Part One: Just Like Everyone Else, Only More So

Hard science deals with facts: it explains and successfully manipulates the physical universe. Its empirical successes attest to the validity of its truth-claims, and to the proximity (or identity) of its laws to and with Reality.

Hard science is to facts as philosophy is to truth. Like its empirically oriented sister, philosophy identifies what things really are (their essence) and how we truly know them (our epistemological foundations). Together, science and philosophy reveal the truths of the physical and the metaphysical universe.

Writing the two preceding paragraphs just gave me the same guilty pleasure that I get when listening to classic soft-rock. Indeed, they are its intellectual equivalent. I had gotten through high school and even through college operating with these assumptions. Graduate school, in the mid-70s, hit hard. I read Kuhn. I read Wittgenstein. I watched friends in departments of English and in comparative literature spinning around as they encountered Derrida, de Man, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes. We all read cultural anthropology. The old definitions dissolved. The view from nowhere, whether scientific or philosophical, vanished. Only a welter of perspectives remained.

Thirty years later, intellectually swamped as we are by the late twentieth century's fervid overproduction of interpretive theories, a 1970s deconstructionist almost looks like a Litvak rabbi. No question of meaning can appear without its de rigueur enclitic: "to whom?" Those disciplines that stand in what used to be the territory overlapped by both "hard" sciences and philosophy—medicine, say, or history—find themselves in a period of extreme improvisation. Ivy League faculties and even so-called health care providers, for example, have acknowledged acupuncture and chiropraxis. If as seemingly empirical a discipline as medicine is so affected by postmodernism, a hybrid discipline like history, at once empirical and literary, can be no less so. And indeed, forswearing the aesthetic satisfactions of the grand récit, more and more historians, their way paved by sixty years of Annales, have turned from the great men/great ideas genre of history writing to recover, in much more exiguous evidence, the humbler details of the quotidian. Our scope seems smaller, our conclusions more tentative, our self-consciousness acute. We speak of the past while thinking with terms like "hybridity," "indeterminacy," "construct." Things aren't what they used to be.

And yet, in a way, they are. What historian does not still use the concept "fact," the adjective "true"? Who does not routinely decide between good history and bad, between honest and dishonest descriptions of the past? Who thinks that sequence does not matter for causality, or chronology for explanation? Who has abandoned the distinction between primary and secondary sources? Between primary and secondary languages? Between description and analysis? What may be one historian's guilty secret, true, may be another's common sense: it depends on the company you keep. Yet we can still speak with each other. We can still identify what we do as "historical thinking." And we still do the best we can to train graduate students to carry the discipline into the future. Given the prevailing cultural climate, perhaps the coherence of the field must remain deeply closeted for now. In the meantime, our intellectual confusions—foregrounded, disorienting, multivocal—are also extremely fruitful.

Whatever its vices, then, our particular historical moment also has its virtues. And these virtues are on rich display in David Biale's sprawling, exciting survey, Cultures of the Jews. Ringleblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis, Biale has gathered a stellar international group of scholars around the grand theme of Jewish cultural history, from its biblical birth to its twentieth-century avatars. The topics of the individual essays are as multiple as the methods employed by their various authors—given the ambitious scope of this volume, it could hardly be otherwise. Some readers will savor the more social-historical chapters, others the more literary ones, others the more biographical ones: no single style prevails. The tastes of many different intellectual palates will find...