CULTURE AND ACCULTURATION

IN 1899, the young Martin Buber read the first volume of Jacob Burckhardt's monumental Griechische Kulturgeschichte, which appeared in four volumes between 1898 and 1902. In a letter to the friend who had sent him the book as a gift, Buber wrote how deeply impressed he was by the description of the inner life of the Greeks and commented: ‘I ask myself when we shall have such a book, A History of Jewish Culture.’ Almost a century has passed since then, and we still have no all-encompassing and comprehensive book on the history of Jewish culture. Nor is there a comprehensive book describing the one hundred years of Jewish culture in Palestine. Much literature exists on various aspects of the history of Jewish culture, but not one comprehensive summary like Burckhardt's great books on the culture of Greece and of the Renaissance. There are many attempts to trace the components of Jewish identity and draw a distinction between practice and faith, and numerous studies deal with modern Jewish political and national value culture. However, what Buber meant was an all-inclusive account of the total fabric of Jewish life, in which the history of the culture should reveal the latter's underlying idea—and itself be informed by an ordering principle.

Burckhardt himself regarded ‘culture’ as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon, so that it was possible to reconstruct the uniformity and unity of a closed culture—one that has already ceased to exist—but not of a living one. We may assume that what Buber wanted was really not a comprehensive description of all the manifestations of the Jewish culture, but rather a description of the idea of the culture in its classical manifestations, or its Great Tradition. He, like others of his time, was searching for what might be considered the permanent manifestations and characteristics of Jewish culture.