All Jewish History in Less Than an Hour with David N. Myers

hello everybody good evening welcome i'm judy greenspan director of public programs here at the Center for Jewish history and I'm very happy to welcome all of you plus the Jewish Broadcasting Service who is taping this for a program later this year tonight to the first program of our new series very short introductions short talks on big subjects if the name of our series sounds familiar chances are you might already be a fan of the very short introduction book series published by Oxford University Press and can I take a moment to see a show of hands if people have already read any of these many little books ok so we do have some good in a moment Nancy Toth oxfords American editor of the vsi series will give a very short introduction to these very popular books of which there are currently 555 and many more coming concisely introducing topics ranging from particle physics to the meaning of life to Jewish history these little books are widely appealing because as a recent New Yorker article put it quote the world is vast and strange everywhere we look there is something to provoke our curiosity some sliver of existence that we want to understand ended quote our series is produced in partnership with Oxford University Press and like these books is for avid learners short talks on big subjects will include four programs this year each one featuring a talk by an author of one of these slim informative volumes so launching our Series tonight who better than David & Myers the Center for Jewish histories new president and CEO a distinguished professor of Jewish history at UCLA for 25 years where he holds the Sadie and Ludwig Cohn chair and the author of your new book Jewish history a very short introduction David whose numerous credentials are listed more completely in your program assumed leadership of the center in July of last year and when he's asked as I suspect he was asked more than once during our recent deep freeze here on the East Coast why leave sunny California and move across the country to New York City David never hesitates I'm a Jewish historian he says and this is the Center for Jewish history it's a nice quote I like it too yeah so for those of you who might be less familiar with this remarkable institution it is a world-renowned Center for scholarly research and academic conferences a destination for public programs concerts exhibits and genealogy research and home to five partner organizations and their extraordinary archives housed in a 12 story building the combined collections of our partners the American Jewish Historical Society the American Safari Federation the Leo Beck Institute Yeshiva University Museum and the EVO Institute for Jewish research encompasses five miles of archival materials five dozen languages 500 years of history 50,000 digitized photographs 500 thousand books and thousands of artworks ritual objects recordings and films it is considered the world's largest and most comprehensive archive of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel and it's right here in Manhattan which brings us back to tonight's short talk big subject and the deceptive simplicity of covering 5778 years of Jewish history in 115 pages as David did in his book and in less than an hour as he will tonight it's a challenge and I suspect you are in for a treat so we'll have time for questions and answers at the conclusion of David's talk and I hope you'll join us for a reception and book signing in the Great Hall when the program is over David will begin in just a moment but first I'd like to introduce the Vice president and executive editor of Oxford University Press Nancy Toth [Applause] thank you very much Judy my assignment tonight is to give you a very short history of the very short introductions and then to become even shorter than I already am and sit down the series began life in the 1990s as a series of paperbacks called past masters which was edited by Sir Keith Thomas of the University of Oxford and these were surveys of the thought and writing of leading philosophers political figures and scientists aristotle darwin and so on in 1995 Oxford's UK office rebranded the series as the very short introductions or vs is and began to expand the title list to include concepts and fields of knowledge as well as people we now have three editors acquiring into the series one who does only science one in the UK and one in the u.s. doing everything else so this is the perfect job for someone like me who loved Curious George as a child grew up reading from one article to the next and a shiny new set of the World Book Encyclopedia and the child who grew up asking why is the sky blue turned into the curious adult who asks why are Mormons so interested in genealogy and could someone please define post-modernism so to plan the vsi list which is one of the most fun things I have done at 26 years at Oxford I put on my Diderot hat and I thought about how to organize all knowledge in a logical way in a series of little intellectual packages and of course every time we think we have the list nailed somebody comes up with another great idea we welcome suggestions for future volumes from both our authors and our readers and we've gotten some great ones borders apartheid and the Habsburg Empire are just a few of those we've also rejected a lot of them coconuts and Olivia newton-john come to mind and I'm a musicologist but then I get to think about if say I want to know something about Zionism or populism or ritual or crime fiction or teeth or ethnomusicology who is the expert that I would most like to consult and can that person accomplish the task in thirty five thousand words or Die and I am the enforcer I'm meaner than I look well in the case of Jewish history the choice of author was easy few people have as broad a grasp and as sensible a worldview as David Myers and as I do with all vsi authors I urged him not only to convey information but to write the book in a manner that tells the reader what excites him about his field and that is what he will do tonight so I'm very pleased to introduce the very tall David Myers for a very short introduction to Jewish history thank you [Applause] thank you very much Nancy and thank you very much beauty for your very kind words I just turned on my stopwatch for the first time ever in a lecture at 60 minutes so we're off and running and I'm gonna jump right in I shouldn't tarry by asking myself the question why would I undertake such a foolhardy task as writing the entire history of the Jews in 100 pages in 35,000 words and I think they're really three answers to that question first because when Nancy tuff comes to ask you it's very hard to say no now the fact of the matter is that I produce this text in about two months but I was five years late so that's the I suppose downside to the story but Nancy has unique powers of persuasion and I immediately recognized the exciting challenge and and decided to take it on and this is the result the second reason is because of this person I had the extraordinary privilege of studying with the great Jewish historian of the latter half of the 20th century professor Yosef can you tell me who may be known to some of you professor who shall me had a remarkable span of erudition and wrote prose with a kind of lyrical magic but he insisted that his students not specialize in one period of Jewish history or one country in the wide-ranging Jewish historical experience but rather be familiar with every period of Jewish history um most of us came up far short of his wide-ranging knowledge all of us in fact did