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3. Recovering Jewish History in the Age of Emancipation and Reform
- University of Wisconsin Press
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3 Recovering Jewish History in the Age of Emancipation and Reform Aside from Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten, Jewish historians had produced few valuable essays that reflected the formulation of an ambitious program. With the exception of Jost and Zunz, only a small number of former Verein members continued along the path of Wissenschaft. Its association with religious reform and the battle over emancipation further contributed to its importance and energy. Yet the very quality that allowed Jewish historiography to blossom made it increasingly divisive and hindered efforts to find an institutional home for it outside of the German universities. Moreover, its conflicting nature obstructed attempts to garner a wide-ranging readership. Far from presenting the dominant discourse during this period, the study of the Jewish past still had to vindicate its primary role within the intellectual culture of German Jewry. Yet with Wissenschaft’s ascendancy, it confronted criticism for its lack of impact upon the wider Jewish society. Despite this nascent condemnation and the emerging ideological differences, Jewish historians continued to regard Wissenschaft as a tool in the hands of the intellectual elite and not an educational force. In this respect, it functioned as “historische Aufklärung” (enlightenment through history) with 35 the purpose of elucidating Judaism’s true essence and countering its biased representation in the German public. It was only during the late 1830s and 1840s that the first efforts to popularize Jewish history were made in the form of textbook histories. Simultaneously, Heinrich Heine and Ludwig and Phöbus Philippson had been dismayed by the lack of impact the scholarly representation of Jewish history had had on Jewish education and proposed poetic treatments instead. For most of the historians, historical scholarship continued to be seen as the supreme instrument in the fight for emancipation and internal reform . As Zunz stated in 1832, “the neglect of Jewish science is intricately bound up with the Jews’ civic degradation.” The linkage of emancipation and reform also formed the cornerstones of his first comprehensive analysis of Jewish liturgy. The study was sandwiched between a call for emancipation in the first chapter, which was censored out of the first edition , and an appeal for internal reform in the last chapter.1 In line with this self-understanding, Zunz and Jost engaged in elaborate public defenses of the Jews in the face of Luigi Chiarini’s slandering of the Talmud .2 When the Prussian government attempted to ban Jews from acquiring non-Jewish names, the Berlin community commissioned Zunz to write a treatise that would counter this prohibition in exchange for 100 thaler.3 Zunz’s Die Namen der Juden (The names of the Jews) amply illustrated that Jews in the past had had names like Jason, Abu-Hassan, Fischlin, and Esperanza.4 Similarly, in 1840, the community leaders of Berlin asked Zunz to write about the notorious blood-libel accusation in Damascus, which quickly became an issue that was debated in the European press.5 Strung together, emancipation and internal reform nevertheless produced the opposing dynamics of discontinuity and development. In respect to the debate over emancipation, Jewish participants pointed to advances and discontinuities between premodern and contemporary Jewry.6 Jost made this point clear when in defense of emancipation he wrote, “all of us who were still in our childhood thirty years ago are witnesses to unbelievable transformations. . . . We have wandered, or better , flown through a thousand-year history!”7 If Jost understood the last few decades as the equivalent of a thousand years, he simply underscored the advancements and discontinuity in light of the accelerated process of social, cultural, and religious transformation. From the 1840s on, however, Jewish historians more strongly grounded current Judaism in the past. Whereas Jost’s scholarship presented a program to overcome elements of the Jewish past that were mainly associated with the 36 historicizing judaism [3.137.178.133] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:22 GMT) dark ages of Ashkenazic Jewry and to return Jewish society to its biblical state, other Jewish historians increasingly reintegrated the premodern period into their conceptions of Judaism’s development. Instead of discontinuity, they emphasized change and progress and highlighted the particularistic aspects of Judaism. Zunz’s study presented an elaborate attempt to come to terms with the question of development and continuity and to legitimize the modern sermon in the vernacular. In his magnum opus, Zunz portrayed postbiblical Judaism as a thriving culture and stressed that during those times when there was no Jewish state...