-
The Historian’s Past in Three Recent Jewish Autobiographies
Autobiography is a presumptuous act. It presumes a life lived in such a way that it deserves to be told. Other people, it seems to suggest, might reflect on and learn something from how this life was lived. Readers may be entertained, but they will also be enlightened. Certainly, there are other factors that help explain why individuals write their life stories and then send them out into the world: autobiography as therapy, as self-promotion or self-aggrandizement, as income generator. But at least some of the impetus for producing an autobiography can be found in Benvenuto Cellini’s explanation for writing one’s life: “No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem great achievements, if he cares for truth and goodness, ought to write the story of his own life in his own hand.” 1 Autobiography is the displaying of the self (even as this “self” is being conceived and constructed through the act of writing one’s own life); surely there must be some sense that this self has earned the right of display and that others out there would be interested in viewing it.
In this article I focus on three recent Jewish autobiographies: Evyatar Friesel’s The Days and the Seasons; Jacob Katz’s With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian; and Raul Hilberg’s The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian. 2 As I read each of these works, I found myself wondering repeatedly: what moved the author to write his memoirs? For whom were these written? Whoever else may read them, it seems fair to assume that the books will be read by other (Jewish) historians and perhaps by non-academics familiar with the scholarship of these historians. Given, then, what we might imagine to be the potential audience, what should the autobiography of a scholar—in this [End Page 132] case a Jewish scholar—set out to do? What sorts of expectations should we bring to the text, what demands may we legitimately or fairly make of it? What sort of information and insight might we expect it to contain, what sort of knowledge should it offer us?
Although there is a tradition of autobiographical writing in Jewish literature reaching back into the Renaissance, the discipline of Jewish history is certainly not blessed with a plethora of autobiographies—or biographies, for that matter. 3 Among the towering figures in Jewish historical writing, only Simon Dubnow, Gershom Scholem, and Benzion Dinur produced sustained autobiographies. 4 And it is a source of continual amazement that the lives of many of the great historians of Jewry—Heinrich Graetz, Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, and Moritz Steinschneider, to name only some of the leading lights in German-Jewish scholarship in the past century—remain to be written, as does the institutional or disciplinary synthetic history of the field. Without doubt, then, it is a positive sign that three Jewish historians have published their autobiographies simultaneously. Clearly, works that facilitate the process of writing the collective history of Jewish historiography ought to be welcomed. It remains unclear just what, if anything, this spurt of publications suggests about the status or condition of the discipline.
There is a consensus among theorists that autobiography only truly began to emerge, as a genre, as a result of specific and fairly recent historical developments in the West. These developments entailed a shift in consciousness about the self and the nature of history. The proliferation of autobiography, of self-conscious writing about the self, is a product of an increasing loss of faith in the idea of history as objective. In the words of one of the early theorists, this shift toward the “auto” came at a time when “the idol of an objective and critical history worshipped by the positivists of the nineteenth century [had] crumbled.” 5 Without making too much of it, can we see some evidence of a growing subjectivity, or attention to individuality, within Jewish history in these autobiographies? To be sure, none of these historians address this idea explicitly. As I will have occasion to remark more than once in this essay, it is one of the disappointments of all three of these books that the historians seem so uninterested in meditating on issues or problems of methodology and philosophy of history. In fact, their narratives—particularly those of Katz and Hilberg—are testaments to the ideal of a positivist objectivity. Yet the form, if not the content, may point to an increasing interest in, and openness to, the subjective self. 6
These autobiographies, then, might be taken as evidence of an increasing assertion of individuality or subjectivity. Still, there are more obvious explanations for their appearance. Each of these works is the [End Page 133] story of a Jewish historian but also of someone directly affected by the rise of Nazism, if not by the Holocaust itself. As such, each is also an example of a much larger and ever-growing subgenre of autobiographical literature, the “Holocaust memoir.” These adhere to a particular narrative pattern; they are “literary” even as they emerge out of historical events. Each tells a story that follows what might be called a twentieth-century Jewish paradigm: the Central European victim of Nazi aggression who is fortunate enough to escape to a safe haven; who must then struggle, once settled in a new country, to adjust and adapt; and who then, over an extended period of time, succeeds in overcoming his past and in making a new life in his new home. Friesel and Hilberg fled, as children, from Germany and Austria respectively, and both spent time in South America. Friesel grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, and as a teenager—committed completely to socialist Zionism—made his way to Israel. Hilberg spent time in Havana before moving north with his family to New York. Katz, born in 1904, fled Germany as a young man in the 1930s and spent a year in England before arriving in British-controlled Palestine. All three struggled, as their autobiographies make clear, to gain entrance into the academic world, and all three of course eventually succeeded.
By definition, an autobiography provides us with these sorts of selected facts of the author’s life and sets them within the context of broader events and developments. The autobiography of an historian will likely conform to the same pattern. But should we not expect something more, or different, from it, in view of the historian’s professional—and presumably also sophisticated—engagement with the past? In the end, how meaningful is it to read about the physical journeys of historians, from Hungary or Germany to Vermont or the Land of Israel? Or to be taken through an extended list of personal triumphs and notable achievements, as important as these indeed are? Without doubt, memoirs must contain these things, but are they enough?
* * *
Both Katz and Hilberg are truly magnificent historians, justly recognized as luminaries in their fields. Katz’s work on medieval Jewish-Christian relations and on the dissolution of traditional Jewish society in Europe are standard books in the field. Tradition and Crisis, in which Katz applied the methodology of what he called social history—but what was more akin to historical sociology—generated one of the few interesting methodological debates that Jewish historians have had over the past four decades; his article on social history remains one of the more stimulating [End Page 134] theoretical pieces written by a Jewish historian. 7 Hilberg’s book, The Destruction of the European Jews, stands, 35 years after its publication, at the center of Holocaust scholarship, indispensable even if refutable in places. 8
Both of these scholars, however, are far better historians than they are autobiographers. Indeed, in the case of Katz, and to a lesser extent Hilberg, the identification of the “self” with the vocation of historian is a nearly total one; this may help explain why their autobiographical narratives take the shape they do. In his study of the autobiographical components in modern Hebrew fiction, Alan Mintz writes of “the constraints of Jewish autobiography” or the inability to follow completely in the Rousseauian path of autobiographical confession. This inability precluded authors, like the eighteenth-century Jewish thinker Solomon Maimon, from exploring in any depth issues of private (family or sexual) life. Autobiography in this vein is more a matter of the head than of the heart. 9
There may also be a gendered component in shaping these books. As Marion Kaplan has recently noted, “there is a relationship between gender and memory. Women and men concentrate on different recollections.” 10 Without embracing too schematic a model here, it is indeed striking that, in all three of the cases under consideration, the familial all but vanishes. To be sure, parents are present as the story begins. But once the individual reaches maturity—becomes a man—he is remarkably free of familial influences; wives, children, and the home are invisible.
Surely, as the English historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood wrote in 1939, “[t]he autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought.” 11 Yet we may still insist that the story be made up of not merely the mental or cognitive. Without arguing that a life—including the life of an intellectual—ought to be written in only one particular way, we might still expect that the complex, multifaceted nature of an individual emerge through the telling of that life. What is the relationship between the intellectual and emotional, the interconnection between the public and private realms of the scholar?
If, as Mintz argues, the narrating constraints of Maimon stemmed from his identity as a philosopher, then the difficulties of Katz and Hilberg may stem from their identities as historians. Both seem unable to move away from the historical narrative mode, uncomfortable with revealing too much of their inner lives, whether emotional or mental. Katz, in particular, writes his own life more as an historian or ethnographer, as if he were looking from the outside in. Hilberg shows us plenty of struggle, but it, too, is almost all “external”; his demons are other individuals and institutions. [End Page 135]
Friesel, on the other hand, appears far less invested in his public identity as historian, and so he suffers least from the autobiographical constraints mentioned above. His is the most engaging and satisfying of the three books. It comes closest, at times at least, to what I think a historian’s memoir should accomplish. From the outset Friesel’s story is about personal struggle, memory, professional tensions, and hardships.
