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Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah

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Dov Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University)

Editorial Board
Ada Rapoport-Albert (University College, London)

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Gideon Freudenthal (Tel Aviv University)

Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

Raphael Jospe (Bar-Ilan University)

Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University)

Menachem Kellner (Haifa University)

Daniel Lasker (Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva)

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Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

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The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 To my children
Shira, Noa, Itamar and Neta
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgments IX
Part One:
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein: Transcendence,
Immanence, and Jewish History in an Era of Secularization 1

Introduction 3
1. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009): Transcendence and Break 5
A. “God” 5
B. Jewish Collective Memory and Modern Jewish
Historiography 10
C. Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Inevitable Break 17
D. The Individual and the Jewish Collective Memory: Passivity
and Restraint 20
2. Amos Funkenstein (1937–1995): Historical Consciousness and
Continuity 34
A. “Remove the reference to God” 34
B. Collective Memory and “Historical Consciousness” 36
C. The Historical Continuity Thesis 42
D. The Secularization and the Static Nature of Jewish History 48
E. Subject, Subjectivism, and Relativism 53
F. The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Historian’s Power 60
3. History Between Transcendence and Immanence 63

Part Two:
Gerschom Scholem (1897–1982): History, Continuity, and Secret 73
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

1. History and Metaphysics 75

A. Historical Observation 81
B. Metaphysical Observation 99
2. Methodical Motifs: Contradiction, Dialectic, and
Demystification 114
A. Distance, Identification, and Tension 114
B. Metaphysical Contradictions and Contents Contradictions 115
C. Dialectics and Demystification 123
3. The Historical Continuity Thesis 129
A. Intuition, A priori Affirmation, and Substance 129
B. The Metaphysical View of Continuity 130

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Table of Contents VII

C. The Historical View of Continuity 138

D. The Historian, the Chronicler, and the Individual’s Status
in History 145
E. Dialectical Conservatism and Daring 147
F. Vitality, Paradox, and the Presence of the Nothingess 152
4. Jewish Reality in the Present: Anarchy, Secularization, and
Utopia 162
A. Secularization and Transcendence 162
B. Anarchy, “Torah from Heaven,” and Historical Continuity 166
C. The Temporariness of Secularization and the Religious
Horizon of Anarchism 168
D. “The Utopian Hope for the Affirmative” 172
E. “The Dual Way”: The Possibility of Mysticism in a Secular
Reality 181
5. Mysticism, Messianism, and Secret 190
6. The Final Stage: The Relations between Immanence and
Transcendence 203
7. In Praise of Dualism 215

Part Three:
Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972): Break, Poetics, and Continuity 217

1. Yearning for Transcendence 219

2. Methodological Motifs: Biography, Transcending, and
Hermeneutics 225
3. The Metaphysical Perception of Literature: Realism and
Transcendence 233
A. The Advantage of Literature over History 233
B. Literary Realism and Its Boundaries 235
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

C. Dualism in Transcendence: Overt and Concealed 241

D. The Reality in the Hebrew Language 244
E. Reality, Absence, and Certainty 246
F. “The Non-Literary Attitude to Literature”: Fiction, Style, and
Aesthetics 249
G. Withdrawing the Author from the Work 254
4. The Ahistorical Element in Jewish History 257
A. Metaphysics and History 257
B. Sacred History, Presence, and Depth 259
C. “Living Myth,” Demythologization, and Remythologization 261
D. Archetypes, Uniformity, and “Synoptic Vision” 264

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 VIII Table of Contents

5. Secularization, History, and Historiography 270

A. “Autonomous Secularism” and Transcendent Presence 270
B. Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jewish Studies, and “Biased
Subjectivity” 273
6. Break and Continuity 284
A. “Does it exist or not?” 284
B. “Three Approaches to Shaping Time” 286
C. Continuity, Tension, and Polarity 302
7. The Subjective Disposition toward the Transcendent Entity:
Passivity and Activity 307
A. The Passive Subject 307
B. The Active Subject 316
8. Literary Realism and Metaphysical Historicism 328

Part Four:
Nathan Rotenstreich (1914–1993): Philosophy, History, and Reality 331

1. Philosophy and History 333

2. Past and Present: The Philosophy of History 339
A. Realistic Ontology of the Past 339
B. Constituting Epistemology in the Present: Historical
Consciousness 345
C. Ontology and Epistemology 349
3. From Beliefs and Opinions to Reality:
The Primacy of the Present 354
4. The Historization of Judaism and Wissenschaft
des Judentums 362
5. Tradition and Historical Consciousness 373
A. Judaism as a Religion of Tradition 373
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

