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  • Reflections on Transnationalism and the American Jewish Experience
  • Gary Phillip Zola (bio)

If we entertain the proposition that “local” history can be shaped by an individual’s membership in a larger, trans-border, constituency, then it seems quite logical that a transnational approach to the study of American Jewish history provides us, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, with a methodology that may serve to enrich and enhance our understanding of Jewish “local” history – the history of, in this instance, the American Jewish experience.1

The dean of American Jewish historians, Jacob Rader Marcus (1896–1995), took note of the significance of transnationalism more than a half century ago. He posited that Jews became “a deathless people” precisely because of the trans-geographical dimension of their historical experience. Possibly drawing upon a Talmudic teaching suggesting that the scattering of the Jews was a sign of God’s compassion for the Jewish people, Marcus suggested that Jewry’s “salvation as a religious community lies in [its] omniterritoriality.”2 For Marcus, this neologism was more than a geographical term. It was a prescriptive designation. This is to say that Marcus believed the Jewish historical experience was always larger than the history of an individual Jewish community that may have lived in this locale or in that nation-state. “The only Israel upon which we can lay all our hopes,” Marcus wrote, “is K’lal Yisrael (the entirety of the Jewish historical experience).”3 As far as Marcus was concerned, the spiritual interconnectedness of diverse [End Page 535] Jewish communities around the world constituted a unique feature of Jewish history in the Diaspora, a characteristic that guaranteed Jewish continuity in the face of an inscrutable future.

The surging interest in transnational methodology among American historians began with a focus on what is today referred to as “Atlantic history”—the histories of North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Western Europe. Bernard Bailyn (b. 1922), one of the pioneering advocates of this approach, noted that the history of the North American continent was actually one segment of an Atlantic-wide drama. By studying North America in the context of a larger Atlantic saga, historians would gain a better perspective on migration, capitalism, slavery, as well as many other topics. Bailyn established an “International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World” at Harvard in the mid-1990s in order “to create an international community of scholars familiar with approaches, archives, and intellectual traditions different from their own and ultimately to further international understanding of this methodology.”4

In the late 1990s, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and its journal spurred a discussion entitled “Rethinking American History in a Global Age.” This initiative, an outgrowth of the La Pietra Report: A Report to the Profession, called on American historians to intensify their efforts to consider American history in relation to other national histories and to examine “cultural, religious, social, institutional, and economic linkages that spanned political borders and boundaries.”5 This methodology, increasingly referred to as transnationalism, may be understood as an effort to take the historical methodology that Bailyn [End Page 536] and his students used in studying the Atlantic World and apply it to the study of history in general.

The roots of transnationalism in the writing of Jewish history may be traced back to the pioneering Jewish historians of the nineteenth-century—men such as Isaac M. Jost (1793–1860), Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), and Simon Dubnow (1860–1941)—who reconstructed the history of the Jewish people as a whole and, in doing so, instinctively identified “overarching themes and unifying narratives” that pertained to Jewish life “transgeographically.”6

Over the past two decades, many historians of the American Jewish experience have rediscovered a methodological approach that was familiar to their nineteenth-century predecessors. Important volumes have already appeared on the history of Jewish life in the Atlantic World, including works that focus on slavery, racism, mercantilism, crypto-Jewish life, piracy, port cities, culture, architecture, Messianism, religious practice, and much more.7 More recently, some American Jewish historians have extended the application of transnationalism beyond the Atlantic World, demonstrating how a wider transnational methodology will further enrich our understanding of the American Jewish experience...

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