The opening sentence is stunningly evocative: “Heidelberg was a city easy to live in.” We know immediately that in the end we will be returning to Heidelberg, to Germany, and to Friesel’s confrontation with that past. Along the way, though, Friesel takes us to Brazil, England, the United States, and of course Israel. Friesel remembers being taken to a Nazi rally as a boy. “Could it have been Nuremberg in September 1934 or 1935?” he wonders. Again, we know that our expectations may be stymied and that Friesel is open to the notion that his memories are not the same thing as history. “The essential feeling from those German days that is engraved in my memory is not one of fear or anguish, but of curiosity. . . . Altogether those were good years, or was it only a later-day impression?” (14–15). After recollecting his early childhood in Chemnitz, he briefly relates how he returned there 45 years later, in 1984. As a child he loved spending time in the great Jewish-owned department stores, Schocken and Tietz, places filled with people and goods. The detail allows him to contrast the drabness, the desolation he experiences upon returning to what is now East Germany. Now he feels fear, he writes, which only abates when he returns to West Berlin.
Friesel’s memoir is what Alfred Kazin has called “emotionally authentic.” 12 It has an immediacy to it, a sense that the writer had to put these memories down, had to somehow come to terms with his past through the act of recording them; the fact that we are reading them is incidental, an afterthought. This is part of what makes the work so enchanting: Friesel’s language flows easily; it is conversational and intimate.
Also refreshing in this memoir are Friesel’s irony, his humor, and his sense of the serendipity behind events. A few years after arriving in Israel in the mid-1950s, Friesel tired of work in forestry and agriculture, and he grew interested in history and the humanities. He wanted to audit a few courses in biblical history and so went to get the permission of the academic secretary at the Hebrew University. He was told that he had to produce a certificate of graduation from high school. However, as a young socialist Zionist in São Paulo, contemptuous of bourgeois conventions such as academic certification, he had neglected to obtain a high school degree. He inquired at the Brazilian embassy about what might be done. The woman working there produced an official embassy letter testifying to Friesel’s “right” to take courses at the Hebrew University. [End Page 136] Returning to the registrar’s office, he presented the document to the harried academic secretary. Impressed by the official seal, the secretary told Friesel “all right, all right. . . . We accept you. . . . Here, take these forms, fill them out, leave them with my secretary. Shalom, shalom.” At that moment, Friesel continues,
I grasped that a huge blunder had been made. The academic secretary had forgotten, or perhaps had misunderstood, about the auditing for which I was seeking permission. He had accepted me as a regular student! Although it had never occurred to me to do so, at that moment, not a second before, I decided to enroll as a student at the Hebrew University.
(61)
Friesel entered the Hebrew University in 1955, when many of the most distinguished and influential historians of Jewry of the past half-century were at work there. He provides some wonderfully evocative glimpses of these scholars as teachers and then as colleagues. There are descriptions, some all too brief, of Yitzhak Baer, Gershom Scholem, Benzion Dinur, and Joshua Prawer (the last portrayed as a marvelous teacher) as well as of his mentors Israel Halperin, Shmuel Ettinger, and Haim Beinart. He devotes a page to Jacob Katz, describing him in very affectionate terms, even though the two had a falling out that was only reconciled after two decades. Katz is praised for his congeniality, intellectual openness, and fierce independence. It is revealing that Katz appears in Friesel’s work but Friesel is nowhere to be found in Katz’s autobiography. This is due only in part to Katz’s greater eminence in the field. It is also indicative of the differing approaches or strategies adopted in the books: unlike both Katz and Hilberg, Friesel is “other-directed,” interested in providing information not only about his own past, experience, and thinking but also about those whom he has encountered. Particularly entertaining is Friesel’s account of beginning a course with the historian of Jewish philosophy Shlomo Pines:
A middle-height, chubby gentleman entered, with a vague look on his face, as if he were not sure he had found the right room. He stood before us, and without using any notes he began to talk, eyes on the ceiling, holding his crumpled hat in his hand like a handkerchief. When the hour ended he stopped in mid-sentence and left. I had the impression that no one in the class had the vaguest idea what he had been talking about—at least, that was true for me.
A week later Pines returned and started anew, again without notes, again the vague look, although this time without the hat. Probably he had forgotten it in some library. The students became restless, and when he mentioned some obscure fourteenth-century Arab philosopher whose [End Page 137] name nobody caught, he was interrupted: “What? What was the name?” Pines sighed as if awakening from some dream, looked at us, looked at the blackboard, wrote the name of the philosopher on it, turned around to face us again, and droned on—with his body obscuring the name he had written! The hour over, he again stopped in mid-sentence and left. I rushed to the blackboard to copy the name. It was written—how else?—in Arabic. I gave up and left the course.
(67)
In the end, though, Friesel’s evaluation of this experience is characterized, as is often the case in this memoir, by self-deprecation rather than by any contempt for others. He admits that he was intellectually unequipped to appreciate Pines as a teacher, whose course “was put together like a cathedral: harmonious and balanced, each idea in the right place” (67).
Friesel lingers over the inner workings of the institution and particularly of the Hebrew University’s Institute for Jewish Studies. He offers a sense of the intricacies of the place, the academic personalities, the infighting, and the academic politics. Patronage and academic inbreeding are the unwritten rules at the Hebrew University, he tells us. This will not shock anyone who is familiar with the Hebrew University or, for that matter, with academic life in general. However, it is the sort of information or knowledge that a memoirist can provide, and it is, truth be told, no small part of what can make reading memoirs so compelling.
More important, though, Friesel ventures to say something about the methodological and epistemological issues inherent in Jewish historiography and, more generally, about the “duty” of intellectuals to question established values and truths. In these passages, as in others interspersed throughout the book, the reader is forced to slow down, to read again, to stop reading and consider whether the writer’s take on issues matches one’s own. Friesel’s musings on the nature of Jewish history and historiography will not substitute for a full-scale meditation on these themes, but nonetheless there is something here intellectually substantive.
Friesel also spends extended time offering his views on what he considers the most pressing problems facing Israel and the Jewish people. He is less successful here, more often than not offering little more than the obvious and the predictable. The Arab/Israeli conflict is a tragedy. Both sides have little to gain from violence. There are fanatics on both sides making the process of peace difficult. It will take who knows how long before Arabs and Israelis are capable of sitting down and working out a real solution. “Until then, we must all hold on, and pray that no major disaster occurs” (110). True enough.
Although Friesel’s analysis of religion and Israeli society is a bit better, [End Page 138] we are again given the obvious, the banal (“Historical work has taught me the centrality of the religious factor in Jewish historical identity”). Yet Friesel is also willing at points to drop in an assertion that ought to elicit stronger reaction. “With regard to Diaspora Jewry, I doubt today that non-observant Jews there will manage to avoid total assimilation into the Gentile environment” (150). Unfortunately, he leaves it at that; there is no further discussion or analysis, just the assertion. Friesel is often far less critical and self-reflexive than he might be, and this is frustrating. He refers repeatedly, for instance, to the “undiluted Jewishness” and “Jewish vitality” of Israelis and Israel. What can “undiluted Jewishness” possibly mean? And what does it mean when a Jewish historian uses such ahistorical notions in a descriptive way? At the same time, it is when he is critically engaged with his own country and his fellow Israelis that his observations are more stimulating. The new Israeli bourgeoisie, coming into its own in the 1970s and 1980s, “now proudly rearing its head, was downright embarrassing. Without the redeeming charm of some common cultural tradition, without the softening influence of established manners and a sensitivity for good form, the behavior of those Israeli burghers and their raw acquisitiveness seemed uncouth and disgusting. The aggressiveness of the new Israelis mortified me” (159). Although Friesel proceeds to recant somewhat and to assert that the condition of the Israeli bourgeoisie is far more complex than he first imagined, nonetheless this sort of directness is refreshing.
