THE REVIVAL OF A HISTORICAL SENSE

‘IF a faithful Jewish writer, who knows intimately his people's ways and language, its ideas and accomplishments, will undertake faithfully to write the history of his people and their ways’, asserted Peretz Smolenskin in 1869, ‘he will succeed in illuminating the path of those who grope in darkness and will exalt his people.’ Smolenskin was, of course, speaking in a language common to many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries: a strong belief in the redemptive powers of History and in History as a rehabilitative, constructive—not destructive—force. By ‘History’ they meant not only the knowledge of the national chronology, but the collective experience of the people, its past and future, its aspirations, hopes and destiny. History was the cohesive power; in it the unity and uniformity of the people, the product of its genius, were manifested. In order to recognize and understand—and use—these great powers of History, one must first discover and recover one's own history. The call for a return to history meant both changing the nature of Jewish activities and attitudes and reconstructing the people's self-awareness; namely, the creation of a new historical consciousness. The chronicles of the Jewish people, its collective experience, faith, and destiny in history, its perceptions and myths, became the core of its self-definition and identity. Jews in modern times not only ‘returned to history’, they also related to their history as the principal manifestation of their identity.