The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History

David N. Myers, Alexander Kaye, David N. Myers, Alexander Kaye

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781611684131
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From his first book, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, to his well-known volume on Jewish memory, Zakhor, to his treatment of Sigmund Freud in Freud's Moses, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) earned recognition as perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of his day, whose scholarship blended vast erudition, unfettered creativity, and lyrical beauty. This volume charts his intellectual trajectory by bringing together a mix of classic and lesser-known essays from the whole of his career. The essays in this collection, representative of the range of his writing, acquaint the reader with his research on early modern Spanish Jewry and the experience of crypto-Jews, varied reflections on Jewish history and memory, and Yerushalmi's enduring interest in the political history of the Jews. Also included are a number of little-known autobiographical recollections, as well as his only published work of fiction.

PART I Self-Reflection

1 : TO THE RUSSIAN READER

Preface to the Russian edition of Zakhor (Moscow: Gesharim, 2004).

The following is the English original of the preface to the Russian-language translation of Zakhor, published in Moscow in 2004. Although Zakhor was translated into eight languages, Yosef Yerushalmi professed a special feeling for the Russian version, even though he could not read it.

He began this brief, but revealing, excerpt by discussing his family’s Russian roots and the origins of the family name—Yerusalimski—which was changed to Yerushalmi after his father fled the post-Revolution violence in Russia and immigrated to Palestine. Yerushalmi further recounted the arrival of his parents to the United States, his father from Palestine and his mother from Russia. Then he described the distinctive cultural milieu in which he grew up in the Bronx, a mix of Jewish religious sensibilities, ideologies, and languages.

In reporting on his multilingual upbringing (Hebrew and Yiddish), Yerushalmi admitted to a “lifelong regret” that he never learned Russian, which was his parents’ “private language.” He confided his great passion for Russian song, which filled his childhood home, as well as for Russian belles lettres. Indeed, it was Russian literature, of all the world literatures that Yerushalmi knew and loved, that spoke to him “most directly and intimately.” There was something of the capacity to peer into the human soul, in all its richness and darkness, that drew Yerushalmi to the Russian classics. This capacity informed his own historical labors, most particularly, his attempts to peer into the soul of the crypto-Jew—and of the inquisitor, as well. So too it would seem that the Russian literary ethos, which yielded a deep, at times tortured, introspection, left a profound mark on Yerushalmi as a person.

Since its first publication in English in 1982 Zakhor has been translated into eight languages, including Japanese, yet this translation into Russian has for me a special and very personal significance. My parents were both Russian Jews, my mother born Kaplan in Pinsk, my father born Yerusalimski in Goloskov, though he received his Hebrew and Russian education in Odessa and studied at the university prior to the Revolution. I was born Yerushalmi in New York.

As far as I can determine, Yerusalimski was a rather uncommon name among Russian Jews. The family tradition is that in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, when all Jews were forced to adopt family names, my forebear chose Yerusalimski because he hoped one day to live in Jerusalem. It was my father and an older brother who finally took this step. During the Civil War following the Revolution, when another brother had been killed in a pogrom, the two young men managed to flee from Russia and make their way to what was then Palestine. There they lived the life of pioneers and the name changed automatically to its Hebrew form—Yerushalmi. My father joined a kibbutz, working as a guard, in construction, and in the fields. In 1923 his brother returned to Russia intending to bring my grandfather to the Land of Israel. Unfortunately, this was just around the time that the anti-Zionist persecutions had begun. Neither of them got out, and thus I never knew my grandfather, my uncle, or any other members of my father’s large family, some of whose members were exiled as Zionists to Siberia and dispersed to other places in Russia. As for my father, in 1928, he was engaged in draining swamps and became severely ill with malaria, an illness that broke his health completely and made further physical work impossible. A friend from Russia who had settled in America invited him to come, recuperate, and then he could go back. He came, and for the rest of his life he was always “going back.” But he never had the money to do so, nor any useful profession that would earn him a living there. My mother had come directly to America with my grandmother in 1922 as a girl of sixteen. In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, she met my father in New York, they fell in love, married, and two years later I came into the world.

