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37 3 : baer’s hisTory, TranslaTed and reVisiTed Published in Conservative Judaism 21:1 (Fall 1966), 73–82. This review of the English translation of Yitzhak Baer’s History of the Jews in Christian Spain was published in 1966, the year in which Yerushalmi, then thirtyfour years old, completed his Ph.D. and took up a position at Harvard University. The journal in which it appeared, Conservative Judaism, was the scholarly organ of the Rabbinical Assembly, the national association of Conservative rabbis affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Yerushalmi had been ordained in 1957. Baer was a leading figure in the “Jerusalem School” of historians at the Hebrew University. Born and raised in Germany, Baer studied medieval Spanish history with Heinrich Finke at the University of Freiburg. He immigrated to Palestine in 1930 to become the first professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Baer wrote about many aspects of Jewish history from ancient times on but gained his greatest renown for his work on the medieval period, and especially on the history of the Jews of Spain. After visiting the Spanish archives in the 1920s, Baer followed the path of his teacher Finke and published a large collection of primary materials relating to the life of Jews in medieval Spain. The first volume of this documentary collection from 1929 served as the prelude to Baer’s most wellknown book, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, originally published in Hebrew in 1945 and then in two volumes in English from 1961 to 1966. Yerushalmi was an ideal person to review this book. The doctoral dissertation that he was wrapping up in this period under Salo Baron at Columbia was rooted in the post-Expulsion history of Sephardic Jews, a period later than that covered in Baer’s History. But it rested on a deep familiarity with the sources and structures of medieval Spanish Jewish life that stood at the heart of Baer’s History. Yerushalmi maintained an active interest in Baer’s work throughout his life, and some thirty years later would write a preface to the French translation of another of his books, Galut. Because the central themes and argument of Baer’s book were known, Yerushalmi assumed, to many of his readers from the Hebrew edition, he used the review to discuss key themes occasioned by the appearance of the new translation. He considered the translation in the context of the growth of Jewish studies in postwar American universities (of which his own position at Harvard was an instance ) and noted that English translations of classic texts had become a peda- 38 | early paTTerns gogic necessity. But his main comments were directed at the self-perception of American Jews. He pointed out that contemporary American Jews often appealed to medieval Spanish Jewry—and particularly to its sense of security and prosperity , its intimate relations with Gentile society, and its enlightened interest in secular knowledge—as a kind of validating historical precedent. But this analogy, Yerushalmi claimed, was based on a false belief that the mythical Spanish “Golden Age”—and the corresponding spirit of convivencia—characterized Jewish society in Spain throughout the medieval period. In fact, occasional bursts of creativity and periods of stability notwithstanding, the history of the Jews in Spain was marked by the recurrent hostility of the Gentile population of Spain, both Muslim and Christian. And this pattern was not restricted to Spain. In a line of argument consistent with Baer’s own understanding, Yerushalmi argued here that the Expulsion of 1492 was not an aberration but the culmination ofa centuries-long process of Christian Europe disgorging its Jews. Accordingly, he declared, in the rather lachrymose tone of the review, that “catastrophic elements were implicit in the development of Spanish Jewry from the very beginning.” Yerushalmi ended his review with a reflection on Jewish historical selfconsciousness , an early foray into the field of Jewish historiography that would, of course, be the subject of his Zakhor twenty years later. Spanish Jews were too used to thinking about historical causation in terms of divine providence to be able to think analytically about the catastrophes they endured and the factors that had produced them. This led Yerushalmi to conclude that although “sacred history” may have “sustaining qualities,” it “has often extracted a heavy price from the Jewish people by inhibiting it from grasping the realities of its struggle to survive in a profane world.” Yerushalmi concluded his review by quoting Baer, who acknowledged...

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