Friesel is equally direct in his assessment of American Jewish life (though he complains, at one point, that as a non-American his opinions about American Jewry are sometimes dismissed). He believes that the American Jewish intellectual possesses a profound ability to understand American issues, yet is far more emotional and ephemeral when it comes to Israel. There are exceptions, such as Jehuda Reinharz and Ben Halpern, Jewish scholars who—as Friesel sees it—have a profound understanding of both the United States and Israel. Far more emblematic, however, are American Jews such as Irving Howe and Saul Bellow. Upon meeting Friesel, Howe launched into a monologue on Israeli politics. “His very superficial knowledge about the topic and the country was in inverse proportion to the surety of his opinions, and nothing that I could say made any difference. . . . [H]e knew more about its [Israel’s] problems than Israelis did, and had no difficulty saying so” (166). American Jews like Howe and Bellow seem incapable of grasping the “unproblematic dimensions of Israeli life”: Israelis love to eat, drink, laugh, and so on.
It is hard to argue with Friesel, either about the frustration he must [End Page 139] feel on being an Israeli studying American Jewish history, or about the exasperation of listening to others speak authoritatively about something you know intimately and they do not. It ought to be pointed out, however, that this is not a one-way street. His description has its counterpart in what I think many non-Israeli academics feel while in Israel, trying to talk to Israelis about Jewish or Israeli history and contemporary life. Moreover, there are those Israeli writers and thinkers who come to the United States, stand before large Jewish audiences, and announce that American Jewry is dying or dead, or that it is soulless Jewishly, incapable of producing anything worthwhile in terms of Jewish culture. And, indeed, Friesel himself seems to have little problem predicting the ultimate demise of American Jewry. This requires, it seems to me, at least as much chutzpah as displayed by Howe or Bellow.
Even though he earlier predicted the disappearance of Diaspora Jewry, Friesel praises American Jewry as one of the great accomplishments of Jewry in the modern era. It is a Jewry that has managed to fully integrate into the general society and culture, yet maintain a distinct Jewish identity (albeit, Friesel must insist, one that is enervated compared to the Israeli-Jewish identity). Moreover, he insists that American Jewry developed a Zionism different from, but no less valid and worthy of praise than, European Zionism. American Zionists were right to reject the early formulation of David Ben-Gurion and others that the only legitimate expression of Zionism was aliyah. How this squares with a conviction that Jewish life in the United States is all but doomed because of assimilation, Friesel does not explain.
Finally, whereas one might anticipate a lengthy meditation on what it means to engage with the Holocaust from an historian such as Raul Hilberg—and, as we will see, that is not what Hilberg delivers—it is Friesel who at least broaches the issue. He asks himself first why he was so reticent for so long to become involved in Holocaust study. And he asks about Holocaust research, “the industry.” “Why does a huge international research machine continue to work unabated,” given the fact that more research has been done on the Holocaust than any other “event” of Jewish life (182)? And he dwells for a bit on the impact the catastrophe has had, in his view, on modern Jewish life and on his thinking as a modern Jewish historian. Friesel’s analysis might not be completely satisfying, but within the context of the other memoirs under consideration here, it is a welcome attempt to address some profound issues in modern Jewish life. [End Page 140]
* * *
Nearly 50 pages into Katz’s autobiography, With My Own Eyes, we learn that he had a romantic encounter while a Yeshiva student in the Hungarian town of Ujhely. Until this point Katz has been describing the highly circumscribed environment in which he was raised, a community profoundly committed to intellectual and social orthodoxy. Although he asserts at the outset that his own intellectual nourishment came mainly from non-Jewish sources, he was nonetheless deeply immersed in the world of Orthodox Judaism. So he devotes significant space to the Hungarian yeshivot, to the rabbis and their reputations, and to the routine of learning Talmud.
And then, a romantic encounter. Unfortunately, as so often in this book, Katz does not linger for very long; he quickly moves on to another subject. And it is this, perhaps more than anything else, that makes the autobiography so jarring. No doubt it is because Katz is such a meticulous and keen social historian that I expected and wanted more from his narrative. Not that there are no details here; the problem is the tone—there is a stiffness to much of the narrative that belies intimacy and passion. It is also that Katz simply stops telling us about particular events long before we tire of hearing about them.
It is not that I expected Katz to reveal truly intimate facts. Rather, what is lacking is any attention to the minutiae, to the details to which late-twentieth-century readers, living in a far different world, have little or no access. How did young men and women court in a Hungarian city or village 70 or 80 years ago? What were the rituals of romance? Did young Hungarian Jews ape the rituals of the broader society, or were there distinct Jewish practices? It seems unlikely that Katz could not offer his readers insights into any of this. But there is no indication in his book that the questions crossed his mind. We are left with only the vaguest impressions of what life lived on a day-to-day basis might have been like in Central Europe at the start of the century.
Katz’s recitation, for example, of his early years in Hungary (like much else in his book) feels obligatory, as if he said to himself, “this is what an autobiography looks like, so I’m going to recount some things from my early years.” Every opportunity to illuminate some aspect of his own interior life, or the interior life of his community, is avoided. At one point, he mentions the extraordinary impact the practice of “eating days” had on him. It was common practice for a community’s more affluent members to feed, and even to house, Talmudic students; this allowed impoverished students to concentrate fully on their studies and brought honor on the householder. In Györ, where Katz had moved in order to study in that city’s Yeshivah, he participated in this social ritual: [End Page 141]
[Györ] consisted of approximately one thousand Jews and could afford to employ both a chief rabbi and an assistant rabbi, maintain a Talmud Torah and a yeshiva, and even tend to the needs of out-of-town pupils like myself. My family relations with the rabbi gave me an edge over the rest of the out-of-towners, and other local householders recalled my mother’s girlhood days in the city and treated me kindly on her account. So I had no lack of sponsors for the “eating days” that here, too, provided the sustenance of out-of-town pupils.
(28)
These eating days, however, left an indelible mark on him, “invisible but ever present.” From that time forward, he writes, he has suffered from a lack of confidence, a hesitation in starting conversations. Unfortunately, again, no sooner has Katz introduced us to “eating days” and their impact on his life than he moves on to a description of Talmud study. Why did these eating days have such a long-term impact on him? (The only hint, that “the homes in which I took my meals were wealthy by the standards of the place and time, and hospitality was offered casually” (28), hardly seems sufficient explanation for such a profound and long-lasting reaction.) Did it have any significant impact on Katz the intellectual, the historian? As far as he could surmise, was he alone in this, or did eating days similarly affect other Hungarian talmudic students he knew? The historian (and biographer) want more about Katz’s interior world, more about what he remembers (or thinks he remembers) about the forces that shaped not just his personality but also his thinking. The social and cultural historian wants more about the interior life, the material life of particular Jewish communities: table rituals, types of food, conversation topics, and so forth. What did the interior of these homes look like, how did people behave? Katz is very reluctant to delve under the surface here, so the narrative is choppy, moving from event to event, theme to theme quickly, resting nowhere for very long.
