Writing the history of the Jews is an impossible undertaking. Happily, this has never prevented anyone from trying.
These were my thoughts this week while perusing a new account of Jewish history, penned by the popular historian and YouTube phenomenon Dr. Henry Abramson. The first instalment of a projected four-volume series, it is a handsome production, generously furnished with maps, illustrations, and timelines, and written from a recognisably traditional Jewish perspective. Another year, mused I, another accomplished yet foredoomed attempt to retell one of humanity’s great dramas: the story of those indefatigable Jews.
Over the past two centuries, the enterprise has become something of a scholarly cottage industry. Historians of every persuasion have undertaken histories of the Jews, producing everything from elegant single-volume surveys to monumental works whose authors had apparently reconciled themselves to never doing anything else. Salo W. Baron, perhaps the most formidable Jewish historian of the twentieth century, spent much of his career producing eighteen volumes of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, reaching only the seventeenth century before mortality rather decisively intervened.
More manageable undertakings have also appeared. One of my favourites remains Cecil Roth’s sharp yet splendidly impish A Short History of the Jewish People (1936), which starts its account of the medieval period with the unsurpassable line “in the spring of the year 622 c.e., a moody Arab camel-driver fled in fear of his life from his native city of Mecca, and the history of Mohammedanism began.” Mercifully, there were no Twitter mobs in his day. There is also Paul Johnson’s enormously popular A History of the Jews, a monument both to his journalistic gifts and to his deeply rooted religious philo-Semitism.
More recently, Simon Schama—arguably the greatest living member of the historian’s guild and unarguably its finest writer—embarked upon a magnificent trilogy whose third instalment has now been awaited for over nine years. The octogenarian historian has my warmest wishes for a long life, accompanied by the increasingly urgent plea that he might complete his history before becoming part of it.
The sheer volume of these undertakings obscures a deeper difficulty inherent in the enterprise itself. The challenge is not merely one of scale, although Heaven knows that three millennia of history, spanning almost every inhabited continent and a bewildering variety of languages and cultures, would flummox even the finest polymath. Rather, Jewish history presents a series of peculiar paradoxes, not least the fact that the Jews have proved extraordinarily successful at remaining Jews, while leaving their historians with the considerably more difficult task of explaining what, precisely, has remained the same.
Indeed, every aspiring historian must confront a series of formidable philosophical questions before even touching pen to paper. Allow me, gallant reader, to elaborate.
“The Tailor”
James Tissot (courtesy of the Jewish Museum)