but nonetheless in a certain sense this book is a tribute to Professor who Shawnee and his universal command of Jewish history the third reason why I undertook to write this book is because I have the great privilege of studying one of the most remarkable historical experiences known to mankind which is to say the story of the Jews and like many of you I have often pondered the unlikely survival of this people and I thought that this was really an opportunity to begin to try to answer the question of how did the Jews survive what is it that set them apart from other peoples many of whom were much more powerful than they as they made their journey from the ancient Near East to all parts of the world and so this got me thinking now of course there was a very traditional explanation for how the Jews survived and that is that they forged a covenant with God and God intervened and protected them at many points in their history and I must confess from my perspective tonight as an historian I can neither confirm nor deny that particular explanation I have over the course of my own study of this remarkable people and its remarkable journey through history fastened on to two causal explanations two explanations for the Jewish survival I wouldn't suggest that they're the only two but they are two that really seemed to me compelling and they're highly unlikely causes of survival namely anti-semitism and assimilation commonly seen as sources for the demise of the Jews I argue and will try to convince you tonight and in the book that I've published that in fact they have been causes for the survival of the Jews especially when seen in tandem with one another now I have to articulate a caveat very early on which is to say anti-semitism in non-lethal doses because of course anti-semitism which has been a constant force accompanying the Jews throughout their historical journey has assumed lethal proportions and at that point it is no longer a preservative force but in non-lethal doses anti-semitism together with assimilation or acculturation I believe have actually helped to hone the remarkable adaptive capacity of the Jews to respond to new circumstances and environments with creativity and ingenuity all right that's an underlying perhaps the underlying thesis of the book you have it for those of you who want to leave now you can do so I'm going to continue by trying to make this argument by pointing to four revolutions that I believe have shaped the Jewish historical experience which I put before you now and I'm going to jump right in with the first the theological revolution which transpired the theological revolution that was the advent of monotheism which developed within the uniquely fertile cultural and political environment of the ancient Near East a region known for a particularly distinctive form of religious expression polytheism belief in multiple gods and what emerged out of that polytheistic environment in the form of a new religious expression was something that came to be known to us as monotheism its bearers we're a small and often scattered group of people who first may have become known to us as a desert nomadic tribe that we refer to as the Habiru or the peru from which we get the term Hebrew who later became known as the Israelites as we will see but who nonetheless stood out by virtue of their belief in this idea of a single all-powerful God an idea that set them apart from other peoples indeed other great peoples the Mesopotamians the Babylonians the Hittites in the ancient Near East how and when did this idea come about that is a scuf that is a question that has perplexed scholars many associated with one of the great patriarchal figures of biblical religion before we get to Abram we'll get to a later figure Moses in circa thirteen fourteenth century BCE who is the person who is believed according to traditional and many scholarly approaches to have given the clearest expression to the idea of monotheism some scholars and amateur scholars as well as professional happen to believe that Moses was in fact not born of Jewish or Israelite descent but rather was himself an Egyptian who drew this new idea from the surrounding culture of 14th century Egypt the most significant person who advanced this thesis was of course Sigmund Freud in his book Moses in monotheism but in addition to those who believed that the original inspiration came from Moses a view held by the great Israeli biblical scholar Yael Kaufman and Freud's view about the Egyptian nosov Moses scholars have tried to take a longer view of the evolution of this idea and extended it back to the 19th or 20th centuries BCE an era in which according to the traditional account the founding patriarch of Israelite religion Abraham lived and what they've happened to come up with is not the view that in the time of Abraham as it were about whom we have no historical or archaeological evidence to support his existence so in the era of the mythic Abraham they surmised that there was a form of religion that was somewhat between polytheism and monotheism that they refer to as manometry a kind of belief in a pantheon of gods but one of whom was significantly superior to the others and so according to that skali account which I find persuasive there was a kind of evolution in the idea of monotheism from let's say 1900 BCE to 1300 of the that same era BCE from the time of the mythic Abraham to the time of Moses mo Abraham's grandson Jacob was the person with whom we associate the virgins of the actual designation Israelite so Jacob as we know according to the biblical account engaged in a struggle with an angel of God in the aftermath of which he was renamed from Jacob to Isla an one who struggles with God and the children of Jacob became known to us as the children of Israel benissa el or the Israelites and it's from that point that we have that designation and so we refer to the new religious idea that emerges out of the ancient near east as Israelite monotheism and it was in fact Jacob who according to the traditional account supported by some scholars who went down from the land of Canaan to Egypt to escape famine and there the children of Israel were enslaved for an extended period as much as 400 years it is there that they met up with their new unwitting and unsuspecting and an unwilling at certain points leader Moses who developed over the course of time boasts the courage and the voice to lead his people out of the condition of slavery to which they had been subjected over hundreds of years in the act of Exodus as they escaped Egypt commemorated during the Jewish holiday of Passover so at this point in time in our account we must say two things one we're not certain that we have actual corroborating historical archaeological evidence for anything that I've mentioned to date nothing about Abraham and relatively little about about even about Moses and in an Israelite presence in Egypt or for that matter of the exodus itself at the same time we have very powerful myths that have survived from antiquity into the present and two very powerful myths are one the myth or historical existence depending on one's perspective of Exodus liberation from bondage in each as Moses led the Israelites into freedom first in the Sinai desert and then to the brink of entry into the land of Canaan and then the second idea is the idea of monotheism so exodus and monotheism two ideas which actually come come together create a kind of braided fabric around a single idea which was the idea that was actually institutionalized in the act of revelation at Mount Sinai and that is the idea of chosen as' the idea