For anyone acquainted with his work as a social historian, such a reluctance, or inability, to explore these issues may be surprising. After all, as Paula Hyman has noted, Katz’s interest in matters of the Jewish family and domesticity reaches back over half a century. In 1944 he published a pioneering article on Jewish family and marriage patterns, long before “there was even a glimmer of interest in the ultimately fashionable subject of family history in general historiography.” 13 In that article, Katz set out the ideal, or sociologically typical, internal life of the traditional Jewish community: the structure of the nuclear family and its relation to the extended family, and normative views on sexual temptation, on marriage as the only acceptable outlet for sexual desire, and on early marriage as the ideal arrangement. He also analyzed the intricate social and economic contexts within which family and sexual matters [End Page 142] worked themselves out as well as the possible implications of this process. 14
Most of the themes Katz touches on in the first chapters of his autobiography—family life, communal and social organization, sexual awareness and longing, the socio-economic context of Talmud study—had already appeared in this seminal article. What might have been the relation between Katz’s own experiences growing up in an Orthodox environment and his later interest in exploring the themes of family, marriage, and sexuality? The biographical and the intellectual never satisfactorily meet here.
Even as Katz attempts to relate his own initial experiences with sexual attraction and temptation, he cannot bring himself to move much beyond the sort of bloodless sociological narrative encountered in his academic treatment. “In many places there were even opportunities for contacts of an erotic nature, such as dances and excursions on the occasion of celebrations of holidays.” 15 There is not much difference between this, drawn from the 1944 article, and Katz’s elliptical discussion of his own romantic endeavors. This is, I think, an excellent example of Mintz’s notion of Jewish narrative constraint. It may very well be that Katz can only talk about such matters comfortably if he employs the historical, rather than the confessional, mode.
Katz is interested, more than anything else, in providing us with an intellectual genealogy. We follow him from his earliest tutorings in Jewish and Hungarian matters, through the world of the Yeshivah, and then on to the University in Frankfurt. We learn of Katz’s studies in a Yeshivah in Pressburg and of the continuing fascination that the world of secular learning held for him. He is at pains to tell us, repeatedly, that he remained committed to two worlds, that of the Talmud and that of secular knowledge. He would forfeit neither but develop a way of bringing both together. He read literature and science in German and Hungarian, taught himself to read French, and began reading the writings of Zionists like Ahad Ha-am in Hebrew (as well as Theodor Herzl in German). All the while, he was immersed in the study of Talmud and the world of Orthodox Judaism.
The problem with this intellectual genealogy is that it never moves below the surface. Anyone familiar with Katz’s work understands that this juxtaposition of the secular and the Orthodox in his own life played itself out in Katz’s research. Yet Katz offers no sense that he recognizes what is fascinating about his own story, or at least what many, probably most, of his readers want to know. For while the subtitle of the work (in English) is “The Autobiography of an Historian,” there is little reflection on how the circumstances and events of his life shaped the way he thinks. [End Page 143] How did he balance these two commitments, between Orthodoxy and the wider society? How did they affect the way he conceives of and writes about Jewish history?
Nor does Katz reflect on the impact of Nazism on his historical imagination. True, his story does become more engaging and dramatic when he relates his experiences as a doctoral student in Frankfurt during the first years of Nazi rule. In a chapter titled “An Academic Education,” he describes his first encounter with the sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim and tells us of Mannheim’s impact on him as a thinker and teacher. Katz briefly discusses other members of the faculty of the Department of Sociology—including Norbert Elias and Hans Weil—the most prominent of whom were Jews.
Very quickly in the months following Hitler’s ascension to power, German universities began the process of Gleichschaltung, or coming into line with the new regime. They fired Jewish faculty and severely limited Jewish student enrollment. Many “Aryan” professors also refused now to take on Jewish students. Katz’s dissertation, on Jewish assimilation in Germany, was finally read and approved by the eminent scholar of ancient Near Eastern cultures Gotthold Weil. This was Weil’s last official act before he was forced out by the university administration. Katz also relates how both of the major Jewish presses in Germany, Schocken and the Judischer Verlag, rejected his dissertation for publication; in Katz’s opinion political considerations motivated this rejection—his work on Jewish assimilation into Germany did not seem appropriate for the time.
Finally, since to receive the doctorate the dissertation had to be “published” in some form, Katz got the agreement of the editor of the Orthodox Frankfurt journal Nachlat Zvi to publish articles from the dissertation, and a printer then bound these into a book. “The story behind the publication of my dissertation,” Katz concludes, “illustrates the duality of my life in Frankfurt. For though I identified with scholarly and societal trends associated with Jewry as a whole, I maintained a limited social contact with an Orthodox circle that pursued a policy of exclusivity” (95). Without doubt, the historical details here are interesting. But Katz seems unable or unwilling to provide us with the meaning of these details, to give us any insight into how particular events in his own life, and in the collective life of Jewry, contributed to the making of a Jewish historian.
This deficiency would be mitigated somewhat if Katz were more consistent in offering us engaging history through autobiography. His interest in conveying a sense of the lives lived, of his own and his fellow students, however, seems minimal at best. “The end of a semester or some other such event was sometimes the occasion for an invitation to [End Page 144] the homes of our teachers” (79). Yes, and? That’s it. Katz abruptly moves on to a discussion of the Association of Religious Students (Verein Jüdischer Akademiker). Granted, this association was Katz’s most important social network, so we can expect him to focus on it. But even here he sounds as if he is writing an institutional history rather than recounting his own life. There is an abstractness, a distance, that is surely advantageous for the sociologist but not necessarily for the autobiographer. Even when he talks about sexuality among the Orthodox youths, his language is strangely clinical: “Erotic tension, sublimated or otherwise, permeated these occasions, and there was no lack of courtship, both furtive and open” (81).
Katz’s narrative comes to life once he arrives in the land of Israel. Now he relates the passion and excitement he felt in a way that, while still quite formal, nonetheless manages to convey a palpable sense of what he experienced. There is a playfulness that comes through in the last half of the book that is not there before. Wittingly or not, he has written into the fiber of the narrative his experience of “slavery and freedom.” A committed Zionist at least since his days in the Pressburg Yeshivah, Katz and his fiancée, Gerti Birnbaum, in 1935 petitioned the British Mandatory Government in Palestine for immigration visas. They received them because of Katz’s rabbinical ordination, which he had obtained in Frankfurt before embarking on his studies at the university. The British, it seems, had somehow been convinced by the Jewish Agency that Palestine needed more rabbis.
After spending a short time in England, Katz settled in Palestine. Like so many other talented Jewish scholars who now flooded the tiny community, he sought employment. Some, like the well-known historian Benzion Dinur, were fortunate to get part-time work at the Hebrew University. Katz had to go searching for a high school teaching position. His description of his long search for a job reveals, refreshingly, Katz’s sense of irony and humor. The first position promised to him, at a prestigious high school in Tel Aviv, he accepted. It was then given to another man, a Polish Zionist activist with better political connections, while Katz was back in Jerusalem getting married. Subsequently, he landed a post at a Talmud Torah in Tel Aviv, as an instructor in secular studies (everything from geography to botany and biology). “For lack of choice I accepted the position. It served as a penance for any sins I ever committed” (117). After a prolonged struggle to do historical research and earn a living in order to support his growing family, Katz finally ended up at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first in the Department of Education, then eventually in the departments of Sociology and Jewish History. [End Page 145]
Although Katz briefly discusses the ambivalent reception accorded his first books, Tradition and Crisis and Exclusiveness and Tolerance, he does not offer any real insights into the conceptualization or realization of the works themselves. He notes that the debates generated were over methodology—Katz’s historical sociology—and that the critique and subsequent exchange with Hillel Ben-Sasson did contribute to a fruitful discussion of the legitimate uses of rabbinic literature as a historical source. Only at the end of the book does he address himself to a question related to the “task of the historian.” As the dean of faculty in the humanities at Hebrew University, Katz had become publicly involved in the Lavon Affair, a major political scandal of the Ben-Gurion government. Hebrew University faculty members, and historians chief among them, had been rebuked by a columnist for the newspaper Ha-aretz for signing a manifesto taken to be hostile to Ben-Gurion’s administration. Katz published a rejoinder in Ha-aretz, and in recounting this he offers us his thinking about when a scholar ought to break from his “voluntary passivity” and become involved in public affairs:
I have always disapproved of colleagues who depended on their scholarly prestige to lend weight to the advice they offered on questions heading the public agenda, excepting, of course, those instances in which their opinion was based on special professional expertise. But a historian’s knowledge of the past does not make for expertise in the problems of the present. Furthermore, intervention in public life is liable to distort a scholar’s judgment concerning the periods of his research. Relative isolation is the price one pays for ensuring scholarly objectivity. But conscious withdrawal from public activity should not be construed as apathy, and there are times and situations that demand the removal of the barrier between scholar and society.
