The Conundrum of Historical Consciousness

Jacob Neusner

Copyright (c) 1995 First Things 55 (August/September 1995): 55-57.

From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism. By Ismar Schorsch. University Press of New England. 403 pp. $39.95.

In this collection of twenty-one free-standing essays, Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and a principal voice of Conservative Judaism, treats topics connected with the advent of historical study as a medium of Judaic theological discourse, or, in his language, "historical consciousness in Modern Judaism." He credits the main figures, Leopold Zunz and Heinrich Graetz, with creating "a historical consciousness that could serve as a base for a voluntaristic and secular Jewish community." Reform and what we now know as Conservative Judaism founded their theological systems on the primacy of historical data.





He adduces ample testimony to that fact when he presents as "evidence for the formative role of Jewish history in the shaping of the multiple identities of modern Jews" such data as "the role of the Maccabees, Masada, and archaeology in Israeli culture, or the grip of the Holocaust on the contemporary American Jewish scene." The same argument would point to the celebration of the Torah in synagogue worship as an act of historical consciousness of Sinai, or of the celebration of the Lord's Supper as an act of mere mimesis. But for the Israelis the mythopoeic power of Masada derives not from the study of history but the utilization of history for political myth, and the Holocaust forms a principal component for secular Jewish ideology for quite other than narrowly academic, historical considerations. In both cases the past serves because it contributes events ripped out of context, not because the past imposes a philosophy of history, a proportionate and cogent statement of beginnings, middles, and endings that could validate the claim that historicism has triumphed. Past events serve theological or ideological purposes without necessarily attesting to the presence of historical consciousness at all.

While stressing what was novel, Schorsch goes still further when he alleges that "historical consciousness was always the substratum of Jewish identity." This defines the theme of the twenty-one essays collected in the book: historical scholarship and the scholars that produced it. Such an allegation, vital to the book as a whole, would have surprised the sages of Judaism from the formative age to the nineteenth century (and the vast majority of Jewish sages in the world today), who speak not of "Judaism" but of "the Torah," and for whom "the Torah" stands in judgment upon history. That is because the Torah- a.k.a., "Judaism"-speaks out of eternity into time. To its statements, historical facts prove monumentally irrelevant, and historians' allegations as to what "really" happened or did not happen-and that is what Schorsch celebrates as historicism-have no consequences whatsoever for the Torah.

The issue concerns the place of historical fact in the formulation of theological truth. Many of the scholars cited by Schorsch take for granted that "Judaism" is a "historical religion" and rests on an interpretation of historical fact. Their position takes shape in their reading of Scripture. Specifically, the Hebrew Scriptures of ancient Israel, all modern scholarship concurs, set forth Israel's life as history, with a beginning, middle, and end; a purpose and a coherence; a teleological system. All accounts agree that Scriptures distinguished past from pres-ent, present from future, and composed a sustained narrative, made up of one-time, irreversible events. All maintain that, in Scripture's historical portrait, Israel's present condition appealed for explanation to Israel's past, perceived as a coherent sequence of weighty events, each unique, all formed into a great chain of meaning. But that historicist reading violates the position of the Torah, oral and written, which at no point submits questions of theological truth to the judgment of historical fact. "Judaism" may be "a historical religion," but for those who live life within the Torah, the world is framed by other-than-historical boundaries.






Alas, it is in the nature of a collection of essays to leave us wanting more in one spot, less in another. For Schorsch's book skirts these urgent issues; only one essay among the score, "The Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Modern Judaism," actually addresses the "turn to history." The others, being reprinted journal articles, treat conventional historical subjects, but not historical consciousness, e.g., "The Emergence of the Modern Rabbinate," "Jewish Academics at Prussian Universities," "Art as Social History: Moritz Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation," "From Wolfenbuttel to Wissenschaft: The Divergent Paths of Isaak Markus Jost and Leopold Zunz," "Jewish Studies from 1818 to 1919," and the like. These are standard academic essays, and in few of them do the great themes introduced in the preface and treated in the cited essay play any part at all. So the book does not hold together very well or work on a single problem or argue on behalf of a cogent proposition.

