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How Jewish is Jewish History?, by Moshe Rosman. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007. 220 pp. $24.95.
Moshe Rosman recognizes that postmodernism has changed the way historians approach their craft, but he rejects those trends in postmodern scholarship that he believes deny the “Jewishness” of Jewish history. His concern is that much postmodern academic discourse, especially in its postcolonial variant, reduces Jews to a metaphor for some larger historical process. He believes that this undermines the legitimacy of Jewish Studies (and, implicitly, of the Israeli state). He therefore proposes a way of synthesizing a postmodern approach to texts with “traditional” historical methodology.
Rosman begins by introducing challenges posed to historiography by postmodernism’s “central tenet”: “that there can never be objective description, only subjective interpretation” (p. 1). His first chapter then examines the difficulty of defining Jewishness and Jewish history and examines metahistories that guided modern Jewish historiography. Rosman defines a metahistory as “a historian’s position on a priori issues . . . [that] determine the framework within which he or she conducts research and composes a narrative” (p. 47). The remaining essays, first published between 1993 and 2004, examine periodization in Jewish history, postcolonial theories regarding Jewish cultural hybridity, multiculturalist critiques of Jewish studies, approaches to Jewish cultural history, the relationship between Jewish cultural history and folkloristics, and work on women’s history by pioneering Jewish social historian Jacob Katz. In his conclusion, Rosman pulls this material together to argue for a methodological synthesis that he describes as “reformed” positivism. He illustrates his methodological points with examples from the Jewish history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a topic on which he has written two excellent monographs and several important articles.
Rosman is especially concerned with a trend that he defines as “the Jew as a trope.” He singles out Yuri Slezkine, who in The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press) described Diaspora Jews as the embodiment of modernity and concluded that the twentieth century triumph of modernity made everyone “Jewish.” If everyone is Jewish, then particularistic Jewish identity is an anachronism. And, as Rosman reads Slezkine, so is the state of Israel. Rosman is particularly worried about postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s influence on Jewish scholarship, exemplified in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew” (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Rosman focuses on Bhabha’s description of “traditional premodern Jewish communities as subaltern peoples” and “Jewish culture everywhere, like the cultures of modern colonized peoples, as primarily hybrid with the culture of the majority” (p. 95). Therefore, Rosman argues, Jews become a metaphor for all subaltern colonized peoples, whose localized hybrid cultures result from resistance to and the domination of colonial masters. Rosman sees this as leading to the paired conclusions that: a) Jewish cultures (plural) were dependent upon “dominant” cultures; and b) there was no coherent common Jewish culture, only local hybrids. To Rosman, not only is this historically inaccurate, but it inappropriately delegitimates Jewish history and Jewish Studies as disciplines. He is critical, though, of Jewish postmodernist scholars like Diana Pinto who defend Jewish Studies by positing what he calls a revamped “contributionist metahistory,” not unlike earlier justifications of Jewish history that cited “the Jewish contribution to civilization.” In Pinto’s version, Jewish Studies is relevant because it illuminates and “realizes” the pluralist agenda. Rosman, however, holds that Jewish history and Jewish studies have intrinsic value and need no justification.
Many of Rosman’s prescriptions for the practice of history echo ideas sounded in earlier works, like Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994). Pace post-modernism, Rosman says historians must recognize that the narratives they construct from their sources are contingent, but nonetheless must meet “standards of evaluation shared by the community of historians” (p. 183). His recommendations, however, are emphatically framed in regard to the practice of Jewish historiography and not the historian’s craft more generally. For example, Rosman notes that periodization imposes a metahistorical framework on the past, generally built around “essential events.” His solution is to define periods in regard to “constellations” of processes that shaped Jewish historical experience. The “constellation of criteria of Jewish modernity” (p. 64) included demographic expansion, diffusion within the Diaspora, pursuit of political and economic emancipation and the right to nationhood, penetration of myriad sectors of the economy, decline of traditional communal structures and their replacement by forms of voluntary associations, pursuit of assimilation and acculturation, and cultural secularization. Roseman sees each of these processes as completed and in many cases under reversal as of 1950, the watershed between the Jewish modern and Jewish postmodern periods. Just as the metahistories that framed Jewish historiography (defined here as nationalist, Zionist, Orthodox religious, and acculturationist) were intertwined with forms of modern Jewish identity, Rosman anticipates the evolution of new postmodern metahistories tied to postmodern Jewish identities.
Rosman argues that sketching a path towards a postmodern Jewish historiography requires clarifying what makes Jewish history Jewish. He proposes a “polythetic approach” in which Jewishness is defined “by a constellation of factors, all of which are never present simultaneously, but a significant number of which, in various permutations, are always in evidence” (p. 184). He proposes a methodology for Polish-Jewish cultural history (the study of how Jews made meaning in and understood their own lives), that employs tools from folkloristics, literary criticism, and the social sciences. As examples, he picks stories about Esterke (by legend, the fourteenth century Jewish queen of Poland) and Saul Wahl (by legend, the sixteenth century Jewish King of Poland for one day) and Rabbi Mose Issereles’ sixteenth century halakhik text Mapah. In some of the book’s finest passages, Rosman shows how careful analysis of such texts can illuminate Jewish social norms and values (e.g., regarding gender roles) and expose the interplay of tradition and local experience in shaping those norms. He also proposes a “polysystem model” for understanding the relationship between Jews and their environments. This model recognizes the complex dialectic between Polish-Jewish and Polish cultures, but also stresses the interaction of Polish-Jewish culture with a larger shared Jewish (Ashkenazic and Sephardic) culture and with a core of tradition.
Rosman’s erudite volume ranges over more theoretical ground than can be explained in a brief review. I found his explications of methodology and analysis of modern Jewish historiography more solidly grounded than his avowedly polemical discussion of postmodernists with whom he disagrees. The politics of academe are never far from the surface here, and Rosman clearly is responding to instances in which scholars have used postcolonial theory to criticize policies of the Israeli state and challenge its legitimacy. As some of Rosman’s targets are fellow Israelis (e.g., Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin), the book also is a useful introduction to the heat that history and historiographical disputes generate in contemporary Israel.
Michael C. Hickey
Bloomsburg University
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