Denying Tradition: Academic Historiography on Jewish Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe

The religious movement Orthodox Judaism, the definitions of which and the date of whose emergence will be explored below, appeared in Europe and spread subsequently to the land of Israel and the United States of America. Academic research on this complex social and cultural phenomenon, in all its forms and periods, has flourished in recent decades. Thus the bibliography compiled by Kimmy Caplan in 2007, 'Research on Orthodox Society in Israel in the Last Generation', includes as many as 580 items.¹ Since then, the extent of this scholarship has significantly increased, making the task of presenting this huge corpus in one overview virtually impossible. This chapter will thus concentrate on the historiography of Jewish Orthodoxy in eastern Europe. However, the discussion cannot also avoid alluding to the research on Germany and central Europe.

INTRODUCTION

Historical research on Jewish Orthodoxy in Europe is a relatively new phenomenon which emerged in Israel in the last third of the twentieth century.² Two basic factors contributed to this. The first was the development of Jewish historiography, which began to pay attention not only to those mainstream groups and ideologies that seemed to be victorious in the twentieth century, like Zionism and socialism, but also to other phenomena that did not appear so prominent in the past. 'Orthodox Jews', associated with the world of yesterday and galut (exile), seemed to be one of these groups, ultimately doomed in a world of progress and Jewish statehood.³ The second factor was the rapid growth of Orthodox communities and their increasing role in Israeli politics. In the inter-war period and especially during the first decades after the Holocaust it seemed that Orthodoxy would sooner or later disappear. By the last decades of the twentieth century Orthodoxy had not only not faded away but, on the contrary, had increased manifold and emerged as a significant force, both numerically and politically.⁴ Not surprisingly, the Orthodox political party Agudat Yisra'el (Agudas Yisroel), which became a decisive element of Israeli politics in the late twentieth century, was one of the first Orthodox topics to be researched.⁵

As in many other fields of historical research, contemporary problems have stimulated interest in the past and often determined the way in which it has been explored. The claim of Orthodoxy that it constituted 'authentic' Jewry and was the 'genuine' continuation of a long-established traditional Jewish society made it inevitable that academic historians would, in turn, stress the 'modernity' of the movement and trace its appearance to the nineteenth century at the earliest. Thus, much academic research on Orthodoxy has involved the adoption of an ideological position in the shaping of the image of the past. It has often aimed, consciously or unconsciously, to demythologize Orthodox perceptions of authenticity and to produce a 'correct' picture of Jewish history. In this view of the past, Orthodoxy emerges as only one of many developments resulting from the Jewish encounter with modernity and the majority of researchers have striven to demonstrate the novelty of Orthodox approaches to halakhah and to explore the modern techniques employed by Orthodox political organizations.

Since historical research on Jewish Orthodoxy developed initially mostly in Israel and was written mainly in Hebrew, a certain confusion has arisen over the use of the Hebrew word for Orthodox, ḥaredi. In modern Hebrew, ḥaredi refers to members of a clearly defined sector of Israeli society, but in the nineteenth century its meaning was not so restricted. When applied to the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, it leads to certain characteristics of Israeli society of the late twentieth century being projected into the past. For example, the contemporary ḥaredi view of the world embraces anti-Zionism,⁶ so many historians have seen Orthodox Judaism in the past as anti-Zionist. In this way they have excluded those groups of Jews who fell within other parameters of Orthodoxy and which took part in the proto-Zionist and Zionist movements, especially those who participated in the organization of religious Zionists, Mizrahi. As a consequence many scholars now refrain from...