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A New Vision of Jewish History: The Early Historical Writings of Salo Baron
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2015
Abstract
While rejecting the traditional belief that Jewish fate was controlled by God, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the Jews maintained prior perceptions of post-70 Jewish history as a sequence of unmitigated disasters. Beginning in 1928, the young Salo Baron combatted this perspective on the Jewish past, which he dubbed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” In his well-known 1928 essay “Ghetto and Emancipation” and more substantially in the 1937 edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, Baron vigorously rejected this view. In the process, he formulated a new periodization of the Jewish past and moved beyond the ideologically grounded and programmatic reconstruction of Jewish history to a rigorously descriptive portrayal of the multi-faceted Jewish historical experience. In so doing, Baron laid the foundations of the flourishing contemporary Jewish historiographic enterprise.
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References
1. This paradigm as the core element in Jewish historical memory is emphasized by Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim in his Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982)Google Scholar.
2. In 1995, Robert Liberles published a valuable biography of Baron, to which I shall make frequent reference—Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. Chapter 1 of this biography covers these early years of Baron's life.
3. Baron, Salo, “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” The Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 515–526.Google Scholar
4. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 526.
5. Baron, Salo Wittmayer, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).Google Scholar
6. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516. Striking here is the readiness of the very young Baron to take on the iconic figures of the early twentieth-century Jewish intellectual establishment. Also noteworthy is his reference to a range of Jews—rabbis, accorded first place in his list; scholars; and laymen.
7. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516.
8. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516–521.
9. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 521–524.
10. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 524–526.
11. Engel, David, “Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 243–264CrossRefGoogle Scholar. David Engel has for many years focused considerable attention on modern Jewish historiography in general and on Salo Baron in particular. He read a number of drafts of the present paper and made invaluable suggestions, for which I am deeply grateful.
12. Engel, “Crisis and Lachrymosity,” 249–264.
13. Engel, , “A Young Man from Galicia on the Anti-Jewish Boycott in Congress Poland: From the Youthful Writings of Salo Baron” [Heb.], Gal-Ed 19 (2004): 29–55.Google Scholar
14. Much of chap. 6 of the Liberles biography is devoted to Baron's extensive involvement in Jewish community activities.
15. The lack of footnotes reinforces the sense of the 1928 essay as popular and polemical, since Baron was famous for his lengthy and comprehensive footnotes.
16. This footnote can be found in Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” at the bottom of p. 516. Baron's citation of Zunz seems somewhat gratuitous, and it may well have been intended to soften the enfant terrible impression created by his opening assault on Graetz, Philippson, and Dubnow.
17. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516.
18. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 516.
19. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 518. Subsequent study of medieval Jewry—by Baron and others—has diminished the importance of Jews as serfs of the imperial court and focused on the broader appearance of the notion of Jewish serfdom all across the western and central sectors of medieval Europe.
20. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 519.
21. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 520. On these comments on post-Emancipation Jewish life, see again Engel, “Crisis and Lachrymosity.”
22. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 520–521.
23. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 521.
24. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” 522.
25. On this momentous appointment and its complexities, see Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron, chap. 2, and Ritterband, Paul and Wechsler, Harold S., Jewish Learning in American Universities: The First Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 7.
26. Baron, Social and Religious History (1937), 2:31–32.
27. Baron, Social and Religious History (1937), 2:31.
28. Baron, Social and Religious History (1937), 1:vi.
29. Baron, “The Great War,” 1:180–183; “The Rise of Christianity,” 1:224–229; “Pauline Schism,” 1:229–234, in Social and Religious History.
30. Baron, Social and Religious History, 1:307–377.
31. The preceding eight chapter titles are: “Jewish Society and Religion,” “The Origins of Israel,” “Kings and Prophets,” “The Crucial Test,” “The Expansion of Judaism,” “The Great Schism,” “The World of the Talmud,” and “The Infidel.”
32. Baron, Social and Religious History, 2:3–8.
33. Baron, Social and Religious History, 2:20.
34. Baron, Social and Religious History, 2:27.
35. Baron, Social and Religious History, 2:31.
36. Baron, Social and Religious History, 2:31.
37. Baron is technically correct in identifying the beginnings of historical writing organized around the lachrymose in early modern Europe. However, he significantly understates the rootedness of the lachrymose conception in traditional Jewish thinking. The lachrymose conception was grounded in a reading of the Hebrew Bible that projected horrific punishments for Jewish sinfulness. Jews from early on—much prior to the Jewish Middle Ages—projected Jewish exile and its attendant suffering as the results of just such sinfulness.
38. Baron, Social and Religious History, 2:31. The portrait of Jews with bundles on their backs is eerily reminiscent of the imagery used by Graetz in the continuation of the statement on post-70 Jewish suffering noted earlier. Graetz created graphic imagery of the two aspects of post-70 Jewish experience—the painful suffering and the intense intellectuality. The former “represents subjugated Judah with the pilgrim staff in hand, the pilgrim pack upon the back, with a mournful eye addressed toward heaven” (Graetz, Heinrich, Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, trans. Schorch, Ismar (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1975), 125Google Scholar. Baron, deeply steeped in the work of his predecessor Graetz, absorbed much, even as he sought to free himself from Graetz's views.
39. Here, Baron even more significantly understates the traditional roots of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, in this case the Christian version. For the Church Fathers, Jewish exile and suffering is the key motif of post-Crucifixion Jewish history, serving as obvious evidence of Jewish sinfulness and divine abandonment.
40. Note the broad Western sense of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity, reflected regularly in university curricula.