Propheten des Vergangenen: Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (review)

The history of Jewish historiography has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention, and Michael Brenner points to the absence of an overview of this literature in the preface to Jüdische Geschichtschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. As Brenner explains, historiography reference books like the collection of Portraits of German Historians, edited by Hans Ulrich Wehler, or the encyclopedia of historians, Historikerlexikon, published by C. H. Beck, have largely ignored Jewish historians. Even among Jewish academics themselves, interest in the history of Jewish historiography has only arisen in last several decades. When Arno Herzig wrote an overview of Jewish historiography in the late 1980s, for example (a contribution to which Brenner strangely enough does not refer), a comparatively small quantity of secondary literature was available to him. Since then, the literature on Jewish historiography has grown considerably, swelled by, among others, the works of Brenner, whose recently published anthology (Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute: Themen, Positionen, Kontroversen, edited by Michael Brenner and David N. Myers [C. H. Beck Verlag, 2002]) provides the audiences with a firm grasp on the methodological and conceptual debates in the field of Jewish history; he also edited a selection of essential sources from the history of Jewish historiography (Jüdische Geschichte lesen: Texte der jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Brenner, Anthony Kauders, Gideon Reuveni and Nils Römer [C. H. Beck Verlag, 2003]).

Brenner’s Propheten des Vergangenheit is a survey of Jewish historians, their works, and the intellectual contexts in which they wrote. The book begins by exploring the Christian roots of Jacques Basagnes’ modern Jewish historiography, and goes on to contextualize Isaak Markus Jost’s “Konfessionalisierung” of Jewish history within the movement for Jewish emancipation. Brenner follows these synopses with a recounting of the emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and a review of the not-uncritical reception of Heinrich Graetz, whose eleven volume Jewish history was translated into many languages.

It is worth emphasizing that Brenner does not limit his analysis to German-Jewish historiography, but also surveys literature from Poland, Great Britain, France, Hungary, and Russia. The case of Romania, however, remains untouched. After summarizing Simon Dubnow’s Eastern European “nationalization” of Jewish history and his “Diaspora nationalism,” the author moves to a recounting of the fundamental change in Jewish historiography, initiated by Salo Baron and his sharp critic of the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history, later taken up by Cecil Roth. This is followed by a summary of the emergence and development of the Zionist narrative, which Brenner traces concisely through its diverse and nuanced stages up to the violently critical perspective of many contemporary Jewish historians.

In the final chapter of his book, Brenner explores the debates over the representation of Jewish history that have arisen from the recent questionings of traditional Jewish narratives and the problematization of Diaspora as a significant factor in the Jewish experience. Thus, Brenner sees the emergence of a new historiographic perspective in the work of David Biale, who suggests a subjectivizing, relativizing, and pluralizing of Jewish history. Biale has presented this model most succinctly in his new non-essentialist collection Cultures of the Jews.

Brenner introduces each of the chapters of his book with a picture as an iconographic source that he uses as a jumping-off point to introduce questions appropriate to a specific time period. A unifying theme of these chapters is an exploration of the conditions of possibility of historiography: Brenner went his own way, beyond the illusion of objectivity, and beyond the untenable epistemology of Leopold von Ranke, who viewed the task of a historian as simply telling it as it was. Just as early as the historian of the Enlightenment, Johann Martin Chladenius had expressed skepticism as to the possibility of presenting history objectively, noting that the historian’s account of the past was intrinsically shaped by his own point of view. In each of the historical stages outlined in...