that this people was uniquely protected by God granted a unique set of Commandments of laws and laws at Mount Sinai and was uniquely subject to the Providence of an all-powerful being and that's where we begin to get into the first of our causal explanations the very idea of monotheism lent to the Israelites a sense of chosen as' alternatively good say that we were adopting the traditional perspective God chose the Israelites but nonetheless at a certain point in time the Israelites came to believe that they were the chosen people of God this led to a significant degree of separation from other polytheistic peoples of the ancient Near East a sense of exclusivity and here we have to encounter where we have to consider the views of the great 17th century Dutch Jewish renegade who was pictured before you Benedictus Varro's Spinoza who came upon a interesting revelation of his own in the third chapter of the theological political treatise when he reviewed this very sequence that you have before you of monotheism leading to chosen this leading to separation or sense of exclusivity leading to Gentile hostility and resentment towards the Jew and then Spinoza adds the final piece to this sequence which is to say that very Gentile hostility validated again the sense of Jewish distinctiveness in a certain sense reinforced the Jews own sense of being unique and apart that is to say Gentile anti-semitism to use an anachronistic term because that term as we'll see develops much later becomes a preservative force becomes a force that that fortifies the Jews sense of distinctiveness and this is a way in which we can see anti-semitism as a preservative force but that's only one half of the story and I want to spend a little bit of time as we move quickly along to the other half of the story Jews Israelites in antiquity and from that point forward always found themselves in the presence of large non-jewish populations they almost always were a small minority in a large Gentile society as you see before you there were a number of exceptions to that the first Temple period that begins in the 10th century BCE and ends in the 6th century BCE but then picks up again almost 70 years later the Second Temple period that comes to a crashing end in the year 70 CE II or ad and then the modern State of Israel these are three exceptions to the rule that Jews exist in conditions of subjection to a Gentile majority that they are a minority dwelling in a majority state and the interesting question to pose at this point is what guarantees their survival given the distinctiveness of their of their religious belief and the resulting ritual practices that emerge out of that monotheistic Creed which come to be known as the oral law and further distinguishes Jews from others what guarantees their survival and we can see from antiquity already the emergence of an interesting power dynamic that some have referred to as the triangle of power or the Royal Lights the triangle of power posits the existence of three legs the sovereign the political ruler the populace and the Jews who stand apart and have ongoing daily relations with both the general populace and the sovereign and because they stand aside and because they are the subject of enmity over the course of time they require the protection of the sovereign already from antiquity we can see the emergence of what you shall me and others called the royal alliance of the Jews their tendency to align themselves with the sovereign with political power as a means of survival this isn't to say that on a daily basis Jews find themselves subject to murderous anti-semitism they do not jews find themselves from antiquity in the midst of gentile societies interacting with gentiles in the marketplace particularly as well as in surrounding institutions at the same time there are certainly moments in the course of this otherwise somewhat peaceable existence in which resentment boils over and is directed at Jews or even further back Israelites sometimes but rarely stoked by the sovereign as a way of deflecting attention away from his or her own incompetence or greed but nonetheless for the most part Jews from antiquity align themselves with political power and dwell within Gentile societies reasonably peaceably reasonably peaceably which is to say apart from Gentile society but also at the same time interacting in the marketplace and on a ceaseless basis drawing upon the cultural norms and practices of the host society and this is where we get to the second causal explanation elation or acculturation it has always been the case that Jews wherever they dwell dwelt under conditions of a minority people and a majority society have interacted with and absorbed from the Gentile population in their host societies and this process of adaptation of negotiation of exchange of absorption of acculturation has been a source of rejuvenation repeatedly perhaps the prototype for this form of rejuvenation is the example of the first century philosopher Philo from the largest Jewish city and for that matter city in the world in this period Alexandria in Egypt which had fallen from the fourth century under the control of the Greeks and which which was very much permeated with a Greek cultural and intellectual sensibility which the Jews of Alexandria absorbed quite expansively Philo is significant to us because I would argue without the adaptation of biblical Judaism that he undertook Jews as we know them would not exist today Philo took a primal form of Judaism with a very pronounced anthropomorphic sense of God and transformed it into a philosophically sophisticated religious system without that transformation Judaism would have become ossified and this endeavor by Philo was undertaken not through the abandonment of Jewish ritual practice or observance Philo himself remained a fully observant Jew according to the norms of the day it's probably the case that he did not know or speak Hebrew his Judaism his observant Judaism was refracted through the prism of Greek culture and and he undertook this transformation as a result of existing in the midst of a Gentile society of which he was to an a certain extent a important part he participated in the important philosophical debates of the day he had non-jewish colleagues with whom he interacted on a regular basis and at the same time it's important to note he also was subject to anti-jewish hostility on occasion but nonetheless it's his interaction with the Greek culture of first century Alexandria and his remarkable transformation of biblical Judaism into a philosophically sophisticated form of religion that suggests to us this process of what we might call assimilation and here I must confess that this is not an original usage I'm borrowing the language of the great near contemporary historian Gershon Cohen former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary who undertook in 1966 a very daring act he was asked to deliver a commencement address to a group of future Jewish educators and he entitled his talk the blessing of assimilation in Jewish history you can only imagine what the parents thought about the investment of money in their children's education what did Cohen have in mind he had in mind exactly this idea of ongoing adaptation that assured the continued rejuvenation of Jewish culture the extending of tentacles into the culture of the host society and then the bringing back of those host of those cultural values and casting them in a Jewish frame Cohn made the very important observation that although the ancients believed that Jews survived because they resisted assimilation because they did not