T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 97, No.

4 (Fall 2007) 491–501

Yosef H. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor—

Some Observations
MOSHE IDEL

I : ‘ ‘ T H E FA I T H O F T H E FA L L E N J E W S ’ ’
T H E F O L L OW I NG R EM A R KS represent some amateurish reflections con-
cerning some of the observations and assumptions found in Yosef H. Yer-
ushalmi’s Zakhor. They concern only quite a small part of this rich and
thoughtful book, especially the initial pages and its final part. In this
framework only two topics in the book will be addressed: the assumption
that history is the faith of the fallen Jews, and then the stark distinction
that Yerushalmi claims exists between premodern traditional Judaism
and modern Jews’ inclination toward history. Consequently, these forms
of Judaism may hardly communicate. An attempt will be made to exem-
plify the complexity of the relationship between the two forms of Ju-
daism.
The faith in history by the ‘‘fallen,’’ an expression that reflects Yerus-
halmi’s ironic understanding of modern interest in history,1 itself has a
small history. According to a certain testimony, Gershom Scholem once
remarked that in his classes at the Hebrew University he taught not rea-
son but history.2 His shift from the earlier reliance on the paramount
Enlightenment value—reason—to historical modernism is, to follow
Reinhold Niebuhr’s diagnosis, ‘‘not so much confidence in reason as faith
in history. The conception of a redemptive history informs most diverse
forms of modern culture.‘‘3 In lieu of the image of the divine redeemer, it
is now history, in its Hegelian form, that offers the redemptive experi-
ence. Faith in history, or in historical research, dislocated, at least to a
certain extent, traditional faith in a personal deity and worked with the

1. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, (New York, 1989), 86, 98.
2. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. W. J. Dannhauser (New York, 1976),
46.
3. See Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History
(New York, 1949), 6, emphasis added. See p. 203.

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2007)

Copyright 䉷 2007 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.
492 JQR 97.4 (2007)

assumption that meaning or, according to another formulations, identities

are hidden in or dramatically shaped by events that constitute the history
of a nation or a person. For a skeptical observer, however, the two forms
of faith are based on strong though rarely explicated hypotheses, which
can hardly be proven. From this point of view, they are equal.
How and why did this new ‘‘faith’’ emerge in Judaism? The new status
attained by Jewish history in the general economy of modern Judaism
represents a major jump; it succeeded in establishing itself as a main, if
not dominant, dimension of identity for many modern Jews. This is part
of a profound process of self-definition emerging in rapidly changing cir-
cumstances, in which the recent history of the Jews has been dramati-
cally accelerated.4 The more dramatic changes are well known: the
Holocaust, the shift from the largest concentration of Jews in Europe to
Asia and North America, the establishment of the state of Israel and the
massive emigration that liquidated whole communities (some of which
existed for millennia), and the emergence of the American center of Juda-
ism—in a word, new forms of struggle for personal, national, and cultural
survival. These struggles were coupled with complex attempts at redefi-
nition, Zionist, and more recent trends, mainly American, to search for
an identity that does not depend on earlier views of the Diaspora or on a
territorial solution of the exilic condition. Such dramatic turns are un-
known even in the long and tortuous Jewish history prior and represent
unparalleled accelerations of events. They were major ruptures that occa-
sioned a search for antecedents, and thus the protagonists of these events
turned to history for examples. This turn is, psychologically speaking, a
natural one. People try, especially in cases of dramatic changes and crises,
to situate themselves in a wider framework in order to understand their
personal or communal vicissitudes, some of which are quite unexpected.
According to such a view, history as an academic profession is not essen-
tial, and the resort to examples from the past reflects crises or turning
points, related to occasional moments of self-understanding, though im-
posed mainly by external forces.
Less dramatic, though still very important from the point of view of
the ascent of history, and of what I call ‘‘the historical Jew,’’ is another
development, characteristic of only a small part of Jewish communities,
mainly in Central and Western Europe: a gradual opening of some Jews
and Christians toward more religiously neutral forms of society, as part

