Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (review)

It may be unusual to begin a review with a quote from the book’s conclusion, but when the work is about memory, as Dean Bell’s new book, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community, is, it seems appropriate to start at the end and look backwards. Bell concludes this thoughtful meditation on Jewish history and memory with the following: “Early modern German Jews thought about and distinguished the past in more complex ways than historians have been willing to believe. They chose from remnants of the past, deciding which customs, rules, and community structures were relevant or obsolete. They engaged the past in their efforts to explain the present and to improve themselves” (p. 153).

One of the pleasures of Bell’s work is that he has in a concise and persuasive way demonstrated precisely what he claims. From the first chapter to the last, this book is a well organized, clearly articulated analysis of the historiography and history of Jewish identity and memory in early modern Germany. This is no small task. In his first chapter, Bell reviews the historiography of memory and its relationship to the telling of history in general, and more specifically, in the context of early modern Jewish identity. Dealing with a much contested subject that has led to heated debates regarding the best way to differentiate between memory and history, Bell ably negotiates the various arguments, beginning with a careful analysis of Maurice Halbwach’s now classic study, The Collective Memory. As Bell notes, Halbwach’s “pioneering concepts” have raised questions as well as the “ire of some scholars who prefer less rigid oppositions” (p. 1). Wisely, there is no attempt here to synthesize the various schools of thought, and in chapter two Bell even locates Jewish memory and history within these schools in order to analyze how chroniclers, writers of memorybooks, diarists, and biographers conceptualized and created their Jewish identity as they engaged with the past, the argument being that these narrators had increasingly sophisticated ideas about history and its many uses vis-à-vis power, authority, community, and collective memory. “Along the way,” Bell notes, “it should be clear that early modern German Jewry was multidimensional and complex; it was hardly monolithic, static, or purely religious” (p. 35).

Chapters Three and Four explore the demographics, organization, and governance of Jewish communities through the customs books, memorybooks, and memoirs in Germany. Examples of these include Joseph Juspa Hahn of Nördlingen’s Sefer Yosef Ometz, a customs book for Frankfurt am Main; the memorybook of the community of Pfersee; and perhaps the most famous of all, the memoir of Glückel of Hameln. These are just three of the many works that Bell examines to point to the variety of methods Jews used not only to narrate the past, but to explain relationships of power, to memorialize the dead, and to legitimize social and political authority. One could wish for a more comprehensive history of Jewish life in these chapters, but it is a small point, especially considering that Bell offers just that in his most recent work, Jews in the Early Modern World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

Chapters Five and Six of Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany assess Jewish identity in the context of politics, the Reformation, and Jewish/Christian relationships. In these final chapters Bell’s real interest is apparent as he explores Jewish confrontations with and mediation of the Reformation and its consequences. While he rejects the idea that German Jewish engagement with the past was simple, or that early modern Jewry was “simply stagnant and helpless, marching on through the Middle Ages and awaiting, in almost breathless anticipation, the birth pangs of modernity” (p. 154), these final chapters are in some ways quite elegiac. They recount through myth and legend, through real and imagined experiences, the effects of the Reformation on German Jewish communities. These chapters work as well as they do largely because...