(160)
In Katz’s view, the historian is compelled to intervene in public affairs when “the democratic process seems imperiled” (in part because it is the democratic process that ensures freedom of speech and scholarship) and “when a travesty of justice seems imminent.” Since both of these conditions held, Katz believed, during the Lavon Affair, he entered into the fray.
Surely, many of us would have little problem agreeing with Katz that an historian’s mastery of the past is no guarantor of sound judgment in the present. What is far from obvious, though, is why involvement in public life tends to distort one’s judgment about the past, and how “relative isolation”—whatever that means—ensures scholarly objectivity. (Interestingly, Katz does not mention the Eichmann trial, which took place around the same time as the Lavon Affair. Katz could have had in [End Page 146] mind Gershom Scholem or Martin Buber, both of whom took public stands against the execution of Eichmann. However, it remains unclear just how such a stand could “distort” their historical judgments.) Since this, unfortunately, is the extent of Katz’s reflection on how contemporary events intersect with and influence the intellectual and political life of the historian, it is difficult to comprehend more precisely what he means.
Again, just when things get interesting and we want Katz to extend and reveal himself a little more, to go out on an intellectual and emotional limb, he retreats. When he relates how he came to be the rector of the Hebrew University, he tells the story of how, shortly after taking office in 1969, he had to confront student protests. Joseph ben-David, the sociologist of science, told Katz “I was in Berkeley. This is how it all started.” What will Katz do to confront the threat of student revolution on Israel’s leading campus? Why would the unrest taking hold at Berkeley, Columbia, and the Sorbonne make its way to Jerusalem? How did academics in positions of power react to this challenge to authority? What sort of impact, if any, did this series of events have on Katz’s own thinking as a historian? We learn nothing of any of this. “I cannot detail here how we managed to neutralize the threat” (164). Why not? This is precisely the sort of detailed knowledge that Katz, as administrator and historian, is uniquely qualified to provide—yet it is precisely the sort of knowledge he does not provide the reader throughout his autobiography.
* * *
In September 1992 a negative review of Raul Hilberg’s latest book, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, appeared in The New York Times. The review, in Hilberg’s reading of it, challenged his scholarship and called into question his entire scholarly career after the publication, 30 years before, of the first edition of his master work, The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg asks pointedly, “What if the reviewer is right?” What if Hilberg’s contribution to scholarship, subsequent to that first monumental work, has indeed been negligible?
Hilberg immediately equates his life with his work. This is a highly effective beginning, since the reader is quickly drawn into this drama of the historian who doubts himself and his work. We are left hanging as Hilberg heads to Boston and toward the knowledge of whether or not his work, and hence his life, has any meaning.
Unfortunately, the remainder of the memoir displays little of this self-interrogation and introspection born of doubt. Rather, Hilberg’s tone is mainly triumphal, even though ultimately the portrait he paints of [End Page 147] himself is of a man intellectually and professionally alone, even lonely. Despite the overwhelming obstacles placed in his way—the numerous struggles and battles waged to gain academic employment, and the concerted opposition or disinterest in his research—he finally published a monumental work of scholarship. The import of The Destruction of the European Jews is hardly open to doubt; Hilberg’s accomplishment is tremendous. It may very well be that, given the severe challenge posed by the 1992 review of his book, Hilberg had to write what can only be described as a therapeutic book, one that reminded himself, as well as others, of his great achievement and contribution. However, in so doing he has avoided addressing the more difficult but far more interesting and ultimately important issues facing historians. Thus, his memoir, while often fascinating and engaging, is ultimately disappointing.
Given the title of this book, one should expect a meditation at some point on “the politics of memory” and on the relationship between memory and history. Strangely, though, Hilberg seems uninterested in questions of memory. He takes it for granted that he can set down his own memories as fact, and we can only assume he believes the reader will take them as such. Recounting his early childhood in Austria, to take a minor example, Hilberg notes his deep fascination with trains. This, he writes, explains in part his heightened interest in the role of the railways in the Holocaust. Hitler’s march on Austria, to take a more telling example, convinced the young Hilberg that history in fact does change, that individuals can transform the lives of millions. “My childhood had ended in one stroke. . . . As I gazed from the window, observing the scene, a thought fleeted through my mind: Some day I will write about what I see here” (42). There is no hint that the reader might harbor some skepticism about such reconstructions. What is the relationship here between memory and history, and what are the wages of remembering in a particular way? Hilberg seems to see no reason to question or interrogate his own memory. He is, indeed, interested in the politics of memory and scholarship; he is just not interested in exploring the politics of his own memories and scholarship.
Trained, as he tells us, as a social scientist in the 1940s, Hilberg possesses a deep faith in the ideals of objectivity and the neutrality of words, in value-free research and writing. “I was an observer, and it was most important to me that I write accordingly” (87). He seems to see no real difference in this regard between a work of social science and a memoir. In unadorned and matter-of-fact prose, he relates how he came to the subject of the Holocaust and how his understanding of the destruction of European Jewry developed. He took courses with the eminent German historian Hans Rosenberg on the nature of the State [End Page 148] and bureaucracy, and he then went on to study with Salo Baron and, more important, Franz Neumann at Columbia. Already as a first-year graduate student, Hilberg decided on “the destruction process” as the subject of his dissertation. It was Neumann to whom Hilberg went with the idea. “It’s your funeral,” Neumann told him.” Hilberg continues,
This was the time when those—like survivors—who were plagued by memories, were told to forget what had happened, and when the Nuremberg trials were conducted not so much to understand Germany’s history as to conclude unfinished business in order that Germany might be reconstituted with a clean slate in the North Atlantic community of nations confronted with the threat of communism. Under these circumstances I was reluctant to mention my preoccupation in conversations with strangers.
(69–70)
In detailing the process of researching and writing his masterpiece, Hilberg does pay homage to those who had a hand in helping him conceptualize the destruction process. The work of the German historian Uwe Adam, for instance, aided in his understanding. Hilberg also credits his lifelong friend Eric Marder with sketching out, while the two waited for a bus at the Port Authority in New York City, the main outline of what would become the framework for the book. Nonetheless, despite this help and inspiration, Hilberg’s was on the whole a solitary and laborious task:
No literature could serve me as an example. The destruction of the Jews was an unprecedented occurrence, a primordial act that had not been imagined before it burst forth. The Germans had no model for their deed, and I did not have one for my narrative.
(84)
Music, Hilberg believes, provides the only adequate analogy for his effort. More precisely, he takes Beethoven as his model. Unlike Mozart, whose compositions seemed effortless, Beethoven “had to work, to build his music like an edifice, draft after draft, slowly, painfully. . . . All was controlled, taut to the ultimate degree. I had to control my work, to dominate it as Beethoven had fashioned his music.”