adapt the names the language the dress habits the broader social norms of the surrounding environment in almost every instance that he could point to Jews did absorb the names the language and the habits now it's interesting to note in contemporary society traditionally Orthodox or karate Jews often refer to the acronym Chelan as a symbol of a kind of guard against assimilation in the modern world the idea is that by resisting the absorption of Shen of name michonne language Mel bouche dress norms Jews have survived over the ages Gershon Cohn makes exactly the opposite point and I think he's right to a great extent it's precisely because of the absorption of cultural norms that Judaism was rejuvenated on so many occasions and was able to maintain this remarkable mosaic of cultural images to a point of course assimilation or acculturation can reach a point of no return and of course that's where anti-semitism emerges in the story because anti-semitism served to mark out limits to demarcate the point beyond which Jews might have extended and disappeared so these two forces assimilation and anti-semitism already from antiquity worked in tandem with one another not knowingly it wasn't as if there was an agent of assimilation who called up the agent of anti-semitism said I think it's now time to get started but nonetheless these two forces have interacted in constant fashion without Jewishness throughout Jewish history and a short ironically enough the survival of that remarkable people okay let's go back to the first century of the Common Era a remarkable period in time one of those periods to which I would love to have been transported a period of intense fractious Ness cultural innovation apocalypticism and a period in which we see the emergence of two very important world forces out of the embers of second temple Judaism I'm referring to Christianity which emerged out of that Jewish movement that fouled the folk healer named Jesus and rabbinic Judaism oftentimes Judaism is seen as the parent of Christianity I like suggest here following a number of scholars that we think of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism as siblings of the same Second Temple parent these two forces arose in constant interaction and tension with one another but there again they interacted if only to differentiate themselves from one another and when Christianity took the pace the path of universal religion of the spirit rabbinic Judaism took the path of a particular tradition devoted to exploitation of the law now we often have the sense that that rabbinic Judaism fell into a pattern of Qasr witih chol wordplay and failed to grasp grand principles and I wouldn't adopt that view of romantic Judaism rabbinic Judaism did a kind of parallel move to Philo's philosophical intervention it rendered far more sophisticated legal and theological content concepts rooted in the Bible and did so with tremendous interpretive tremendous hermeneutical sophistication and nuance and out of the rabbinic the rabbinical project emerged a fully formed oral law that at a certain point in time actually assumed written form and first in in the framework of the Mishnah and then following that the to tell mats the Babylonian and Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud so rabbinic Judaism itself in part through its polemical engagement with Christianity redefines Judaism in ways that assure yet another mode of of Jewish cultural existence and again it's that sequential that sequencing of Jewish cultural innovation that is both remarkable in its own right and a key to the survival of the but let's not overstate the case because the relationship between Judaism and Christianity from the first century was also very fraught these two children of Second Temple Judaism were fierce rivals and the rivalry took a very significant turn in the fourth century in the early fourth century of the Common Era when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and embraced Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire and that really altered the balance of power between these two forces this is particularly significant because it's important to note that Christianity not only bored degree of resentment against Judaism as the parent religion not only because it believes that Judaism had in a certain sense lost the spiritual mantle of true monotheism but because Christians held Jews responsible for the gravest crime imaginable namely deicide the death of the Christian God Jesus so when Constantine converts to Christianity an assumed state power there now are very real consequences for Jews living in Christian realms from this point forward Jews are subjected to discriminatory legislation they're prevented from building new synagogues they're prevented from reading some of their holy books and of course this new political arrangement raises for us a very significant question why if Christians have political power do they not exact the ultimate revenge or for that matter deliver the ultimate punishment for the gravest capital crime the crime of deicide and it's in the same century and a little bit later in the fifth century that the Church Fathers debate this question and arrive at an answer and most significant here is the great figure patristic figure church father st. Augustine who develops the idea that the Jews should be preserved because they are the essential witnesses to the second coming of Jesus Christ who if not they who had spurned Jesus should be the second the witnesses to the second coming and st. Augustine elaborates and says now the fact that the Jews should be preserved doesn't mean that they should be accorded luxurious accommodations they may be kept in a state of debasement but they should be preserved and so we have from this point forward really a theological writ justifying preserving juice in a debased state and this stands alongside the regular ongoing interactions between Jews and Christians in the marketplace particularly where theological differences oftentimes took a backseat we have this mix from this point forward of hostility and normalcy a similar relationship I should add also obtains between Judaism and Islam though the nature of that relationship is less fraught than it is between Judaism Christianity the familial connection is less direct than between Judaism and Christianity and perhaps we can talk about that in the Q&A as we make our way into the Middle Ages we see that this dynamic of hostility and normalcy this dynamic of the constant presence of a theological anti Judaism and normal everyday life which allows for Jews not only to interact in the marketplace but to absorb cultural norms from the surrounding society continues and in fact even in the most seemingly isolated of Jewish communities in Jewish history medieval Ashkenazi northern France and Germany we see a kind of subterranean exchange of cultural values and I should note it was not a one-way street Jews absorbed from Christians ritual norms and practices and Christians absorbed from Jews ritual norms and practices often in unarticulated fashion never by exchanging a word merely by by contiguity by osmosis by this regular daily contact in the marketplace and that unacknowledged cultural exchange was yet another form of what we might call this particularly distinct form of assimilation but again it's important that alongside enmity that served as that demarcate err that marker that may have discouraged for example a jew from becoming even more friendly to a Christian maybe even to considering conversion and that was the deep-rooted theological enmity that I mentioned