The Shift in Authority Paradigms among Jewish Historians

• In Event: Jewish History and Jewish Historical Imagination

Abstract

There has been much discussion of the review by Haym Soloveitchik in the Jewish Review of Books 3:4 (2013) of Talya Fishman’s Becoming the People of the Talmud (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), discussion that has tended to focus on whether the review’s strident rhetoric was ill-mannered and whether its harsh criticisms were justified. I would like to broaden the topic to explore the central claim to intellectual authority implicit in the review and defended by its author. This claim, I would like to argue, is a reflection of a very specific moment in Jewish intellectual and religious history and helps us to understand the underlying metanarratives that informed the rapidly developing field of Jewish Studies in the United States, (as well as in Israel and Europe) in the second half of the last century.

The nature of this claim and its special valence in the American Jewish university context can be fruitfully explored by rethinking Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor, a personal mapping of the author’s location in the territory of Jewish knowledge. That slim volume makes some quite astonishing claims about the nature of Jewish historical thought, claims that deserve serious examination. But it also helps us to understand the kind of identity issues that were being debated by American Jewish historians as they strove to carve out a place for themselves in both the Jewish and the academic communities.

Finally, I will argue that tracing shifts in the paradigm of authoritative knowledge allows us to understand better the continuities and ruptures of Jewish knowledge in general over the ages, and to assess the constant collection, rediscovery, and redefinition of Jewish scholarly knowledge since at least the Renaissance.

The paper is meant as a contribution both to intellectual history and to the sociology of knowledge.

author

• Bernard D. Cooperman, University of Maryland