4. For the concept of acceleration of history, see the introduction to Pierre

Nora, Les lieux de memoire (Paris, 1984), 1:xvii.
 YOSEF H. YERUSHALMI’S ZAKHOR—IDEL 493

of a more comprehensive process of secularization. Deep changes that

took place in Western Judaism, in centers where history emerges as a
main form of self-understanding for the Christian majority, induce soon
afterwards a similar development in Jews. Comparatively speaking, this
propensity for history does not occur in other Jewish communities:
Northern African, East European, or Asian Jewish communities, where
historical events were not conceived of as identity-forming. Therefore, it
is not only a matter of adherence to the rabbinic worldview that marginal-
ized the importance of history for shaping identity, as Yerushalmi cor-
rectly demonstrated in Zakhor. The negative attitude toward history
among Jews also owed to the majority non-Jewish and nonhistorical cul-
tures. One may argue that in those more traditional settings, the cohesive-
ness of Jewish community was much greater and more resonant to a
rabbinic way of life, while in Central and Western Europe the process of
disintegration of the Jewish communities impelled the search for new
forms of cohesiveness, or personal identities, now based on shared history
in the past rather than on shared rituals in the present. However, this
process is also discernible in Christian communities which looked for
forms of identity other than the religious—most notably, the nation,
which, it was claimed, had a common history. Among traditionalist Jews
in Central Europe, the critique of this historicizing trend is especially
evident in the case of Samson Raphael Hirsh in Germany.
However, the first modern Jewish historians were not only in search
of a new identity but also of some form of transcendental meaning embed-
ded in history. As Yerushalmi formulated the contribution of the Jews to
history: ‘‘If Herodotus was the father of history, the fathers of meaning
in history were the Jews’’ (p. 8). So there is a certain dissonance between
the more Greek descriptive vision of history and a more directed or even
biased exposition of history, which points to a certain kind of sacred
history. While Greek history is understood in much more immanent
terms, the biblical type of history includes an incomparably more tran-
scendental dimension, which creates, or discovers, meaning in events by
attributing to them an expression of the divine will and an ultimate pre-
meditated design. However, while Jews in biblical times were concerned
with ‘‘meaning’’ in historical events, this interest ceased, according to Yer-
ushalmi, in the next major form of Judaism, the rabbinic (p. 18), and was
not a major form of expression in Jewish literature until the sixteenth
century. Though scholars have offered different explanations as to why
historical writings become so prevalent in a rather short period of time
in the sixteenth century—whether it was the impact of the Renaissance
494 JQR 97.4 (2007)

historiography5 or of the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Penin-

sula (pp. 57–75)—the very rise of this trend of Jewish writing was, to
the best of my knowledge, never disputed in scholarship. However, evi-
dent as this new interest in Jewish history was, it never became a central
feature of Jewish thought in the Renaissance. Dominated by other types
of speculative interest like philosophy and mysticism, and obedient to the
rabbinic regimen vitae, premodern forms of Judaism remained indifferent
to the few chronicles or critical works of history produced in the sixteenth
century.
This does not mean that a historical approach to Judaism, embodied
in what I call the historical Jew, is less Jewish or less authentic than
other forms of Judaism. The ‘‘historical Jew’’ constitutes part of the proc-
ess of assimilation to his environment, just as the intellectual Jew reflects
the impact of Muslim and Christian engagement with philosophy and
theology in the Middle Ages. Graetz and Yerushalmi are, in my opinion,
no less Jewish than any other exponents of Judaism, including Abraham
ibn Ezra or Maimonides. Yerushalmi’s elegiac assumption, emphasizing
the rupture involved in the historical tendency seems to me to be true,
though exaggerated. Maimonides, a major exponent of Judaism, pro-
voked a lot of bitter criticism in his lifetime, and yet he became—though
a revolutionary of the first order—part and parcel of many forms of Ju-
daism. Given my working assumption that tradition is a multifaceted con-
cept, and that, in fact, we should speak of a constellation of traditions
that is accumulative, flexible, and developing, ‘‘historical Judaism’’ is cer-
tainly part of it. This function is a result not of an abstract Jewish tradi-
tion but of the place that the bearers of historical Judaism occupy in the
general structure of the Jewish nation, as we will see in the second part
of this essay.
The description of events related to Jews above constitutes an example