before that took on very pronounced iconographic form in the Middle Ages Jews were often represented in Christian literature in very colorful and quite diabolical imagery Jews were cast as satanic as possessing tails and horns as resembling pigs an interesting inversion of the jewish revulsion for pigs in the Middle Ages and here in the top right we have one of the most familiar images seen throughout churches in Europe ecclesia on one hand and synagogue on the other church and synagogue ecclesia on the left upright holding a staff looking on proudly synagogue a' blinded looking down spurned this kind of representation is frequently found in churches throughout medieval Europe and indeed it reflected that very deep theological hostility and yet it's important to note as the teacher of my teacher the greatest Jewish historian arguably of the 20th century professor cell a Barone of Columbia University depicted on the on the bottom right Esmeraude noted in his famous article from 1928 ghetto and emancipation we should not succumb to an excessively laquer most conception or theory of Jewish history an exceptionally mournful or tearful view of Jewish history especially in the Middle Ages because the condition of the average medieval Jew was significantly better barone notes than the condition of a typical non Jew and particularly a serf Jews were protected oftentimes with explicit charters or privileges known as privilege yet they were called upon to assume in exchange for those privileges certain financial tasks that were dangerous but lucrative like money lending tax farming liquor production and distribution these were dangerous vocations but nonetheless lucrative once and so Jews very often had a better economic status than non-jews and a protected legal status as a result of the charters and privileges they were accorded okay what I did to note is that Philo embodied the second revolution that I want to talk about the Cultural Revolution that process of constant cultural exchange interaction and rejuvenation now we are going to make our way to the third of the four revolutions that I want to speak of and that is the secular revolution which we could associate with figures in the 17th century but I will for the sake of facility I will I will refer to this revolution as unfolding in the 18th century the 18th century the great Age of Enlightenment the age when philosophers sought to throw off the yoke of traditional ecclesiastical Authority when philosophers sought to discover explanations for the world that did not rely on traditional religious texts the age of Reason which suggested that every human being was possessed of the capacity to understand the word the world rationally and this I should note especially as it emerges in the last quarter of the 18th century occasioned a problem or the new secular philosophers and the problem was if indeed we believe this idea that everybody has possessed in the capacity of human reason what do we do with the Jews because for so long we have understood them as theologically other as irredeemably other as dirtier as less cultured as theologically wrongheaded what do we do now that we hold to the belief that all human human beings are possessed of the capacity for reason this was the great problem of many philosophers especially in the 1780s and one of the most significant figures to emerge out of this discourse is arguably the first modern Jew who is depicted here the great German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn picture depicted on the left and we have in the collection of the Leo Beck Institute here at the Center for Jewish history this statue on the right which is one but only one reason why you should come to the Center for Jewish history not just for lectures like this Mendelssohn argued that in fact the Jew was perfectly capable of enlightenment and reason and there was nothing in Jewish tradition that prevented him or her from achieving the requisite state of enlightenment and in fact Judaism should enter as a co-equal with Christianity into this new enlightened world but not everybody believed that including some who regarded themselves as Friends of the Jews one of the most interesting of these friends of the Jews or I should say one of the most interesting statements about this condition from a putative friend of the Jew came from a delicate to the French National Assembly in 1789 as you may recall in the summer of 1789 the French National Assembly throws up off the yoke of the Olsen regime and announces the declaration of the rights of men and here again the question arose but does that apply to Jews that was actually the question posed right so deeply ingrained was that sense of Jewish other alongside the Jews familiarity that the question was posed does that apply to Jews and in the midst of the debate the particular and specific debate dedicated to the question of does the declarations of the rights of men apply to the Jews in December 1789 one young delegate by the name of Clermont till now who was later defenestrated stood up and said the following which in a certain sense is a credo of the Jewish entry into modernity nothing to the Jews as a nation everything to them as individuals this became what we might call the social contract of emancipation the social contract of the secular Revolution which demanded that the drew Jew strip away the distinctive features of his or her religious and cultural heritage and enter into enlightened society as a human being shorn of the particularity of of his or her Jewishness this foursome was a welcome message one famous French Jew said we should in fact divest ourselves of that narrow spirit of corporation and community and enter into society as Frenchmen another figure in fact one of the chief disciples of Moses Mendelssohn in Germany a man by the name of David Friedlander wrote a letter to a prostitue trying to really take to heart this idea that Jews needed to made make serious modifications in order to be eligible for enlightened emancipated society and he said Herr pastor we will make all the changes we need to make we will convert to Christianity we will present ourselves comport ourselves as good Christians on one condition that we not be required to accept any Christian dogma including an especially belief in Jesus Christ pastor teller said thank you very much for your letter I think this is not going to work out and this came to be known as Friedlander's dry baptist and attempts to gain entry into hugely secular enlightened European society but a world in which Christianity continued to serve as a marker of social identity and this is an important message to convey that when we talk about a secular era when we talk about secularization we are not talking about the disappearance of religion we are talking about the transformation of religion and in fact that's what occurred in late 18th and early 19th century Western and Central Europe this persistence of Christianity as a marker of social identity led some juice to take the step of conversion in order not to become full believing Christians in the first instance but really to gain a measure of social validation and indeed throughout the 19th century we know that Jews convert in significant numbers but a much larger number seek to assimilate in language in dress norms in food habits without converting but by significantly diluting their Judaism in part and in fact in large measure as a way of integrating into European society as a way of really achieving a comfortable form of assimilation they're constantly sent the message that it's not enough that indeed they remain