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  • Part Two:Vision and Realization
  • David Malkiel (bio)

While there is no scarcity of surveys of Jewish history, David Biale was convinced that the time had come for a fresh treatment of the subject. In his introduction to Cultures of the Jews: A New History, Biale offers a thorough explication of the book's raison d'être, to which he alludes in both the title and subtitle. The following essay explores the goals defined by Biale and then analyzes their fulfillment in the section devoted to the premodern era (pp. 305–722). A global overview of this section leaves the reader with no doubt that this was an age of immense cultural treasures, and that even under sometimes trying conditions, Jews everywhere engaged their religious and cultural heritage with verve and creativity, for which their heirs are immeasurably richer.

Seven distinguished scholars write on the medieval and early modern periods, each offering opulent and textured portraits of the Jewish cultures of various important centers. For a volume of discrete essays, this one is remarkable for its literary and thematic cohesion, for which both editor and authors deserve the reader's commendation and thanks. The chapters are rich in information, but also thoughtful and imaginative, with an element of reflection that allows the reader to ponder and digest before moving on to the next idea or image. The writing is fluent and elegant and adds to the aesthetic value of the volume, already enhanced by the generous number of illustrations, about five per chapter.

Vision

By subtitling the volume A New History, Biale invites the question: What is new here? In the preface Biale presents his approach to Jewish cultural history, one that replaces the notion of a single, monolithic, and normative "Judaism" or "Jewish culture" with the kaleidoscopic image of Jewish cultures in a state of perpetual ferment and evolution. The catalyst of this process, in Biale's view, is interaction with neighboring cultures, and [End Page 131] it has ever been so, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day America. Biale explains that, rather than swallow non-Jewish norms and values en bloc, the Jews borrowed selectively, which forced them continually to define what in their own heritage was particularly Jewish.

This approach to Jewish culture is unabashedly polemical. Biale explicitly sets out to debunk the "popular conception of rabbinic Judaism flourishing in splendid isolation from its Greco-Roman surroundings" (p. xix), and he applies this ideological message to all historical contexts, as in the following statement: "Even those Jewish cultures thought to be the most insular adapted ideas and practices from their surroundings" (p. xx).

On the theme of exile and homeland, Biale argues that here, too, the historical record does not correspond to the "hegemonic" and uniform myth offered in previous historical narratives, particularly Zionist ones. He observes that while Jews traditionally expressed a one-way yearning for the Land of Israel, from the Bible to the present the reality has been a perpetual cycle of yearning, returning, and departing.

Another innovative aspect of this volume concerns the term "culture." Instead of limiting it to the culture of texts created by and for adult males, Biale posits a culture produced by the broad spectrum of Jewish society, including women and the uneducated, and consisting of visual images and material objects as well as texts. The reclamation of space on the stage of Jewish history for other media and players is another way in which Biale establishes a more all-embracing vision of Jewish culture than that presumed and portrayed in earlier Jewish histories.

Biale presents his volume as a replacement for the time-honored works of Louis Finkelstein and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson (pp. xxix-xxx). Clearly this is the significance of the word "history" in the subtitle. I question the aptness of the comparison. Ben-Zion Dinur seems to exemplify the hegemonic approach to Jewish history that Biale sweeps away, particularly in his Zionist orientation, but Ben-Sasson was respectful and admiring in his treatment of the Diaspora Jewish culture of the Middle Ages. Moreover, he insisted that historians must come to grips with the mindset of a given period, rather than judge it with their own...

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