5. For a general assessment of the reasons for the emergence of Jewish histor-
ical writings in the sixteenth century, see Reuven Bonfil, ‘‘The Historian’s Per-
ception of the Jews in the Italian Renaissance,’’ Revue des etudes juives 143 (1984):
59–82; idem, ‘‘Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de Rossi’s Meor Enayim
in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry,’’ in Jewish Thought in the
Sixteenth Century, ed. B. D. Cooperman (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 23–48; also
by Bonfil, ‘‘How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiogra-
phy,’’ in Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. D.
Ruderman, (New York, 1992), 219–50. For a more general survey of Jewish
historiography during the Renaissance period, see Reuven Michael, Jewish Histo-
riography from the Renaissance to Modern Times (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1993), 17–71.
See also Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
 YOSEF H. YERUSHALMI’S ZAKHOR—IDEL 495

of what Nora called an ‘‘acceleration of history,’’ which created, in turn,

an acceleration in the pace of historical research. As part of this accelera-
tion Jewish history became a new form of identity in Israeli academe
and intellectual life, leading to the exploration of new topics of research.
Especially evident are departments of archaeology of the land of Israel
and the history of the Land of Israel. Those two academic domains have
become, in some Israeli universities, full-fledged departments, sometimes
institutes, and new academic journals have been established in order to
further research in them (such as Katedra and Shalem). Moreover, the
emphasis upon the importance of a certain topic—messianism—that was
underestimated by previous scholars now flourished in several disci-
plines. In a certain sense, some Jewish historians became not only ob-
servers of past events but also participants in historical processes that
influenced their professional approach.
Yerushalmi’s description of the belief in history as the faith of fallen
Jews may be, at least to an extent, an exaggeration (p. 98). I cannot
dispute his own feeling that the career of a Jewish historian may repre-
sent an existential rupture, perhaps a tragic one, with traditional Juda-
ism. But this rupture is not only with traditional faith but also with the
versions of historia sacra proposed by other Jewish historians, including
his own teacher Salo W. Baron, as we will see below. The stark opposi-
tion between history and belief presupposes some form of religiosity that
alone is conceived of as authentic and attributes to the corrosive acts of
history an antireligious effect. By contrast, I would resort to a vision of a
complex and multifaceted tradition in order to resolve what may be con-
ceived of as a state of fall or of despair.6 Indeed, I claim that despite the
rupture created by the ascent of history, there are nevertheless lines of
continuity that shed light on the existence of a Jewish historical mode.
The question of the possibility of history existing within a traditional
framework may be asked also from another angle: if two audacious think-
ers such as Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides were able to offer and
have accepted such a strong synthesis between rabbinic Judaism and
Greek philosophy—prompting an intellectual reform of Judaism—why
should not historiography become part of Jewish religion? If the Jews
were the fathers of meaning in history, as Yerushalmi formulated it, why
should that type of religious historian, who is seeking meaning in his-
tory—with respect to divine or demonic intervention in human affairs—

6. See also David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in
German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 172.
496 JQR 97.4 (2007)

not be seen as continuing a broader Jewish religious enterprise?7 Are not

some forms of medieval and modern philosophy on the one hand, and
modern history on the other hand, forms of culture with which some elite
Jews were confronted, forms of which they rejected some and accepted
others?8 Is history, even when understood in immanent terms, so essen-
tially alien to all possible forms of traditional Judaism that it cannot gen-
erate a new version of the religion that is less controversial than ibn
Ezra’s astrological and Maimonides’ philosophical reforms were in the
Middle Ages? Was the modest and quite restricted scandal that emerged
after the publication of Azariah de Rossi’s famous historical book Me’or
‘enayim9 greater than that created by the dissemination of Maimonides’
philosophical or even his halakhic writings? Was the marginalization of
ibn Gabirol’s philosophical book Fons Vitae paralleled by anything similar
in debates over history such as the marginalization of the medieval Yosi-
fon? The answer to these questions is quite obvious: ibn Gabirol’s neglect
of Judaism and the intellectual reform of Judaism by ‘‘the Great Eagle’’
attracted sharper, fiercer, and sometimes more prolonged debate than
the modest historical tensions related to the work of the Italian Jewish
historian.
It should be mentioned that some of the most important Jewish histori-
ans have been rabbis, including Baron, and in our generation Yerushalmi,
Robert Bonfil, and David Ruderman. Thus, we may describe a more com-
plex, though perhaps smoother, relationship between the transcendental
type of understanding history, or historiosophy, by religious thinkers in
the Middle Ages and the first generations of Jewish historians, on the
one hand, and the apparent rupture and despair that is more commonly
found among recent scholars of Jewish history, on the other. For exam-
ple, it seems that it is only in recent decades that the basic formation of
historians took place exclusively in universities at the expense of religious
seminaries.
II: MULTIPLE TRADITIONS AND MODERNITY
Throughout Yerushalmi’s book, the assumption of a unified Jewish peo-
ple recurs (p. 94). It is this unified vision of traditional Judaism, as I