different and when we make our way to the 1870s we have a very concerted decade of discourse and debate over again over what to do with the Jews because thinkers philosophers intellectuals and activists began to ask anew can the Jews be assimilated into European society indeed it's in this decade that we see the very emergence for the first time of the term anti-semitism I've used the term at various points throughout the evening somewhat inaccurate anachronistically it actually emerges for the first time in the 1870s from the mouth of the person depicted here a German journalist by the name of Vilhelm Mao who created the League of anti-semites as he called it in 1879 and why we might ask if Jews were so intent on assimilating into the European society if they no longer spoke Yiddish if they no longer held to the dietary regulations of traditional Judaism if they no longer dressed in ways that set them apart why well Maur said something quite remarkable it's not the Jew who is outwardly different from us who concerns us it is the Jew who can no longer be visibly identified who is the gravest danger which suggests to us that the structural function of the Jew as scapegoat maintains itself well into the modern era well into the secular era the secular era which promised so much to the Jew still featured this powerful but new form of anti-semitism drawing on traditional anti Judaism but different in one important regard and the great German Jewish thinker honey Arendt put her finger on it she said from Judaism the traditional religion one could escape through conversion from Jewishness that more diluted form of Jewish identity that we see in the 19th century there was no escape and what she had in mind was Mars discovery along with a number of colleagues of the fundamental feature of Jewish difference in the modern age it wasn't religion any longer it now was race and race could not be eradicated in a radical difference in the form of race we could talk about how race emerges as a significant feature in in European society of this time but it's interesting just to track this attempt by Jews from the late 18th century to assimilate and realize the grand promise of enlightenment only to be told as they cross the threshold of the new edifice of enlightenment that they could not gain full entry it was literally crazy-making and produced a lot of neuroses on the part of Jews and at the same time that hybrid status of the Jew was crazy-making for Gentiles who feared that they could no longer identify their traditional enemy the traditional enemy of Christian Europe and it is in part as a result of that hybrid status though also far more significantly a result of very significant social and political instability in the 1870s that anti-semitism emerges Jews are if nothing else a highly adaptive group and indeed they adapted once again to the rise of anti-semitism in the late 18th century Jews expected with great expectation to be emancipated expected with enthusiasm to be emancipated by the late 19th century Jews began to say we can no longer wait for European enlightened European rulers to emancipate us we in the face of anti-semitism must emancipate ourselves and thus begins the fourth and final revolution that I want to talk about tonight the political revolution of the Jews very much associated with Jewish nationalism of which there were many strains the most important of which was Zionism it's important to note that in 1882 a Russian doctor by the name of Leon Pinsker wrote a treatise entitled Auto emancipation now we must emancipate ourselves and that became a foundation for the first wave of emigration from the Russian Empire to the Land of Israel which commences the modern known as Zionism even before we have the name Zionism so in the early 1880s the first wave of Zionist Aliyah or immigration to Palestine occurs and we don't get the term Zionism until the early 1890s and it isn't until 1896 seven that we have the first articulated form of what comes to be known as political Zionism very much associated with a figure on your right Theodore Herzl who authors in a frenetic fit in 1895 six a treatise known as the Jewish state or the state of the Jews what prompted him to do so well he was present in Paris in 1894 when a French Jewish army captained by the name of Alfred Dreyfus was accused of espionage and subjected to a humiliating trial which became really an occasion for pro-democratic and anti-democratic forces to spill out into the streets and Herzl heard in the streets of Paris the very place where Jews were emancipated for the first time in 17 1991 shouts death to the Jews and he thought the year of emancipation is over we must now emancipate ourselves and he undertook in this and this fit of frenzy to author treatise calling upon Jews to create a state of their own and indeed that idea was transplanted from Europe from the first honest Congress in Basel Switzerland in the summer of 1897 to Palestine in the first decades of the early 20th century where sinus settlers encountered another population native to the land with which it engaged in a protracted struggle that culminated in a war 1948 in which the Jewish or Zionist side emerged victorious and at that point we had for the first time in 2000 years the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the form of the State of Israel and epic and monumental moment in the history of the Jews and indeed to a great extent the fulfillment of that political revolution but I want to conclude as I have 11 minutes left by noting that Jewish politics was not confined to the Zionist project or to the Zionist presence in Palestine and later the creation of the State of Israel Jews survived to a great extent throughout history by developing a very particular form of political acumen that allowed them to adapt and respond to crisis and challenge repeatedly they did so through the royal alliance they did so by establishing very strong forms of community that were accorded rights of autonomy by by the rulers who were the partners in the royal lines and they did so by really developing finely-tuned sensors to alert them to danger and to the importance of moving away from danger and relocating and immersing themselves anew in a new culture and are undergoing that process of rejuvenation to the point that a recent contemporary historian who just came out with a massive new book on one apartment building in Moscow by name is yours les Caen wrote a book that now must be ten years old called the Jewish century in which he describes Jews as the paradigmatic moderns by virtue of that capacity to move in fleet form from context to context ever adapting acquiring multiple languages on the way and the ability to adjust to new circumstance in that regard Jews in a certain sense adumbrated modernity they anticipated modernity and then became its foremost exemplars and they did so through a political acumen and savvy that were developed over centuries of movement acculturation and anti-jewish hostility and this brings me to the final slide which is having spent 50 minutes talking about the history of the Jews I now must conclude by asking about the future of the Jews what will be and here I'm reminded of the famous line of my one of my favorite Jewish thinkers about whom I wrote a book man by the name of Shimon Davidovich who who wrote a 900-page book called bevelle Volusia Lyon Babylon and Jerusalem about his belief in the importance of two main centers of Jewish culture throughout history but 1949 he wrote a he wrote an essay called Israel or the Jewish people and ever dying people in which he said in every