B. Tradition and Revelation 374

C. The Seriousness Regarding Time 375
D. Contemporary Historical Consciousness 378
E. “The Subjective Jew” 380
F. Content and Time 382
6. Secularization and Historical Continuity 389
A. The Reality in Secularization 389
B. The Present Reality as Transcendence 393
C. Real Continuity 394
D. Radicalism of Immanence 397
E. “The Eclectic Jew” 399

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Table of Contents IX

7. Zionism Between History and Reality 402

A. Zionism: Spirit and Action 402
B. The Past of Zionism: Epistemology and Passivity 402
C. The Present of Zionism: Ontology and Activism 408
D. From Passivity to Activity 415
E. “An Archimedes Point that is not Useful” 419
8. Summary: “Real Contents” 424

Epilogue: The Old Angel 425

Works Cited 430

Index 454
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues who have accompa-

nied me on the journey resulting in this book: Prof. Dov Schwartz, the
series editor, who found the book worthy of inclusion in the series.
I would also like to thank the readers of the Hebrew version of the
book, published by Magnes Press, the Hebrew University: Prof. Avi
Sagi, who read and gave instructive comments, and helped raise the
funds to enable its publication; Prof. Ron Margolin and Prof. Amon
Raz-Krakotzkin, who read the manuscript carefully and made help-
ful comments; Prof. Avidov Lipsker, who read the sections of the book
dealing with Baruch Kurzweil; and Prof. Dov Herzenberg, for his
unlimited support and appreciation.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the students of the Program
for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies and the Philosophy Department
at Bar-Ilan University for the mutual inspiration and pleasure of our
shared studying, whose fruits are apparent between the pages of this
book.
I thank my close friends for their love and support: Ben Avner
Hecht, Shaul Contini, Orit Kalfish, Nir Cohen, Dr. Iris Braun, Netanela
Ben David, Dr. Yehudit Waldman Parnas, Dr. Ayelet Banai, Yehudit
Oppenheimer, Hava and Guy Schwartz, Dan Grossman, Hefzi and
Simon Montague, Lia Koch-Stolov, and Dr. Yehuda Stolov.
My deep gratitude to the book’s translator, Ruth Ludlam, who
worked tirelessly to find the language and tone that would convey not
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

only the content but also the spirit of the text.

I would also like to thank the editors of Academic Studies
Press, Sharona Vedol and Deva Jasheway, for their efforts and posi-
tive attitude.
Last but not least, my children Shira, Noa, Itamar, and Neta.
This book is dedicated to them with love and hope.

Ronny Miron, Summer 2013

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Part one

YOSEF HAYIM YERUSHALMI

AND AMOS FUNKENSTEIN:
TRANSCENDENCE, IMMANENCE,
AND JEWISH HISTORY
IN AN ERA OF SECULARIZATION
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Introduction

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein, two of the most

important Jewish historians of the twentieth century, focused on the
relationship between the past and the present in the historical space—
as an arena for events, as a field of research and knowledge, and as an
object of reference and memory for individuals and groups. These two
historians faced a shared historical datum: the dissipation of the tran-
scendent presence in modern Jewish existence, along with the loss of
religious practice in the era of secularization.1 In light of the special sta-
tus of transcendence in the pre-modern Jewish experience, as an object
of abstract theological study and as a reality represented in the prac-
tices of real life, it could have been expected that the two would view
the new reality of secularization as expressing a break with Jewish tra-
dition, and as a loss of historical continuity with it. However, as will
be seen below, the two understood the nature of the datum in Jewish
history in different ways, and in particular, interpreted differently the
reality that served as a backdrop for the changes taking place during
the modern era. They formulated differing perceptions of the collec-
tive Jewish memory, the growth of modern Jewish historiography, and
the issue of historical continuity. Yerushalmi believed that the experi-
ence of the break between modern Jews and their past is an inevitable
element in the era of secularization, where the connection to the tradi-
tional practices and beliefs on which classical Judaism was based has
become weakened to the point of fracture. He believed that these pro-
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

cesses are reflected directly in modern Jewish historiography, which is

one of the explicit expressions of secularization:

Western man’s discovery of history is not a mere interest in the

past, which always existed, but was a new awareness, a percep-
tion of a fluid temporal dimension […]. The main consequence
for Jewish historiography is that it cannot observe Judaism as

1
Berger, 1990, 170. Berger stresses the changes in practice as unique charac-
teristics of secularization in the Jewish world.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 4 Part one. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein…

something absolutely given and subject to a priori definition.

