Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction

2. State of the Question

50 2 State of the Question Jewish Studies after Auschwitz A current state is a state “for now,” a state of our own conceiving, but also a transient matter. The ancients taught the enduring quality of wisdom traditions, social practices, and structures of power. What the moderns learn from that lesson, however, is that even the most enduring of ancient constructions comes to an end: all things human are only for now. Modernity represents itself as the aftermath of those endings. The chief discipline for charting and explaining the overarching pattern of ruptures in continuity (more or less acute, more or less complete), followed by innovation or transformation, is modern history. For well over a century, historiography and the related disciplines of philology and archaeology predominated in Jewish Studies as a modern field, a scientific project separate from covenantal obligations. Science was the key word in Jewish Studies in the nineteenth century, and history the key mode of studying Jews scientifically, not as an eternal people circumscribed by a providential design, but as a changing people, acting on their own behalf in an open-ended story within the constraints of different social environments. The rupture that distinguishes the current state of Jewish Studies from its predecessors is the “war against the Jews, 1933–1945,” in historian Lucy Dawidowicz’s pointed phrase.1 To call that twelve-year period by either of its most common names—the English designation Holocaust, based on a Greek root referring to a whole, burnt, sacrificial offering, or the Hebrew Shoah, literally “catastrophe”—is already to locate discussion in one of many positions within contemporary terms of debate. Key words are more than lexical niceties. They concentrate disparate meanings at a point of possible intersection; they make certain conversations possible, while obstructing others; they bear a heavy burden. For an Englishlanguage text, Shoah is perhaps the better term, at least in that it signals resistance to any easy comprehension. To speak of genocide, another key word coined precisely on the basis of the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews, is by no means neutral. “Genocide,” too, has a history whose salient point is institutional. Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin introduced the term in the United Nations State of the Question 51 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 that defined certain acts against peoples as a particular kind of international crime. The choice of Latin roots for the neologism as a means of speaking to and for an international body imports a history of Roman Empire and Church of Rome, that is, a foundational perspective in which “Europe” is seen as universal. The term is no less debatable than the others. But the institutional purposes of creating a definition that would make it possible to recognize similarities between the Shoah and future atrocities also implies that the Jewish genocide of the Nazi years is only a rupture “for now,” that it forms part of a series of similar events: prior, yet to come, or ongoing in the current state. Theological alternatives to historical study have been articulated from the very time of the events, before such terms as Holocaust and Shoah came to take a place in current debate. In Night, for instance, a text that raised novelist and essayist Elie Wiesel to prominence as a spokesperson for victims of the Shoah, the death by hanging of a Jewish boy at Auschwitz transcends the juridical context that underwrites the concept of genocide. Unlike most of the manifold ways in which countless murders were committed, that hanging is staged as the execution of a judicial sentence: the false, summary military justice of the Nazis. The issue for the camp inmates, as Wiesel retells it, is the apparent withdrawal of God—a negative counterpart to the divine interventions of miracles. “Where is God now?” a Jewish prisoner asks: “And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.’”2 Neither miracles nor the death of God are historical constructions. Literary critic, philosopher, and cultural historian Walter Benjamin, writing in the face of a triumphant fascism in 1940, and soon to be its victim , sounds a call for scholarly engagement. In a critique of nineteenthcentury German historicism, which could well be extended to the major scholarship of the Science of Judaism, Benjamin asserts: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is...