Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (review)

"Angelus Novus"

Walter Benjamin famously criticized the German historicist tradition for counting time like "beads on a rosary." A charged little simile, it captures Benjamin's distaste both for the mechanistic thinking of positivist Marxism and for the whiggish, reformist politics of his Social Democratic Weimar-era contemporaries. And it grafts this criticism onto a polemic against Christianity. All of these movements, Benjamin claimed, share a triumphalist model of time: they seek an illicit warrant for past suffering by theorizing the future as merely perfecting how things already are. They are all, in Benjamin's eyes, types of historicism.

As David Myers demonstrates in his elegant survey of the topic, Benjamin's anxieties about historicism were part of a much broader tradition of "anti-historicist" polemic in German-Jewish thought. This tradition was as rich and complex, Myers shows, as that of German historicism itself. It is surprising, then, that no one until now has tried to chart the unifying patterns of this diverse intellectual sensibility. The more familiar story of how Jewish communal "memory" yielded to linear "history" has been well documented, thanks chiefly to the seminal work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (who was, incidentally, Myers's teacher). Talmudic culture wreaks playful havoc with history, indulging in constant anachronism and dialogues across the generations. And Maimonides famously referred to history as bizbuz zeman—a waste of time (Perush ha-mishnah, Sanhedrin, 10).

Beginning in the Renaissance, however, Jewish scholars such as Azariah de Rossi and David Gans embraced the nascent historical perspective. Initially, perhaps, they did so with reluctance, some of them seeming to sense that attention to context and historical difference jeopardized the idea that the Jews were the recipients of a timeless revelation. But Spinoza's withering critique of the Bible as merely a historical and, therefore, he claimed, now-defunct repository of political legislation did not obstruct the rise of the historical attitude in Jewish thought. Mendelssohn himself was relatively indifferent to history. And Kant, who held to a progressivist vision of history, criticized Mendelssohn's view of profane history as "abderitic" or up-and-down, without philosophical insight. But Maskilim such as S. Y. Rapoport endorsed contextualizing methods and thus helped clear the way for the flourishing school of Jewish historical scholarship, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, which fully embraced the reigning historical attitude of the nineteenth century. As Myers explains, by the end of the Wilhelmine age, German Jewish culture at large was deeply "historicist." Most German Jews believed that an understanding of history was a prerequisite not only for Jewish scholarship but for Jewish self-understanding as such. Liberal and orthodox seminaries in Breslau and Berlin trained their rabbis in history, while Ludwig Philippson's widely read Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (founded in 1837) took the historical perspective so much for granted that in 1887 an anonymous critic observed that "the history of the Allgemeine Zeitung is essentially the history of [German] Jews in the last half-century."

One of Myers's strongest arguments is that we can best understand German Jewish culture when we see its fashions within the context of German culture broadly construed. German Jewish "historicism," he explains, was part of the larger vogue for historical thinking in nineteenth-century Germany: From Hegel and Ranke down to Dilthey and Meinecke, the great luminaries of German thought after the Aufklärung embraced some version of historical reason. Of course, there were exceptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, dissenting as usual from German fashion, criticized this excess of historical thinking in "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life." Although he called it one of his "untimely" meditations, Nietzsche was here as in so many things a harbinger of things to come. By the end of the nineteenth century, this overwhelmingly "historicist" culture began to spawn discontent. A small but growing chorus of German as well as...