(Yerushalmi, 1989, 91)2

In contrast, Funkenstein perceived the transition of the Jews into

the modern era as a gradual process, with deep and lasting processes
in its background. Moreover, in his opinion, despite the changes that
took place in the Jewish being in the era of secularization, the possi-
bility to experience a relationship of continuity between their pres-
ent lives and their tradition and past remained open to the Jews. In
this spirit, Funkenstein understood Jewish historicism, as established
by Wissenschaft des Judentums, as an expression of the efforts of mod-
ern Jews to link themselves to their past and as a link in the chain of
Jewish tradition and history.
The exposition and analysis of the approaches of Yerushalmi and
Funkenstein, to be the focus of discussion in this part of the book, will
serve as a basis for constructing two metaphysical models for under-
standing the meaning of the Jewish past, tradition, and history in the
era of secularization. The model based on Yerushalmi’s approach will
be named the “break model,” while the one anchored in Funkenstein’s
approach will be termed the “continuity model.” The following parts
of the book will examine the influence of the approaches at the basis
of these models—whether as a positive source for adoption, or as an
object for rejection and criticism—on the views of Gershom Scholem,
Baruch Kurzweil, and Nathan Rotenstreich, three major figures in
the Israeli historical and philosophical discourse regarding historical
observation and the phenomenon of Jewish secularization.
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

2
Emphases in citations are mine, unless stated otherwise.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Chapter One

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009):

Transcendence and Break

A. “God”

More than once, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi required God in character-

izing Jewish history. The most direct and explicit reference appears in
Zakhor, one of the most evocative and stimulating treatises written by
a Jewish historian in the past generation1:

I submit that no Jewish historian today […] would bring him-

self to write an explicit “reasons-from-God” epilogue […] what
would be inconceivable in a history of the English, the French,
or the Dutch is still possible in a serious twentieth-century his-
torical work concerning the Jews. (Yerushalmi, 1989, 91)

These words, appearing in a treatise Yerushalmi himself

described as “part history, part confession and credo” (Yerushalmi,
1989, xxxiii), are joined by an interesting statement in the context of
describing his historical approach:

The author’s intention was something sacred to me. I grew

Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

up on the intention of the literary reviewer or historian being

to reach, as much as possible, the author’s original intention.
(Yerushalmi, 2005, 18–9)

1
From the appearance of the treatise Zakhor in 1982 until today, articles and
reviews about it have been published constantly. See in particular: Myers,
1992; 1998; 2003; Funkenstein, 1993; 1992; Neusner, 1995; Graetz, 1983;
Shavit, 1985. The journal The Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR) devoted the
fourth issue of volume 97 (see Myers, 2007) to Zakhor, discussing the wider
context of Yerushalmi’s historical approach. And the list goes on.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 6 Part one. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein…

Perhaps there is a connection between Yerushalmi’s approach to

the status of God in Jewish history and the author’s intention, defined
here as original and “something sacred.”2 In any case, what is pre-
sented as a “credo” and a hypothesis appears in his book Freud’s Moses
as an actual historical argument. As Yerushalmi put it:

For to be a Jew without God is, after all, historically problematic

and not self-evident, and the blandly generic term secular Jew
gives no indication of the richly nuanced variety within the spe-
cies. (Yerushalmi, 1991, 9).

Elsewhere, Yerushalmi states unequivocally:

For me secular Judaism is a contradiction. If you want something

Jewish and secular, do not call it Judaism, because this semanti-
cally empties the word of all meaning. You have to find another
word. (Yerushalmi, 2005, 14)

Yerushalmi, of course, did not deny the existence of a real phe-

nomenon of secularization among the Jewish people, but he saw it
mainly as a cultural expression of Judaism, and elsewhere stressed
that “culture […] cannot do what religion can do […]. In the end, sec-
ularism was not and is not sufficient to nourish the soul” (Yerushalmi,
2005, 15). Either way, as a hypothesis, a belief, a research-based argu-
ment, or a statement about reality, for Yerushalmi God was an axiom
in Jewish history.
The fourth chapter of Zakhor is central to the discussion in
this ­section. Its title, “Modern Dilemmas: Historiography and Its
Discontents,” openly refers to Freud. Like Freud, Yerushalmi seeks to
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

establish something general or encompassing about the modern era,

while at the same time stressing a personal statement, a sort of credo.
In another place, Yerushalmi again indicates his connection with Freud:

There is, after all, something in common between psychoanaly-

sis and historical therapy. One raises the individual’s sub-terra-

2
Elsewhere I have discussed the connection between Yerushalmi’s approach
to history and Schleiermacher’s theory of hermeneutics, where the author
has a very dominant role. See Miron, 2007b, 190–221.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Chapter One. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009): Transcendence and Break 7

nean memory, and the other refers to groups. […] If we define

simplistically the purpose of studying history, it is to penetrate
the past in order to know ourselves. (Yerushalmi, 2005, 11)

What Yerushalmi identified in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism—

“Here, as always, the crucial task was to lay bare its roots” (Yerushalmi,
1991, 19) —denotes a basic feature of his own search. Yerushalmi seeks
for the elements, the origin, that point in time when a new thing
occurred that touched directly the original connection between God
and Jewish history. He locates this in an event he considers to possess
dramatic significance with wide-reaching implications in Jewish his-
tory—the establishment of Wissenschaft des Judentums3 at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, the first modern Jewish historiographical
appearance. He opens the fourth chapter as follows:

As a professional Jewish historian I am a new creature in Jewish

history. My lineage does not extend beyond the second decade
of the nineteenth century, which makes me, if not illegitimate,
at least a parvenu within the long history of the Jews. It is not
merely that I teach Jewish history at a university, though that is
new enough. Such a position only goes back to 1930 when my
own teacher, Salo Wittmayer Baron, received the Miller profes-
sorship at Columbia, the first chair in Jewish history at a secular
university in the Western world. (Yerushalmi, 1989, 81)4

Yerushalmi lists here several elements whose connection he

will later seek to explain—the nineteenth century, the Jewish histo-
rian, secularization, and as mentioned earlier, God. All these together
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

3
In Hebrew, Hochmat Israel (.‫)חכמת ישראל‬
4
Moshe Idel characterizes this “new creature”: “One of the latest mutations
among many that have existed in the past is the appearance of the histor-
ical Jew” (Idel, 2006, 188). In his opinion, “The nineteenth century can be
described as an era in which a new Jewish type was born, the historical Jew.
While many Jews identified in the past through their ritual […], in the nine-
teenth century the self-identity of the Jew was crystallized based on the
nation’s historical experience” (ibid., 174). However, he later clarifies that
“the transition from a transcendental perception of history to a secular per-
ception, meaning an immanent perception, had hardly ever occurred prior
to the mid twentieth century” (ibid., 175).

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 8 Part one. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein…

may grant meaning to the modern Jewish being, for whom historio-
graphical writing served as a channel of expression and a means for
acquiring meaning. From Yerushalmi’s point of view, Jewish histori-
ography is not merely a genre dealing with the history of the Jews,
but is itself a phenomenon of Jewish history—the Jews writing about
their own history in order to achieve self-understanding. Moreover,
he interprets the nineteenth-century Jewish historicism and its descen-
dants as a statement about God, or more precisely, about the original
connection between God and Jewish history. We discover that at the
turning point at which the Jewish nation was constituted as a modern
nation, secularization and the historiography the Jews wrote about
themselves were joined.
Yerushalmi emphasizes that this was not an event that occurred
suddenly. Furthermore, “The historian in the nineteenth century begins
his work still rooted in the organic life of his people” (Yerushalmi, 1989,
114). Despite this, he considers that there is something significant in the
inclusive, collective, and practical way in which God was rejected in
modern historiography. Even though Yerushalmi recognizes already
in Spinoza, at the end of the seventeenth century, “a secularization of
Jewish history in the literal and radical sense” (Yerushalmi, 1983, 176),
in practice he finds that it was actually Freud, a twentieth-century fig-
ure, who lived in a secular culture of which Jews were an inseparable
part, who “has a better claim than Spinoza to be considered the arch-
heretic of Judaism in modern times” (Yerushalmi, 1991, 35). In his opin-
ion, the presence of the transcendent in the Jewish collective mem-
ory—whether it is identified as God or presented in Halakhah—is
original and unconditional. He therefore understands the connection
between God and Jewish history in ontological and substantive terms.
Accordingly, his approach to modern Judaism assumes that despite
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

the reality of the phenomenon of secularization, God continues to be

present and active in Jewish history, influencing its path and serving
as a source for understanding and meaning.
However, Yerushalmi’s argument about the permanent pres-
ence of God in Jewish history, which was the basis of his approach
that a break exists between modern Jewish history and the Jewish
past, should not be understood as identifying Jewish history as sa-
cred or as needing to be examined using unreal criteria. As a his-
torian, Yerushalmi frequently referred, even in works serving as
a stage for presenting his personal world view (and even in Zakhor),
to the influence of real processes on the history of the Jewish