The analogy to Beethoven, as presumptuous as it may seem, is not taken far enough. Surely there was more to Beethoven’s sustained creative efforts than merely a slow, almost mechanical (as Hilberg would have it) construction. All, in fact, was not control. Was there not also enormous emotion and pain, suffering, and then something akin to madness? Hilberg, however, displays no interest in what might be termed the “emotional capital” necessary to engage deeply with the Holocaust over decades. He, like many other people, has built a career, a reputation, [End Page 149] as he tells us at the outset, on this most horrific of events. Every aspect of his life, or so it appears from his autobiography, has been bound up with this catastrophe. How did a historian of the Holocaust enter into the world of the Nazis and their victims, the extraordinary misery and suffering of the ghettos and the camps on a day-to-day basis? What is it like to wake up every day and go to work on the Holocaust? What sort of toll does it exact?
Death confers power on any survivor, on those who are proximate to the dead, who have been drawn into the circle of death but survived. What sort of power does mass death or genocide confer? What does it confer upon those who take it up as a lifelong object of study, who come into contact with it every day, dwell among it, and then interpret it for the rest of us? Inappropriately, I think, Hilberg has remained true here to his social scientific devotion to objectivity and detachment. Indeed, at one point, he states explicitly—and with a strange sense of pride—that he has remained immune from emotional reactions to the material. Some may find such a claim difficult to imagine or believe, but there is little doubt that in the case of The Destruction of the European Jews it is a highly effective narrative technique. The restrained, even deadened tone of the work evoked perfectly the chilling detachment of the Nazi bureaucratic killing process. But this sort of emotional distance, which is so effective in a work of history, seems misplaced in a memoir.
There is a good deal of struggling and battling in the book, but it is not of the philosophical or introspective sort. We do get details about the difficulties Hilberg encountered finding a publisher for his major work. After being turned down by Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, Oklahoma University Press, and many others, the first edition was finally printed by Quadrangle Press, a small, independent publisher in Chicago. And, in the most interesting and analytically insightful section of the book, Hilberg describes and explains the initial, mostly hostile, reception of the work.
The Destruction of the European Jews is generally regarded as a masterpiece of Holocaust scholarship, a book that is truly indispensable. 16 It is instructive, then, to learn of the negligible reception the work received at first, and of the slights and attacks Hilberg endured. For example, in 1965, working on the revised edition, he was barred, so he tells us, for a month from access to the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem. Finally he encountered “the remarkable Bronia Klibanski,” a woman of extraordinary linguistic skills who held a low-level job at Yad Vashem. She allowed Hilberg access to the archives; other staff members were not so kind, refusing to speak to him. Weeks later he learned that, six years after its publication, his book had finally been reviewed in the institution’s [End Page 150] journal, Yad Vashem Studies: “The review was thirty-six printed pages, and its title was ‘Historical Research or Slander?’” (166).
The poor reception accorded The Destruction of the European Jews was due in part, Hilberg believes, to a “general unpreparedness” for the subject of the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not become a matter of interest in the United States until after the Vietnam War, “when a new generation of Americans was searching for moral certainties, and when the Holocaust became a marker of an absolute evil against which all other transgressions in the conduct of nations could be measured and assessed” (123). In Germany and France, the subject did not become one of widespread interest until the 1980s.
More important, though, than this general Zeitgeist in determining the reception of the book was the argument Hilberg made about the behavior or response of the Jews of Europe to their own destruction. In accounting for what he believed was “accommodation” and “non-resistance” on the part of Jewish elites and masses to Nazi measures, Hilberg examined “the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws, and contracts.” He found part of the explanation for Jewish passivity in Jewish history, part in the Jewish (mis)calculation “that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit.” In the end, Hilberg had implicated the Jews—and especially the Jewish leaders—in their own destruction. The Germans relied on Jewish compliance and passivity, and they received it.
It was this argument about the “active role of the Jews in their own destruction” that the British historian Hugh-Trevor Roper, in a long review for the journal Commentary, called “the ‘most surprising revelation’ and, prophetically, ‘the least welcome’” (126–27). And negative reactions did indeed follow, from historians, survivors, and others. For instance, the Harvard historian of immigration, Oscar Handlin, accused Hilberg of “impiety” and of “defaming the dead.” For 30 years, Hilberg writes, “I was almost buried under an avalanche of condemnations.”
Hilberg was clearly taken aback by such criticisms. He had not reminded himself often enough, he writes, of his mentor Franz Neumann’s admonition that “this is too much to take.” Out of a massive work of over 750 pages, he had devoted probably no more than half a dozen to what he termed the “Jewish reaction pattern” to Gentile hostility. Yet, in those few pages he had formulated a comprehensive theory—which appeared in the introduction to the book—about collective Jewish behavior, a theory that he used to explain the purported Jewish passivity in the face of their own destruction. As surprised as he appears to have been at this reaction, Hilberg has clearly struggled to comprehend the nature of the response. And he succeeds in offering some deeper [End Page 151] insights into why his work found little favor among his Jewish readers. But he also provides, again, a sense of his self-perceived heroic isolation, of a battle—the title he gives this chapter is “The Thirty Years War”—waged between the solitary soldier for truth and all the rest who are satisfied with myth:
It has taken me some time to absorb what I should always have known, that in my whole approach to the study of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself against the main current of Jewish thought, that I did not give in, that in my research and writing I was pursuing not merely another direction but one which was the exact opposite of a signal that pulsated endlessly through the Jewish community.
(129)
There were three main currents in Jewish thought that Hilberg identified. First, his work focused on the perpetrators, whereas “Jewish learning and remembrance must be focused on the Jews, their circumstances and their experiences” (129). There is evidence for this in almost all of the “edifices”—encyclopedias, institutes, museums—created in the United States and Israel.
Second, Hilberg focused his research into the destructive process on German sources, whereas the emphasis on Jewish victimhood demands that Jewish sources be at the center. Above all else, Jewish sources in this case mean survivors’ accounts. These allow for the individuality of the victim to emerge, whereas Hilberg’s approach—as one of his critics charged—buries the Jews “with the records of the murderers,” with “thousands of footnotes,” leaving them, in the end, anonymous. Hilberg, on the other hand, insists that he has little use for such accounts. They are highly selective in what they relate, so that more often than not the most useful and interesting information is absent. Curiously, Hilberg’s distrust of the memoir does not keep him from writing one himself. Just how his memory, and his account, differ from those for which he has little use, he does not say. Again, everyone but the author seems to engage in a politics of memory.
Third and finally, Hilberg’s analysis came up against the imperative that “the Jewish victims must be seen as heroic.” Anyone familiar with the scholarship on the subject knows that the issue of Jewish resistance is a highly contentious one. Should “resistance” be defined narrowly, in almost purely physical terms, or should it be broadly conceived to encompass everything from the Warsaw uprising to the plays, poems, and musicals put on by Jews in some of the ghettos and camps? Or, should it be taken even a step further, as Martin Gilbert did in his 1985 work The Holocaust: “Even passivity was a form of resistance. . . . To die [End Page 152] with dignity was a form of resistance. . . . Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit.” 17 Hilberg refuses to go along with what he calls this “campaign of exaltation.” With enormous insight, Hilberg defends this refusal to transform almost any act by a Jewish victim of Nazi efforts as resistance:
When relatively isolated or episodic acts of resistance are represented as typical, a basic characteristic of the German measures is obscured. The destruction of the Jews can no longer be visualized as a process. Instead the drastic actuality of a relentless killing of men, women, and children is mentally transformed into a more familiar picture of a struggle—however unequal—between combatants.
(135)
This sort of “inflation of resistance” is dangerous because it suggests that the Jews truly did present the Nazis with some sort of “opposition” that was not just a horrible figment of their antisemitic imaginations. Moreover, it diminishes the achievement and heroism of those relatively few Jews—Hilberg calls them “independently minded breakaway Jews”—who actually did resist.
