he considered these perceptions generally realistic and, though at times tragically blinding, still ultimately anchored in historical experience. This essay situates the royal alliance within Yerushalmi’s broader conceptions of Jewish community, political agency, and domicile as diasporic survival strategies. It also views this concept as part of his post-Holocaust commitment to chart the paradoxes of Jewish hope and to regenerate Jewish hope, both collective and individual. Yerushalmi is often celebrated as a pioneering thinker who contrasted modern critical historiography to traditional collective memory and who explored the individual, existential, psychological, and skeptical dimensions of modern Jewish identity. Yet, this essay suggests, a traditionalist strain may be heard in his profound identification with the Jewish people and his deriving hope from their political and historical experience—in both its continuities and its ruptures.

Introduction

With the death of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in December 2009, the world of Jewish studies lost one of its most distinguished practitioners. Yerushalmi undertook pathbreaking research in a number of different fields of Jewish history that reflected the breadth of his erudition. This issue of Jewish History explores several key branches of Yerushalmi’s scholarly labor including his study of conversos and his ongoing interest in the “royal alliances” of the Jews. It also explores Yerushalmi’s reputation beyond the United States, focusing in particular on France and Germany, where he achieved wide renown in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yerushalmi in a French Key: (French) History and (French) Memory

This article explores the reception of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in France in light of the many and diverse reactions his books and lectures engendered at major conferences and meetings. It describes how the American scholar became one of the leading figures among French intellectuals after the first translation of his book Zakhor in 1984 and his first lecture at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1987, which resulted in a series of annual lectures over the next ten years. Following the readings of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Francois Furet, among other intellectuals, the eminent standing achieved by Yerushalmi coincided with a special “moment.” At a time when doubt was cast on the testimonies of living witnesses and when the words of Holocaust deniers and of members of the French Resistance were treated on equal terms, the politics of memory challenged the status of history and historians. This paper aims to recover the atmosphere of these past decades and to elucidate how Yerushalmi’s name has become inseparable from the issues linked with the debates about history and memory.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Historian of German Jewry

This article draws attention to a rarely considered dimension of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s scholarship and teaching, namely, his engagement with the history of German Jewry. It examines the manner in which Yerushalmi approached this subject—generally through the twin poles of antisemitism and Wissenschaft des Judentums—and suggests that analyzing it with reference to the Arendtian categories of “pariah” and “parvenu” provides us with a key to unlocking some of the motivations that drove Yerushalmi’s particular interests. The article concludes with some speculation as to why, by contrast, Yerushalmi seemed to avoid the history of Eastern European Jewry, in spite of his oft-repeated pride in and intimacy with his own personal heritage.

Yerushalmi’s Germany

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi came late to Germany, but he developed a close, almost intimate relationship to it during the last fifteen years of his life. After staying in Munich for a year in 1996–97 he returned regularly. He was able to enjoy the positive responses to German translations of his works and met colleagues who engaged with his ideas. It was here that his first collection of essays appeared, and some of his publications, such as his contribution to the debate on Jewish historiography at a Schloss Elmau conference, appeared only in German. His fascination with German society was founded in his admiration for German culture and language and for such diverse figures as Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, as well as in his attempt to understand more deeply the causes of the Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Genocide and the Terror of History

The Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson initiated the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in 1998 after visiting a Nazi concentration camp and...