Memory Matters: Reading Collective Memory in Contemporary Jewish Culture

REVIEW ESSAYS Memory Matters: Reading Collective Memory in Contemporary Jewish Culture History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler . . . . Reality is not in the present but between the past and the future.1 Yael Zerubavel. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and tfte Making ofIsraeli National Tradition. Chicago and London, 1995, 340 pp. How does a society remember its past? How does it negotiate between what are often competing encounters with history and myth, inscribing "collective memory" and establishing tradition within (or even without) a nationalist discourse ? How do Jews, in particular, understand and define themselves, and their communities, in light of recent and ancient history? How, in short, do we find our way, amid the rubble of the past, to our present reality? In recent years, there has been a virtual explosion of academic research into the issue of collective or cultural memory, but while such discussions are currently fashionable across several disciplinary lines in the human sciences, a more thorough analysis of the development of the concept, its particular crystallizations and constructions, and its broader relevance has been lacking. One recent article, "Collective Memory—What Is It?" by Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, attempts to address this lack by considering the utility and validity of the term in historical discourse (noting as well its "complementary counterpart 'narrative'"),2 chiding the "memoriologists" for treating memory as if it were a living entity and for reifying in the collective what only applies to the individual. For Gedi and Elam, "collective memory" can function only as metaphor, code for the thing (which is not) that stands behind the myths, traditions, customs, and so on of a given society. Thus, they critique the classic work of Maurice Halbwachs on the subject, arguing that for him, "'collective memory' has become the allpervading concept which in effect stands for all sorts of human cognitive products generally."3 This is the pure form of the criticism they level at most contemporary users of the term, which is read as a catchall conglomeration of cognitive processes concerned with the meaning of the past in the present that has insinuated itself too far into an academy that should know better, an academy that suffers deterioration and disintegration as the result of the term's prominence. PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 67-34 O 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 68REVIEW ESSAYS But the authors overstate their case. In their zeal to save history from the threat of memory, they do both a disservice: history becomes some absolute narrative of the "real," while memory a false and contingent narrative more akin to "stereotype" and "myth," both taken in a negative sense. While they rightly criticize Halbwachs's avoidance of the individual, personal (and therefore, "real") dimension of memory, and his overemphasis on the "collective," they too easily separate the individual from the collective, history from memory. Gedi and Elam therefore overvalue individual cognition, failing to see the noncognitive, symbolic levels of memorialization. In truth, as the Jewish ethnographer and critical theorist Jonathan Boyarín has observed, memory lies somewhere between the individual and the collective: Memory cannot be strictly individual, inasmuch as it is symbolic and hence intersubjective. Nor can it be literally collective, since it is not superorganic but embodied. . . . What we are faced with—what we are living—is the constitution of both group "membership" and individual "identity" out of a dynamically chosen selection of memories, and the constant reshaping, reinvention, and reinforcement of those memories as members contest and create the boundaries and links among themselves.4 It would have been beneficial for Gedi and Elam to have paid more attention to this dynamic sense of memorialization as it is lived and constantly renegotiated. Such memorial "reinvention" is perhaps a main function of "myth" in society, but for these authors, myth is wholly negative and unreal; to them, it is a developmental stage that contemporary, historically conscious humans have outgrown. But myths are real. As narratives ofwhat "was" in the past (ancient or recent, fabulous or historical) and of how the "present" came to be, myths, in all their variety, effectively...