While it is clear that Hilberg is bothered by the implications of such misinterpretations, his greater concern is the injustice that he and his work suffered at the hands of critics, publishers, and fellow historians of the Holocaust. Again, when Hilberg comes to discuss what he labels inappropriate and illegitimate in the field of Holocaust scholarship, he sets himself up as a scholar under siege, surrounded on all sides by ineptitude, bad taste, and dishonesty:
The philistines in my field are everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and clichés. In sculpture, Jewish resistance fighters are memorialized in the center of Warsaw by a large heroic statue in Stalinist style. In poetry I regularly encounter graves in the sky. In speeches I must listen to man’s inhumanity to man. In some of my own works, the publishers have added their flourishes on jackets, covers, and title pages. The stylized barbed wire appeared on one of my paperbacks.
(140)
Hilberg’s complaints about the level of kitsch or bad taste linked with representations of the Holocaust are not misplaced. However, Hilberg seems to see this process as a direct attack on him, as something he, above or apart from others engaged in this study, must suffer and endure. “I am surrounded . . . I regularly encounter . . . I must listen.”
His most profound resentment is reserved for three women—Nora Levin, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Hannah Arendt—who, in his view, produced works on the Holocaust of highly questionable value (and in [End Page 153] Levin’s case, integrity), and each of whom “complicated my life in her own special way.” 18 There is something startling in Hilberg’s willingness to group these three together. Levin, the author of a synthetic history entitled The Holocaust 19 and published in 1968, might legitimately be excluded from the category “scholar.” She certainly was not trained as an historian, nor did she ever hold a significant university position. In fact, as Hilberg tells us, she admitted in the introduction to her book that she possessed “very limited credentials”—she had degrees in education and library science—and “very limited resources.” These limited resources consisted in the main of earlier scholarly works, such as Hilberg’s and Gerald Reitlinger’s, from whom she copiously stole. But she paid the price for her indiscretion: the “rumor network” seemed to settle the score, at least in part.
If, in Hilberg’s eyes, his work failed to garner the attention it deserved because of his treatment of the Jewish councils, the enormous success of Dawidowicz’s book The War Against the Jews can be explained by the fact that she wrote with approval of the Jewish leaders. It offered consolation (“nothing really could have been done, since Hitler had conceived of the extermination decades before”) and so appealed to all those “who did not wish to look deeper” (146). Dawidowicz, according to Hilberg, was never really a full-fledged scholar, so her transgression was not only to succeed where Hilberg had failed but also to want a greater prominence in academia than was deserved: “She wanted preeminence. Now that she had spoken, there was no need for other efforts. Hers was the ultimate word. She became a critic, weighing the contributions of researchers and dispensing judgments” (146). Hilberg says he can console himself with the fact that “Dawidowicz has not been taken all that seriously by historians” (146). However, regardless of what one thinks about Dawidowicz’s writings on the Holocaust, few would contend that she was not a scholar of the subject.
If Hilberg’s evaluation of Dawidowicz’s status is questionable, his discussion of Arendt is downright bizarre. He does his best to belittle her reputation and cast doubt on the judgment that she was a serious thinker. Arendt was, he begins, “an icon. Books have been written about her, and in the Federal Republic of Germany her name was given to an express train and her face appeared on a postage stamp” (147). It is not quite clear what this has to do with Arendt herself and the quality of her thought; all we know is that she is not to be taken seriously. Although she exerted an enormous influence on political scientists, philosophers, and historians, Hilberg cannot bring himself to call her a philosopher or political scientist. Rather, when she came to the United States “she began to identify herself as a political theorist” (147). In her work on totalitarianism [End Page 154] Hilberg could find only “unoriginal essays” (147); he didn’t bother finishing the book. 20
Arendt acknowledged, as Hilberg admits, the importance and influence of his work on her own. In at least three places in Eichmann in Jerusalem she refers to Hilberg’s book, either quoting him directly or crediting him with a crucial insight. 21 What bothers Hilberg is that Arendt neglected to include footnotes in this particular work; she therefore could not mention again (and again) her reliance on and indebtedness to his scholarship. It does not seem to occur to Hilberg that this absence of footnotes might not have been a malfeasance on Arendt’s part, some further attempt to cheat him out of his due. Eichmann in Jerusalem was first published, of course, as a series of articles in The New Yorker. This format helped to determine what sort of piece Arendt would initially write; journalistic articles tend to be short on footnotes. When the work appeared as a book, factors other than personal malice may very well have determined its shape. For instance, a business decision on the part of the publishing company to aim at a broader, popular reading audience would have dictated a certain form and hence taken some of these sorts of decisions out of Arendt’s control.
Other complaints are more substantive. Hilberg disagrees strongly with Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann—he was not the pathetic, lower-middle-class salesman she made him out to be—and of the role of the Jewish councils in the destruction process. He resents that her faulty interpretation of this role has come to be identified with his own. Especially angering, and understandably so, was Hilberg’s discovery that, after the enormous flap that followed in the wake of the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt sought to distance herself from Hilberg and from her original argument about Jewish collective behavior. She denied that she had sought to implicate the Jews in their own murder; someone else had assigned to the Jews a “death wish.” This someone else, it turned out, was Hilberg himself. In a letter to her teacher, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Arendt wrote that Hilberg “is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a ‘death wish’ of the Jews. His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig.” 22 Hilberg, in the end, remains puzzled by Arendt’s attack on his first chapter, which sought to explain Nazism in part with reference to the German past. Yet he does not refrain from insisting that, given her love affair with the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, “she had a personal need to insulate the Nazi phenomenon.” 23
I admit that at first there is something intriguing about reading this sort of academic gossip; though some of it has been published before [End Page 155] elsewhere, it is titillating. Ultimately, however, it is not terribly satisfying. Hilberg spends a good deal of time interrogating other historians, attacking them for their hermeneutic and moral failures. There is, indeed, a politics of memory, a politics of scholarship. But it is all one-sided. Only Hilberg’s opponents and enemies, it seems, are plagued by such politics; he is the victim.
It is a shame that Hilberg decided to focus his autobiography so narrowly, almost exclusively on the writing and reception of his masterpiece. We hear nothing, for instance, about his teaching. He was at the University of Vermont for 40 years, where, one imagines, he must have taught courses on the Holocaust. Was this experience also not part of his “journey”? Did interacting with students over four decades—including the 1960s and 1970s—affect his understanding of history, of politics, of any of the concepts and categories he employed in his research and writing? It is Hilberg’s unwillingness to address the complex relationship between himself, the historian of the Holocaust, and his subject that is the most curious aspect of this memoir.
He ends up, then, representing his “journey” as a Holocaust historian as, in effect, a physical journey from Central Europe to the northeastern United States. He never returns to that trip to Boston with which the memoir begins; in the end he does not tell us what he believes about himself and his work over the course of a lifetime.
* * *
An autobiography, of course, is not a life; it is a narrative, constructed in the present out of select events from the past. In contrast to other types of personal writing, such as letters, diaries, and journals, autobiography is retrospective. 24 It is not immediate but rather partakes of a temporal and critical distance. As such, it is a more or less deliberately constructed narrative, akin to a novel or a work of history. It seems to me, then, that it is legitimate to bring certain expectations, even demands, to the reading of memoirs. What sort of information was imparted here, what contribution to our collective understanding made? In the work of an intellectual, perhaps more than others, we might expect this retrospective dimension to facilitate introspection. Autobiography ought to provoke reflection and shape it. 25
Autobiographies written by those who have devoted their lives to studying and interpreting for others the drama of the past, and who have lived for much of the time in the world of ideas, ought to be able to reflect on and illuminate the historical enterprise. What is the nature of the relationship between the (Jewish) historian and his or her subject, [End Page 156] and more generally the life of the intellectual? Why do historians devote their lives to the study of the past? Why does this study matter?