7. See the material collected in M. Idel, ‘‘ ‘That wondrous, occult power’:

Some Reflections on Modern Perceptions of Jewish History,’’ Studia Judaica 7
(1998): 57–70.
8. See Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern
Judaism (Hanover, N.H., 1996), 172.
9. See Joanna Weinberg’s introduction to Azariah de Rossi, The Light of the
Eyes, trans. J. Weinberg (New Haven, Conn., 2001), xvii, xlii–xliv, and Yerus-
halmi, Zakhor, 69–73.
 YOSEF H. YERUSHALMI’S ZAKHOR—IDEL 497

understand his argument, that prevents religious Jews from adopting a

critical approach to the canonized conceptualization of the past, or to
collective memory. Or to put it in other terms, a homogenous traditional
society seemingly confronts modernity with a negative attitude toward its
critical demythologization. Or to put it in terms more explicitly found in
Yerushalmi, the importance of ritual in traditional (read, rabbinic) Juda-
ism represents an alternative to history (pp. 6–7, 52).10 Like Yerushalmi,
I am among those scholars who do not assume that Jews had an espe-
cially strong historical sense or interest in immanent explanations. How-
ever, we should not see the vast and variegated literatures and forms of
experiences known as Judaism as being so monolithic, static, and closed
that they cannot absorb some historical understanding. To resort to one
of Salo W. Baron’s formulations: ‘‘The Jewish religion has little to lose
and much to gain from a thorough knowledge of the past . . . In their
subconscious, as well as conscious, historical feeling, modern Jews have
much in common, both with one another and with their ancestors.‘‘11 The
assumption of the existence of a mysterious sense of union linking various
generations of Jews that may be understood by fathoming the secrets of
their history is quite obvious and is reinforced by another quote from
Baron.12 Thus, while in the generation shaped by the Jewish interwar
experience—Salo Baron was an immigrant from Galicia—the history of
the Jews is still understood as a unifying vision, whereas in the writings
of his postwar followers in America, it was conceived to be a corrosive
element. Indeed, I would say that alongside the Shoah, more has been
written about the history of the Jews in America, which is a relatively
short chapter in the long history of Jewish immigrations, than about any
other major chapter in Jewish history. This may be just another interest-
ing effort to create a sense of local identity by resorting to historical tools.
Both in Israel and in America, history is still a form of situating oneself
in place and time and creating new and unifying identities. History, like
Jewish philosophy or mysticism, is a new way of looking at earlier strata
of Judaism and contributes unifying as well as corrosive forms of under-
standing. Like these two other forms of Jewish literature, history also
adopted a critical perspective on other manifestations of Judaism.
However, this development is just one form of organization of Judaism:
in the Bible, what we call religion was constituted by a mixed discussions

10. See also p. 92, where he explicitly rejects an essentialist vision of Judaism.
11. A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1937), 2:459.
12. Ibid., 2:457–58. See also the discussion of Schorsch, From Text to Context,
156.
498 JQR 97.4 (2007)

