Jewish studies and Jewish identity: some implications of secularizing Torah - A Success Story

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Bernard D. Cooperman

The salient characteristic of modern Jewish Studies, therefore, is an intense and passionate effort to discover and delineate an authentic and independent Jewish society and culture through the ages. The field of Jewish Studies assumes that, no matter how much Jews took from surrounding civilizations, they also addressed Jewish concerns in the terminological, conceptual and often institutional vocabulary of the Jewish past. Demarcating the contours of this "independent authenticity" is the cardinal task of Jewish Studies today.

This was not the case a century ago. Modern Jewish scholarship emerged in large measure from the effort to demonstrate the positive results of tolerating Jews. Historians therefore regularly churned out volumes on "Jewish Contributions to Civilization" and "Great Jews in Medicine."(12) Such apologetics are still, of course, on the agenda of many. I am still reprimanded by Jews if, in a lecture, I deviate from the old program and suggest that Jews may not have all been pious scholars, honest merchants and upstanding citizens who, through no fault of their own, were the victims of blind fanaticism on the part of their ignorant neighbors. Such concerns exist even in the university. After a recent academic lecture on Jewish moneylending in the Renaissance, I was asked by a colleague if I was not worried about promoting anti-Semitism by focusing on such activities. My answer to all such complaints and queries is the same: Jews have reached a point where, thank God, simplistic apologetics are no longer needed. More to the point, we have learned that they are futile. It is counter-productive to portray the Jews of the past as "all righteous, all wise, and all knowing the entire Torah." It is ultimately more useful to portray the Jews and their relations with the outside world as these really were, not as we wish they had been.

But, most important, apologetics are simply not a significant part of my goal as a scholar, and I do not care very much what an anti-Semite might make of my work. I am, for example, interested in the moneylenders because they dominated the Jewish society of Renaissance Italy, because their careers defined the parameters of Jewish existence, and because their perceptions determined the aspirations and limits of Jewish culture for the rest of the community. Since I am interested in understanding the dynamics of this Jewish world, I must try to understand the basic experience of the moneylenders, how they ran their businesses, how they competed with each other, and how they profited from the Gentile society around them. I do not, however, have to begin my analysis by demonstrating that social prejudice had driven these Jewish moneylenders into an unsavory profession against their will.(13)

The turn away from apologetics in contemporary Jewish historiography is a direct reflection of the changing agenda of contemporary Jewish life and the changed nature of Jewish identity. Because nineteenth-century Jewry was deeply engaged in a struggle for emancipation and social acceptance, its historians naturally emphasized the extent of Jewish participation in Western culture, or the antiquity (read: legitimacy) of a local Jewish presence. Nowadays, on the other hand, the Israeli state legitimizes Jewish nationality in new terms, and historians seek to delineate an un-hyphenated Jewish society in the past, one which could confront, and stand in opposition to, surrounding cultures.