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 Chapter One. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009): Transcendence and Break 9

people.5 In fact, even Yerushalmi would agree that historical thinking

is not so alien to the Jewish religious tradition, as long as it is founded
on the historical-real level of past events.6 Moreover, Yerushalmi does
not dispute the common historiographical approach whereby up to the
modern era the Jews perceived the history of their nation as sacred, as
directly and overtly guided by a transcendent factor. It is the continu-
ation of the Jewish tradition of perceiving history as sacred that can in
principle enable continuity with the modern nineteenth-century histor-
icism, despite its unique features, in contrast to the break indicated by
Yerushalmi. It seems that alongside the analysis of the basic processes
that shaped the Jewish being in the era of historiography and secular-
ization, Yerushalmi’s main interest in Zakhor is directed at the meta-
physical dimensions that determine the character of Jewish history. This
work devotes ample scope to his personal approach that history serves
simultaneously as both a field of appearance and an arena of represen-
tation for God or for an ahistorical transcendent entity, whose real pres-
ence in Jewish history is certain in his eyes.7
The hint at the discontent characterizing modern culture in
Freud’s approach, appearing already in the title of Chapter Four of
Zakhor, is now fully developed. God’s absence from secular Jewish his-
toriography cannot push him aside, let alone negate him completely
from its contents. Like Freud, Yerushalmi distinguishes between

5
E.g., Yerushalmi, 2005, 13; 1989, 93.
6
This opinion is shared by Idel. See Idel, 2007, 495. Idel wishes to prove that
despite the marginality of historical thinking in the Jewish tradition, ap-
proaches have always existed within Judaism that believed in an immanent
history with its own internal logic. As an example, he cites the messi-
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

anic approach of Rabbi Abraham Abulafia (ibid., 496–501). Dealing with

Yerushalmi’s arguments in Zakhor on a real level is common among writers
addressing this issue. Apart from Funkenstein’s critique, to be discussed in
detail below, see also Rosenfeld, 2007, 511–15. For more about pre-modern
historical writing, see also Bonfil, 1997.
7
Myers believes that although Yerushalmi was aware of historical phenom-
ena in general modern culture dealing with historiography and collective
memory, and although he thought they represented and deepened the
break in collective memory caused by modernism, he did not find a paral-
lel for them in the Jewish world (see Myers, 1992, 133). This argument suits
the suggested interpretation in which the real context in the being of mod-
ern Jews has a minor role in shaping Yerushalmi’s approach to the Jewish
collective memory.

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
 10 Part one. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein…

memory as a mental space, to which repression and sometimes denial

have contributed, and history or events as take place in real real-
ity.8 The innovation that Yerushalmi identifies in Freud’s Moses and
Monotheism—the dynamic of the tradition in which the repression
takes place and later the return of the repressed9—touches upon his
very interest in Jewish history. God cannot disappear from Jewish
history as Yerushalmi understands it. The discontent Yerushalmi
addresses in Zakhor is related to the modern Jew’s experience of the
absence of what should be present, the experience of the break from
something to which the attachment was original, so it cannot be break-
able. Yerushalmi testifies to this in the first person: “I live within the
ironic awareness that the very mode in which I delve into the Jewish
past represents a decisive break with that past” (Yerushalmi, 1989, 81).
In Chapter Four, Yerushalmi wishes to sketch the components and fea-
tures of the stormy arena in which the modern Jew wishing to under-
stand his past finds himself,10 even before the historical investigation
has begun, meaning the discussion of the present or absent God in the
collective Jewish memory, and above all, the discussion of the discom-
fort and break between historical research and the traditional percep-
tion of the Jews’ past.

B. Jewish Collective Memory and Modern Jewish

Historiography

Yerushalmi determined that Jewish collective memory has two central

features. The first, dealing with the origin of this memory, is “a func-
tion of the shared faith, cohesiveness, and the will of the group itself”
(Yerushalmi, 1989, 94). According to Yerushalmi, this faith crystal-
Copyright © 2014. Academic Studies Press. All rights reserved.

lized around two premises: “the belief that divine providence is […]
an active causal factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the
uniqueness of Jewish history itself” (ibid., 89). In his opinion, the
Jewish faith has been “transmitting and recreating its past through

8
See Freud, 1955, 170–1.
9
See Yerushalmi, 1991, 79.
10
In this context, see the similar opinion of Graetz, that Yerushalmi “did not
wish to deal merely with remembering, but […] with “the Jews’ reference
to their past,”” (Graetz, 1983, 430).

The Angel of Jewish History : The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century, Academic Studies Press, 2014. ProQuest
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