of ritual with descriptions of historical events. Though the latter was mar-
ginalized in the subsequent development of the religion, there was still a
solid anchor in the founding document of this religion onto which new
historical approach can graft themselves. In fact, kabbalistic and sometimes
also philosophical forms of thought include some historical theorizing,
which can be described as modern, or as I attempted to call it, historia
profana. This is quite evident in the schemes concerning redemption that
constitute a historiosophic approach, although an immanent one.
I would like now to present a theory of historical redemption as re-
flecting a natural process. According to a view of Abraham Abulafia, a
messianic event could occur without any extraordinary intervention on
the part of supernatural powers. A natural interpretation of the redemp-
tion is Aristotelian. It is based upon the assumption that all potentialities
will, at some point in time, reach their actualizations. This idea runs as
follows: since time is eternal, it is illogical to suppose that a potential
reality will not at some point in time be actualized. Therefore, the notion
of Jewish statehood, which is actually an idea that had already proved
its feasibility, must again come to fruition at some point in the future.
Abulafia’s insight into history, dealing with the rise and fall of nations,
apparently convinced him that there was sufficient reason to believe that
the Jewish people could rise again. This outlook can be better understood
if we take into account the historical background of the times in which
Abulafia was formulating his thoughts and writings. In his youth, during
the fifties and sixties of the thirteenth century, the land of Israel was the
focal point of a gigantic struggle between the major superpowers of the
Middle Ages: the Mongols of the east; the Crusaders who were in control
of parts of the country; and the Mameluks. The ongoing struggle between
these three powers was unusual in these decades. In an unstable situation
such as this, it would be fitting to suppose that the Jews could also be
integrated in an historical process that would allow them a foothold or
even a victory by exploiting the struggle between these superpowers. This
background of a bitter struggle seems to be pertinent to an explanation
of the rise of messianic expectations during times of great international
crisis. It would seem that Abulafia is not the only one to recognize the
messianism inhering in this particular historical situation. It is quite possi-
ble that this same background provides the basis for the thought of R.
Yehudah ha-Levi when he pondered the success of the Crusades in the
capture of the Land of Israel. This perspective can also be seen to relate
to the modern Zionist ideal which flourished and gained strength against
the background of the success of still another great power, Britain, to
occupy the Land of Israel.
 YOSEF H. YERUSHALMI’S ZAKHOR—IDEL 499

These crises are not crises of the history of Jewish people per se but
international struggles that did not originate with the Jews. Yet it is likely
that these fluid situations gave rise to underlying expectations of Jewish
political and military activism. Obviously, as long as the international
situation remained stable, the Jews had very little chance of regaining
political power. The contemplation of human nature, especially in the
ways in which nations rise and fall, appears very strongly in Abulafia’s
writings. For example in his Sefer ha-malmad or ha-Melamed, he states:

Even what will happen in the future such as the coming of the Messiah
and the kingdom of Israel, are not impossibilities, or to be denied logi-
cally, because thus we see every day with the nations of the world.
Sometimes these have dominion over those (and visa versa), and this
is not a matter that Nature can deny but rather human nature decrees
that it be so.13

Abulafia’s theory of human nature had a certain historical influence. At

the end of the thirteenth century, a Jewish intellectual, R. Joseph ibn
Caspi of Provence, raised the possibility of the reestablishment of the
Jewish state based on a consideration of the history of the rise and fall of
nations throughout history. It is likely that through ibn Caspi this idea
later appeared in a composition of Spinoza’s, as has been suggested by
Shlomo Pines.14 For his part, Spinoza suggested the possibility of a rees-
tablishment of a Jewish state under certain political conditions. It is quite
possible to assume a historical affinity between Abulafia and ibn Caspi.

13. MS Paris, Biblioteque Nationale 608, fol. 304a. For the background of
this text, see Moshe Idel, ‘‘Some Concepts of Time and History in Kabbalah,’’ in
Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. E.
Carlebach, J. M. Efron, and D. N. Myers (Hanover, N.H., 1998), 170–76. For
an interesting parallel to this view, see the mid–thirteenth-century Toledan
thinker R. Yehudah ibn Matka’s Sefer midrash @hokhmah. The text of ibn Matka
was printed by Colette Sirat, ‘‘Juda b. Salomon Ha-Kohen—philosophe, astro-
nome et peut-etre Kabbaliste de la premiere moitie du XIIIe siecle,’’ Italia 1.2
(1979): 48, n. 21, and discussed in Idel, ‘‘Some Concepts of Time,’’ 175.
14. Pines, Between Jewish Thought and the Thought of the Nations (Hebrew; Jeru-
salem 1977), 277–305. On this issue, see also Y. H. Yerushalmi, ‘‘Spinoza on the
Existence of the Jewish People’’ (Hebrew), Proceedings of the Israeli Academy of
Science 6.10 (1983): 171–213. See also Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, the Mysti-
cal Messiah, trans. R. J. Z. Werblowsky (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 544, and Aviezer
Ravitsky, ‘‘ ‘To the Utmost of Human Capacity’: Maimonides on the Days of the
Messiah,’’ in Perspectives on Maimonides: Philosophical and Historical Studies, ed. J. L.
Kraemer (Oxford, 1991), 225, n. 7.
500 JQR 97.4 (2007)