generation Jews predict that they are the last chain in the link in the chain over and over again and I take some solace in the in Ravi dova chah's point that this prediction has been repeated over and over again I would say that in fact when I began to write this book I believed that we were making our way to an era in which anti-semitism at least in America would disappear and I pondered the question without that dynamic that I mentioned at the outset between assimilation or acculturation and anti-semitism what would guarantee the survival of the Jews I regret to say that we seem not yet to be at that point where I can pose that hypothetical and though I certainly certainly do not advise or counsel the recurrence or persistence of anti-semitism I am confident that the Jews will continue into the future on this remarkable historical journey that I've tried to outline over the course of the past 55 minutes thank you very much for your time and now I'll be delighted to take any questions you might have yes please Oh you know the woman behind you and then I'll go to you if you don't mind yeah I saw her first but you'll be second throughout the centuries Jews have tried to go back to the land of Israel and it was not the first one to try to do so so okay can you comment on the right with the other attempts the question was throughout history Jews Jews have aspired to return to the land of Israel Herzl was not the first can I comment yeah I would say the impulse of what is known in hebrew as Shevat seoane the return to Zion has been intoned in daily liturgy by Jews of the course of millennia and it has been a very persistent constant aspiration at various points in time well before Herzl in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Jews did pick up and move to the Land of Israel sometimes they did so in order to discharge the Mitzvah or commandment of being buried in the Land of Israel and sometimes they did so because they believed that they were in the vanguard of a messianic movement because the return to the Land of Israel is very much associated with messiness and Judaism the end of Gentile subjugation of the Land of Israel is seen as a sign or as an important criterion of the rival of the Messiah and we know of many movements of Jews to the Land of Israel over the course small groups to the Land of Israel as part of their own messianic quest and again we also know of it's the embeddedness of that impulse in Jewish liturgy ritual and culture more generally such that Herzl had to in a certain sense activate what was somewhat dormant impulse normal s1 that was not too deeply beneath the surface yeah so after this after after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 there was indeed a movement of Jews to the Ottoman Empire in the first instance the Ottoman Sultan said of Ferdinand and Isabella the Spanish monarchs responsible for the expulsion these fools have enriched my kingdom a thousandfold and in fact one of the places that Jews settled in the sprawling Ottoman Empire was in a northern Palestine town of Safa dort spot which became the center of a remarkable efflorescence of Jewish spiritual practice known as Kabbalah we can talk a lot more about that but I know there other questions yes sir I'm sorry did all Jews to be a Jew is to express some Jewishness and you mentioned that the element of anti of of integration to other assimilation there's always going to be an inherent conflict how can you may you know sort of expand on that that there seems to be the basic conflict between Jewishness and you can't get rid of your Jewishness and yet you're still trying to do a you know accomplishes some level of a similar they similarly so the question is how can I make sense of this idea of Jewishness which would seem to be by borrowing Hannah Arendt's language a more diluted form of Jewish identity than that which was found in pre-modern societies and I guess what I would say is that one of the characteristic features of Jewish identity in the modern era the ER in which this new entity Jewishness emerges is that it rests on a negative criterion prior to the modern era Jews had a holistic community a very particular set of ritual practices and steadfast faith in God many of those pillars begin to dissipate or become a Visser ated in the modern age what Jews do have is the persistence of anti-semitism and we hear accounts from rather assimilated Jews to take one example the aforementioned Sigmund Freud who makes his way to the University of Vienna as a young student and encounters anti-semitism in full form and says for the first time I really discovered that I was a Jew and then did what Jews do in such situations made his way to a Jewish self-defense group I'm in fact Jews very frequently in the modern age defined themselves as Jews by virtue of the presence of anti-semitism this is an insight that Spinoza offered up the French philosopher stole south don't pass out in anti-semite and Jew happened upon it they're also anti-semites who expressed it quite clearly the late 19th century Mayor of Vienna called waygu said it is I who determines who is a Jew so it's that kind of negative definition of Jewishness that I think undergirds this this idea that art was referring to it's no longer a robust faith or a commitment to the ritual practices of an observant Jew it is the recognition of the non Jew that you are different in ways that you cannot always define a kind of vague vague ethnic sense a vague sense of ethnic difference I think that's the foundation of this decidedly modern form of Jewishness thank you what I've learned from the talk tonight is the the focus on the status of what we've been for most of our history of people in diaspora people apart from the land of Israel my question is in the continuation of the historical journey looking at you know at us in America the The Fountainhead of diaspora jewelry here we are surrounded with a lot of love the the the anti-semitism of the white supremacist is is very different from from that of anti-semites of decades earlier they actually admire Israel and go to Israel Israel as a Jewish state we want to have a white supremacist state just the way they understand the Israel to be and from their land so my question is how do you see do you see a future for diaspora jewelry when we are surrounded in America with such love okay so the question was do I see a future for American jewelry in environments such as America which has achieved an unprecedented degree of the absence of anti-semitism notwithstanding the recent appearance of of white supremacism which ironically enough you note seems to have a pro-israel or pro-zionist view I think that's a reasonable question I guess I would say two things one I would never want to make a prediction arguing against the possible recurrence of anti-semitism because of one really important feature of it that I think helps to explain it's its durability and that is it's remarkable malleability its ability to assume multiple and even contradictory forms sometimes out of the same person's mouth Jews are our arch capitalists intent on global domination and revolutionary communists intent on global revolution right sometimes out of the same mouth so it does not abide the normal rules of philosophical consistency that we might adhere to and although it's my general view of America conforms to yours one can never tell in times of social and political instability it is empirically the case that forms of xenophobia group hatred and anti-semitism arise and who knows now having said that it looks like America is an outlier in the long annals of the Jews