The great renaissance of historical writing occurred in the early nineteenth century, when the Society for the Science of Judaism was formed in Germany and the great works of Zunz, Graetz, and others began to appear. What Yerushalmi notes is that this new scholarly enterprise was born not in a sense of identification with the past, but precisely out of a sense of alienation. In the eyes of its founders, Judaism was a spent force, a relic of the past that had no future in post-Enlightenment Europe. All that remained, in Moritz Steinschneider’s words, was “to give it a decent burial.” It is said that Zunz, introduced in his old age to a Hebrew poet visiting from Russia, asked him, “Tell me, when did you live?” History is the dead past that only memory can revive.
It was Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch who delivered the most cogent critique of history as a substitute for memory:
Moses and Hesiod, David and Sappho, Deborah and Tyrtaeus, Isaiah and Homer, Delphi and Jerusalem, Pythian tripod and Cherubim – sanctuary, prophets and oracles, psalms and elegy – for us they…all rest peacefully in one grave, they all have one and the same human origin, they all have one and the same significance, human, transitory and belonging to the past…. We let the old Jews fast on Tisha B’Av, we let them say Selihot and weep over Kinot. But in return we know far better than they do in which century these “poets” flourished, in what meter these “poets” composed…. Do these departed spirits rejoice in the literary gratitude of our present generation? Whom do they recognize as their true heirs? Those who repeated their prayers, but forgot their names, or those who forgot their prayers but remembered their names? [“Die Trauer des 9. Av”]
To be a Jew is to know that over and above history is the task of memory. As Jacob Neusner eloquently wrote: “Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding” (Neusner on Judaism: Religion and Theology).
More than any other faith, Judaism made this a matter of religious obligation. Pesach is where the past does not die but lives, in the chapter we write in our own lives and in the story we tell our children.