This background could also provide the explanation for how Spinoza
came to know of this natural conception of history; the evolution of the
idea remains a subject open to further in-depth investigation. For our
purposes, we take note of the rise of a certain train of thought that is
more characteristic of the secondary elite among the Jews in the Middle
Ages—kabbalistic and philosophical—than of popular thought that
tended to link redemption to a total disruption of history and nature.
Abulafia and Spinoza are among the few Jewish thinkers who have
been formally banned by rabbinic authorities; Ibn Caspi has been margin-
alized and was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century by maskilim.
Nevertheless, the idea they proposed had a huge impact, on both secular
and religious Jews, and changed their frame of thought whether or not
they participated in the Zionist political idea. However, what I would like
to point out is that while the later two thinkers have never been published
by Orthodox printers, in the case of Abulafia, whose writings had never
being printed by religious thinkers, the situation has changed dramati-
cally in the last decade when almost all his known writings have been
published by Orthodox editors, sometimes with the formal approval of
halakhic authorities in Me’ah She‘arim and distributed in bookshops
there in thirteen-volume sets alongside other canonical sets of the Bible,
Talmud, and Lurianic Kabbalah. Sefer ha-melamed, the book from which I
quoted above, was one of the last in the series, and its editor, Amnon
Gross, chose to preface this volume with the following statement:

Behold we have thereby to bless on the accomplished work (levarekh

‘al ha-mugmar), may the name of the King of Kings of Kings, the Holy
one, blessed be He, be praised, that He had mercy and pity on us and
removed the bad decision (gezirah) from this house, the house of our
rabbi Abraham Abulafia, and changed this house to an altar for the
union of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah, and the
entire people of Israel.15

To be sure, this is just one of the modest ways of introducing Abulafia

found in the twelve introductions to the volumes of the new set. It shows
that Orthodoxy is much more open than we imagine, and that dramatic
spiritual changes there are far from impossible—at least in terms of books
written in Hebrew and intended for a religious audience. Therefore the
difference between some medieval and premodern views of major topics,

15. Maftea@h ha-re‘ayon, ha-@heshek ve-ha-melamed (Jerusalem, 2002), 1. The

passage quoted above from the manuscript is found on p. 38.
 YOSEF H. YERUSHALMI’S ZAKHOR—IDEL 501

and what is conceived today to be the Orthodox perspective, does not

necessarily hinge on content. The problem of the historian or of the aca-
demic scholar is that he chooses the audiences that he would like to ad-
dress and resorts to a particular language, terminology, and conceptual
structure. Yerushalmi complains about the fact that an audience that he
chose deliberately to ignore would not be open enough to the modern
inclinations to history. Does this consist of building a bridge to ‘‘his peo-
ple,’’ as Yerushalmi put it? (p. 100). In the case of Maimonides, ibn Ezra,
and Abulafia, we find attempts at addressing in new ways the age-old
problems that unified most of the Jews. With Spinoza and the more re-
cent Jewish historians, however, the main group of reference is not the
Jewish community but rather a more dispersed, invisible, and universal-
istic community of scholars, dead and alive, united by some overlapping
academic practices, whose validity has been aggressively questioned in
the last generation, more and more by their peers.
Nevertheless, Yerushalmi’s book was canonized by those audiences to
whom its author consciously and systematically addressed himself: aca-
demics and the intelligentsia, both Jewish and non-Jewish. No author is
capable of addressing radically disparate audiences at the same time. In
fact the book became an academic best-seller. As such, I assume that
Yerushalmi was read by more modern Jews than was Maimonides’ Guide
of the Perplexed, and thus shaped their identity. No less than Harold Bloom
declared that ‘‘it may be a permanent contribution to Jewish speculation
upon the dilemmas of Jewishness and so it may join the canon of Jewish
wisdom literature.’’16 This is a significant statement about canonization
coming from a scholar who is concerned mainly with defining the canon.
The number of the book’s translations is quite considerable: I know of
Hebrew, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and there may well be
many more, all this in twenty-five years. These translations create a new
ambiance that, over the long term, will push religious understandings of
Judaism in a more historical direction—which may come to be seen as
traditional. This is not just a matter of the impact of Yerushalmi’s book
but of the entire academic enterprise: universities are strong institutions,
which disseminate critical approaches to all the audiences, religious or
not, that attend them and thus create new intellectual contexts, which
infiltrate slowly even into the most secluded circles of Orthodoxy.
In other words, the fallen Jews may sometimes be less fallen, and the
traditional ones less traditional, the net effect of which is to mitigate the
stark opposition between critical history and collective memory.

16. See his foreword to Zakhor, xiv.