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A Colleague Not a Sacred Authority—Reflections on Salo Baron's Scholarly Opus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2014
Extract
The three papers by Elisheva Carlebach, David Sorkin, and Adam Teller refreshingly do not merely invoke the name of Salo Baron as a sacred authority but actually reflect critically upon significant pieces of his scholarly corpus. As Adam Teller has pointed out correctly, academic historians of the Jews have sought for decades to align themselves with what they have taken to be the fundamental thrust of Baron's approach to his subject and have warned their students against too great a deviation from it. In the discourse of the field, to claim Baron's mantel is altogether bon ton, while “lachrymose” has long served as a term of severe reproach. Yet, many more people appear to have claimed to be Baron's acolytes in abjuring lachrymosity than have actually read a significant portion of Baron's corpus, much less seriously engaged with what he had to say in those writings. The three contributors are, happily, not among them: in their papers they all have entered into a genuine conversation with certain key propositions in Baron's work, with a mind to refining his insights and building upon them. Baron has served them not as an icon but as an interlocutor in the continuing discussion of significant problems to which he devoted much thought and study. That is a salutary development. Baron's contribution to the study of Jewish history was hardly exhausted by his articulation of a particular conceptual approach to it. As anyone who takes the multiple volumes of A Social and Religious History of the Jews or The Jewish Community in hand becomes aware immediately, Baron was a prodigious researcher whose painstaking mining (and in some cases even discovery) of a vast array of source materials laid the empirical foundations for future scholarship on a broad range of Jewish historical subjects. On that level, as well, reading his work returns significant rewards.
- Type
- Symposium: Rethinking Salo W. Baron in the Twenty-First Century
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- Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2014
References
1. Sh. B. A. [=Shalom ben Eliyahu (Baron)], “Hizayon ma'atsiv,” Ha-micpe 9, no. 43, 8 November 1912. Baron was not permitted to publish the article under his full name because an Austrian law forbade minors from publishing articles of a political nature.
2. Baron, Salo W., The Contemporary Relevance of History: A Study in Approaches and Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. If I may be permitted a personal aside, I recall that when this book appeared, Professor Shlomo Simonsohn, longtime chair of the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, remarked to me that Baron must have written it years before, because it was, in his words, “a young man's work.” But references in the book to events that took place as late as 1979 (the overthrow of the Shah of Iran) make it clear that he did indeed write at least some of it in the ninth decade of his life.
3. Baron, Salo W., “Żydzi a żydostwo,” Miesięcznik żydowski 3 (1933): 193–207Google Scholar.
4. Baron, Jeanette Meisel, “A Bibliography of the Printed Writings of Salo Wittmayer Baron,” in Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, 3 vols., eds., Lieberman, Saul and Hyman, Arthur (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1975), 1:1–37Google Scholar.
5. Baron, “A Bibliography of the Printed Writings,” 1:1–37.
6. Liberles, Robert, Salo Baron: Architect of Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 248–49Google Scholar.
7. Baron, Salo W., “Emphases in Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies 1 (1939): 15Google Scholar.
8. Baron, Salo W., The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 1:viiiGoogle Scholar.
9. Baron, Salo W., “Newer Approaches to Jewish Emancipation,” Diogenes 8 (1960): 75–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10. For a fuller discussion, see Engel, David, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 44–50Google Scholar.
11. Both were adumbrated already in the first published piece in which Baron employed the word “lachrymose”: Baron, Salo, “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 520–22Google Scholar.