insofar as Jews have been accorded access to the highest echelons of society and have had a longer run without serious incident than any other Jewish community in history and this is in many respects it just should be said in unprecedented period and context in Jewish history if that remains the case and I suspect it will I think what it means in part is that the Jewish community of the United States will become smaller and more traditionally observant that the non-orthodox elements of the Jewish community which today comprise anywhere from 85 to 90% will become smaller that is to say without the constraining force of anti-semitism we have the assimilation and acculturation we may not have the constraining force of assimilation I think we will see a diminution of that that very large element of the pie today and growth relative and absolute in the observant Orthodox population so that's just one demo traffic prediction I'm a historian I can take luxury and predicting the past and I'm not so good at predicting the future it's the best I can do yeah I'd like to ask about the relationship of Jews and Palestinians in Israel and how you draw that into the story of Jewish history as you've told it it doesn't seem to be part of the various movements that you've talked about right well some of you know who know me I know nothing of these matters right it happened to be thank you for the reminder I happen to be speaking on precisely this issue this week Thursday night at Fordham University at 6:00 p.m. further details are to be found somewhere I don't know where that's that's a different hat I wear well you know I'm going to answer this question very about where do Palestinians fit into this dynamic by noting another exception to the Jewish historical experience if one exception be America as the site of unprecedented access for the Jew into a mainstream society then obviously the State of Israel is also an outlier in the experience of Jewish menorah terian existence because Jews become the sovereign and the majority and here I will just refer again to the person on the right side of the screen Simon Ravi Novick who wrote an essay that he never published in which he noted this important historical inversion he said once upon a time which is to say for thousands of years Jews were a beleaguered minority facing persecution from hosts majority societies he notes after 1948 Jews became the majority and now have to deal with the challenges of a minority within its midst referring to the Palestinian population within its myths they I take it that that's what you were referring to largely to be sure there's a wider Arab world in which Israel is deemed a foreign intrusion and that's a very significant challenge to be sure but Rafi doboj advice was we must bring with us as Jews the experience of being a beleaguered minority into our new status as the dominant majority and bring with us that that pain and and desire to be treated as an equal partner in society and I think that's an aspiration that can be found in Israel's Declaration of Independence and it's an aspiration that remains unrealized today but I think Ravi dovish and certain sense got it right in understanding the relationship between Israel and the Zionist the knight science movement and previous Jewish history he understood the inversion and he understood the ethical imperatives that accompanied it do have time for one more okay my friend Syd he's gonna trick question at me David thank you so much for this wonderful talk I'd like to ask you a question about the Center for Jewish history in light of your lightning summary of many thousand years of Jewish history here we are at a unique place in America the 21st century what is your vision as the new head of the Center for Jewish history as to what we together can do to what good can we do together I've never met this man before thank you very much said well that's known as a softball thank you well first of all I just want to say what I want to reiterate what an extraordinary privilege it is to be here but really what an extraordinary privilege it is to be able to study Jewish history my teacher professor who saw me as I often say transformed the study of Jewish history from black and white to the most explosively polychromatic of tones and indeed he got that right because Jewish history he's in a certain sense world history it spans the entirety almost the entirety of civilized human existence and every corner of the world this my friends is not only a temple to the study of Jewish history it is the world's greatest repository of sources related to Jewish history in Chelsea on 16th Street we have a shared obligation to cultivate nurture and communicate the importance of Jewish history so in the first instance I really feel a sense of almost sacred obligation to transmit Jewish history to assure that the chain of transmission continues for this extraordinary world civilization in the second instance I think we happen to be in a moment of history a moment that demands historical accounting a moment at which we ask ourselves how did we get where we are history comes to tell us and I feel that the Center for Jewish history with its extraordinary resources must be that place that conveys to the general public what history has to tell Jewish history in the 20th century has a lot to tell us about the early 21st century and we need to develop ways to reach ever wider publics in this building outside of this building digitally and in every way possible and we are doing that by trying to introduce programs such as this that communicate the importance of history and I'm very pleased to tell you that we're about to launch a whole series of programs this week and next week so for example tomorrow night we begin our first names series which brings people of renown to talk about their own personal Jewish history we begin tomorrow night with the renowned author Tova Mervis next Tuesday night we begin I happen to have props the history matters series which brings historians of renown to talk about how the past has an impact on the present so next Tuesday night here we will feature professor Deborah Lipstadt talking about anti-semitism past and present what else do I have in my bag of tricks the very short introduction series continues with some wonderful some wonderful people delivering a history of the world in an hour and we're introducing our own continuing education courses on February 6 the first session of a new course entitled radical Jewish politics will begin and the teacher is my dear friend professor Shama gate in the third row so who deserves applause if you have any questions if you're interested please go talk to Shah all should be a wonderful a wonderful evening and finally my final prop is this very important piece of literature if you share with me a belief in the importance of Jewish history if you share with me a belief in the remarkable tale parts of which I have just told if you share with me a belief in the importance of history then we invite you to be partners in our work together we are constantly in search of new partners pick up a donation card on your way out fill it out to the fullness of your pocket this evening and I look forward to seeing all of you at the reception outside where I'd be happy to sign copies of this book thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Center for Jewish History

Views: 40,604

Keywords: David N. Myers, Center for Jewish History, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction, yt:cc=on

Id: JnLjzba_NUs

Length: 81min 6sec (4866 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018