Historical Memory in Abraham Geiger's Account of Modern Jewish Identity

In Jan Assmann's study of the biblical Moses in European memory, he distinguishes between "history in its radical form of positivism" and "mnemohistory" as the study of a remembered past. ¹ Although memory is certainly related to history, Assmann opens new questions about how we imagine the past and its heroes while setting aside factual issues concerning what "really" happened. If history is for Assmann a discussion of events, then memory uses features of those events to form a bridge of meaning for contemporary portrayals of identity. Assmann is by no means alone in this turn toward memory in historical studies. Beginning with Maurice Halbwachs's distinction between collective memory and history, together with Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's influential Zakhor and Freud's Moses, new works have canvassed the varied terrain of historical memory and have resurrected forgotten texts that deserve the historian's attention. ² For many historians of memory, discovering what "really" happened in the past is either unfathomable or simply unnecessary for understanding how persons narrate and imagine that past. Assmann, for example, is not worried about whether Moses ever existed, or even if he had been an Egyptian. Those are historical questions. Moses as a figure of memory "is modeled, invented, reinvented, and reconstructed by the present" and for the present. ³ Assmann shows that a remembered past is not an innocent memory but a motivated projecting of contemporary debates about identity onto a past. Through memory, the past becomes a usable history, and its heroes become sources for modern identity.

Abraham Geiger (1810-74), the influential German-Jewish historian and theologian, published seminal historical studies of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), in which the retrieval of a forgotten past becomes the only meaningful approach to history. In this article, I will argue that Geiger's discussion of memory shows how the retrieval of a past through reconstructed memory works to fashion modern identity. Geiger actively and consciously struggled with the role of memory in history. Both in his historical pieces and in his essays on Jewish liturgy, Geiger stressed the centrality of a remembered past to historical and liturgical studies. Memories would be challenged, reworked, and at times completely erased in Geiger's works in order to ground his reform in a recognizable and meaningful past. But he remodeled that past in the image of contemporary concerns. His Wissenschaft des Judentums could now challenge modern Judaism by appealing to a different, once forgotten but now remembered past. A history of events, a mere recounting of a past, would be set aside and replaced by the power of memory to recover past moments of religious meaning for modern reform. Through reconstructed memory, Geiger's reform became the true, authentic Judaism rooted in a remodeled past. Geiger constructs modern Jewish identity out of new historical memories.

Issues surrounding identity and memory arose most forcefully in Geiger's popular historical lectures, Judaism and Its History, his ground-breaking theoretical pieces on liturgical reform, and his two edited prayerbooks of 1854 and 1870. ⁴ In each work, Geiger addressed how historical memory fashions modern Jewish identity. In Judaism and Its History, identity was integrally linked to historical memories, and Geiger even appealed to such memories in order to defend religious belief. It was equally clear in his essays on liturgical reform that memory serves not only to link a past to a present but also to open imaginative possibilities for the future. So the retrieval of a forgotten but now remembered past was crucial to Geiger's construction of identity. Yet problems surfaced when powerful historical memories distorted or damaged Geiger's vision of modern Jewish identity. In his attempt to overcome such dilemmas, Geiger revealed how the dynamics of historical memory work to subvert the academic discipline of Wissenschaft. For Geiger, Wissenschaft was neither a scientific nor an objective study of a past. It was a motivated retrieval of that...