''Settlement, Assimilation, Distinctive Identity'': A Century of Historians and Historiography of Medieval German Jewry, 1902–2002

"Settlement, Assimilation, Distinctive Identity":

A Century of Historians and Historiography of Medieval German Jewry, 1902–2002

We ask many questions of history, and for some of them historians may take a long time to answer. If we ask when did the history of European Jewry become anything more than an alien, unchanging, and marginal component of European history, historians must regretfully answer—not until quite recently. Long ignored or barely noticed by mainstream academic historical research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European Jewish history was also long studied and written from an internal perspective that paid little attention to the wider Christian European world in which it had taken place—except for those occasions when the Christian world erupted violently into Jewish community life. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did historians begin to rethink European history as a history of both Jews and Christians. In the case of European Jewish history, history's answer was indeed long in coming.

At the turn of the twenty-first century a group of German academic historians based at the University of Trier, in collaboration with a number of Israeli historians of medieval German Jewry, has produced a monument of European historiography—and of Jewish history as German and European history. At the same time an ambitious and splendid conference volume has linked that work with other research that reflects the new state of the field of Jewish history in other parts of early Europe.

As new and stunning as these works are, they are also the latest stage of a complex historiographical story, one that began in the nineteenth-century intellectual movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, generated the passionate debates about the nature of Jewish history and identity that it engendered, and came to fruition in the intensive scholarly turn that German-Jewish medieval historiography took around the turn of the twentieth century.¹ The story continues through the early twentieth-century flowering of German Jewish medieval historiography and comes to an abrupt and terrible end in the destruction or exile of German-Jewish historical scholars—and of German and other European Jews—in the Shoah.

The story restarts with the establishment of a school of German-Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the 1950s along with the gradual connection forged by many Israeli historians with non-Jewish German historians of medieval Europe in the postwar years, at first intermittently, and then extensively from the early 1970s. At the University of Trier, Alfred Haverkamp organized and sponsored the first Israeli-German medieval history conference in 1977 and later founded the Institut für die Geschichte der Juden at the University of Trier, renamed the Arye Maimon-Institut für Geschichte der Juden in 1996. In many respects, Alfred Haverkamp has been the academic impresario of the entire movement. Since the 1970s German Jewish history has also been taken up at other universities and research centers in Germany.² That is, it is the story of the early flowering, near-destruction, and reconstitution of scholarly...