As most of us know, or at least suspect, we live in an age when movies and television, far more than historical monographs, shape the collective memories of groups and societies. This may be somewhat less so in Israel than in the United States, but no industrialized society or culture is immune to this development. So just how strange or peculiar does a “commitment” to the study of the past, including the Jewish past, appear to many people, Jews included? Surprisingly, there is little rumination on the significance of academic Jewish history for the majority of the Jews in the late-twentieth century. The commitment to historical study is, unfortunately, taken for granted in all three of these memoirs.
The sort of reflection I have in mind can be found, for example, in Gershom Scholem’s wonderful memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem. 26 Scholem recounts his earliest intellectual encounter with Jewish history and religion and how his profound love and fascination with the subject evolved. On the one hand, he admits that he cannot adequately describe or reconstruct the original “intuition” that transformed him, though this very admission conveys the intellectual and emotional power of the engagement. On the other hand, Scholem provides us throughout the book with a potent sense of what it was within the Jewish intellectual tradition that attracted him: the intersection between personal identity (i.e., the German bourgeois Jew in conflict with his family and in search of the “authentic”) and religion and history: “During my search for the tradition that had been lost to my circle, a tradition that had a great magical attraction for me, the writings of the ancient Jews seemed infinitely rich and alive.” 27
These reflections on the internal, intellectual, and spiritual growth are intertwined with both the details of everyday life—Scholem’s accounts of his book-buying sprees in Berlin are particularly evocative—and momentous events such as World War I. Moreover, he devotes a good deal of space to personal friendships and relationships—including those with Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, S. J. Agnon, and Zalman Rubashov (Shazar)—and their impact on his own development. This is not merely a recitation of well-known individuals encountered but an attempt to offer a sense of the importance of intellectual fellowship.
Thus, more important than anything else perhaps, Scholem’s memoir offers us a bit of inspiration, some sense of what is genuinely wonderful about the life of a scholar (even as it engenders a sense of nostalgia for a world that has vanished). He succeeds in reconstructing an extraordinarily rich and varied mental world, which draws us in, adds to our comprehension and appreciation of his life and work, and vividly [End Page 157] reminds us of just how thrilling the intellectual and academic life can be made to appear.
One gains the same sort of appreciation (and inspiration) from the opening scene of Alfred Kazin’s memoir New York Jew. 28 Kazin is a young man, at work on his first book. He is bounding up the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, the constant movement of people and things providing the ideal context for the excited movement of ideas and images inside his head. The reader envies Kazin at this moment, enveloped in the safety and silence of the library, purposefully engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. This is a world in which the life of the mind is enthralling.
In describing, often in some detail, the intoxicating intellectual atmosphere of New York City in the late 1930s and 1940s, Kazin is able to draw us into this world, provide a taste of it, and induce in us regret that we were not, or could not hope to be, part of it. At a certain point it matters less to what extent the writer is romanticizing this past. His narrative produces a longing for this sort of intellectual vitality and community as well as the simultaneous realization that we live in a culture in which such communities are difficult to find and sustain. It speaks to the question of what it means to be in love with ideas and books and libraries in a time and culture that appear to find less and less use for all of them and for those people who are passionate about them. The memoirs reviewed here are unlikely to elicit such musings and longings.
Mitchell B. Hart is an Assistant Professor of Jewish and European History at Florida International University in Miami. His book, Social Science and the Politics of Jewish Identity, will be published by Stanford University Press, and an article, “Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation,” is forthcoming in ISIS: Journal of the History of Science Society.
Footnotes
This essay was completed before the passing of Jacob Katz. I have decided to publish it as originally written.
1. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography, trans. George Bull (New York, 1956), 15. Cited in James Goodwin, Autobiography: The Self Made Text (New York, 1993), 6.
2. Evyatar Friesel, The Days and the Seasons (Detroit, 1996); Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian, trans. Ann Brenner and Zipora Brody (Hanover, N.H., 1995); Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996). Hereafter, the page numbers of quotes from these works are given in the text.
3. On Jewish autobiographical literature, mainly among modern Hebrew fiction writers, see Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, Ind., 1989). For the Renaissance and early modern periods, see the essays collected in The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, trans. and ed. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton, N.J., 1988).
4. Simon Dubnow, Mein Leben, translated from the Russian by Elias Hurwicz and Bernhard Hirschberg-Schrader (Berlin, 1937); Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1980); Benzion Dinur, Be-Olam she-shakah: Zihronot ve-rishimot me-derekh haim (Jerusalem, 1958). Other Jewish historians have also published their autobiographies, though the number is not great. The legal historian Guido Kisch, who wrote a magisterial work on Jews in medieval Germany, published his memoirs, Der Lebensweg eines Rechthistorikers (Sigmaringen, 1975); Saul Friedlander, the historian of the Holocaust, published When Memory Comes (New York, 1979); and Lucy Dawidowicz published From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New York, 1989).
5. George Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, James Olney, ed. (Princeton, 1980), 40.
6. The most interesting recent example of this subjective, autobiographical impulse can be found in the biography of Ahad Ha-am by Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, Calif., 1993). Zipperstein begins—and also ends—his biography with autobiographical reflections in which he describes how his interest and engagement in Ahad Ha-am developed out of his, Zipperstein’s, personal and political commitments.
7. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York, 1993); Jacob Katz, “The Concept of Social History and Its Possible Use in Jewish Historical Research,” Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 3 (Jerusalem, 1956).
8. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961).
9. Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table, 11–12.
10. Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York, 1998), 8.
11. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1939).
12. Alfred Kazin, “The Past Breaks Out,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of the Memoir, William Zinssler, ed. (New York, 1995).
13. Paula Hyman, “The Dynamics of Social History,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Jonathan Frankel, vol. 10 (1994), 105.
14. Jacob Katz, “Nisuim vehayei ishut bemoazei yemei habenayim,” Zion 10 (1944). A revised English version appeared as “Family, Kinship, and Marriage Among Ashkenazim in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 1, no. 1 (1959).
15. Katz, “Family, Kinship, and Marriage,” 9.
16. On the judgment of Hilberg’s book, see, for instance, Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N.H., 1987), 5 and passim.
17. Quoted by Hilberg, The Politics of Memory, 134.
18. A future biographer might want to explore more fully the sexual politics motivating Hilberg’s attack on these women scholars.
19. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry (New York, 1973). Levin’s 768-page book was published, Hilberg makes a point of adding, by Thomas Y. Crowell, “a firm established in 1834.” The pedigree of this firm makes the moral outrage even greater and stands in stark contrast to the unremarkable Chicago house that finally published Hilberg’s book.
20. On the continuing importance of Hannah Arendt’s work, especially Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York, 1964), and on her reputation as a thinker, see Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996), and Dan Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative,” New German Critique, no. 71 (Spring/Summer 1997).
21. On p. 71 Arendt speaks very favorably of Hilberg’s work; on p. 107 she quotes and cites him; and on pp. 117–18 she credits him with making the sordid details of the Judenräte known.
22. Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 155. The passage comes from a letter from Arendt to Jaspers dated Apr. 20, 1964, and can be found in a slightly different translation in Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York, 1992), 549–51.
23. Dan Diner has correctly labeled arguments such as Hilberg’s, which posit some connection between Arendt’s personal relationship with Heidegger and her purported attraction to all things German, as “scandalous.” See Diner, “Hannah Arendt Reconsidered,” 187.
24. Goodwin, Autobiography, 10–11.
25. Janet Gunn, Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia, 1982), 25.
26. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1980).
27. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 50.
28. Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York, 1978).