It is almost impossible for me to describe the culture and society in which I was raised, because that world has disappeared. The entire neighborhood was Jewish, not necessarily Orthodox, but Jewish to the core, mostly from Eastern Europe, traditionalists and secularists, Zionists, Bundists and Communists, all perpetually and passionately debating, but friends nonetheless. Suffice it to say that, although born in New York, my first language was not English. Until the age of five I spoke fluent Hebrew and Yiddish, as I do to this day. The Hebrew came from my father, who spoke only that with me when we were alone. My mother did not speak Hebrew, so the lingua franca when we were together was Yiddish (a very literary “Vilna Yiddish”). However—both my parents, as I heard from their friends, also spoke and wrote a beautiful Russian. This language, to my lifelong regret, they withheld from me. It was their private language, spoken behind closed doors. When I went to university I did not study Russian; there were so many other languages I needed to learn for the historical work I wanted to do.

The one aspect of Russian that they did not keep to themselves was Russian song. Both of them loved to sing, whether in Hebrew, Yiddish or Russian, as did many of their friends. From my earliest childhood, when my mother would sing me to sleep with Russian lullabies, through the years when, on a summer evening, I would stroll through the park facing our home and hear Jews on the benches singing, some with guitars or even balalaikas, Russian music entered deep into my soul, moving me as no other can. It is part of what the French call my moi profond.

Perhaps it was from this that I came to Russian culture in the broader sense, of course in translation. In my adolescence I began to discover Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Chekhov, whom I have read and reread to this day and to whom I have added many others, from Alexander Herzen to Isaac Babel. Yet although I have read widely in modern Hebrew, Yiddish, English, American, French, German, and Spanish literature, and have many loves in each, somehow Russian literature which, unlike the others, I can only read in translation (I first read Goncharov’s Oblomov in Yiddish!), speaks to me most directly and intimately.

Only Russian poetry in translation has defied me. I have read Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, anthologies of Russian poetry, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Mandelstam, all with the feeling that I remain outside of what I am reading. I own a two-volume edition of the complete poems of Akhmatova with the Russian and the English on facing pages, and even visually I can feel how much is lost. When I asked a Russian colleague to read me a few poems in the original, I realized what it was. The music of her Russian language could not be transposed…

In light of all I have said, you can imagine how moved I am to find one of my books translated for the first time into Russian. Happily, Zakhor is not poetry but prose, and while my style may be difficult to render in Russian, I have been assured that the translation has overcome all obstacles. In the years that have passed since the first edition in English, I have found nothing that would make me change any of the premises of the book. It is now for you, my new readers, to make your own judgments.

As the book goes to press I cannot help but think of my father’s family who remained in Russia. I do not know how many survived the Second World War, nor where they or their children or grandchildren may be today. All contact was broken off in the early 1950’s. I have never been to Russia. If I go, it will be to see the glories of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov in Moscow, and to meet Russian intellectuals, Jews and non-Jews alike. I do not think I will go to Pinsk, because that will bring me only heartache. The “Great White Synagogue” of which my mother and grandmother spoke is no more; there is nothing left of what they knew and cherished. I would go to Goloskov only if the Jewish cemetery is still in existence, which I doubt. But Russian Jewry, though reduced in number, is still alive and full of creative potential, and the future, as historians should know, remains always unknown and open. This book and this preface are now for you, my dear and unknown Russian reader.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

New York

13 Tammuz, 5764

2 July 2004

2 : WORDS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVING AN HONORARY DOCTORATE FROM THE ÉCOLE PRATIQUE DES HAUTES ÉTUDES

The Sorbonne, Paris, January 14, 2002.

This short speech afforded Yosef Yerushalmi the opportunity to reflect on his connection to the language and culture of France. He recalled his first teacher of French as a boy, as well as his wide reading of French literature in college, where he served as president of the Yeshiva College French Club.

Yerushalmi also gave voice to his admiration for the French tradition of Jewish studies and its scholars, for example, I. S. Révah, whose work on Marranos he often quoted in lectures and seminars. Yerushalmi also expressed esteem for notable French historians in fields other than his own, from Marc Bloch to Pierre Nora, whose multivolume Les lieux de mémoire appeared in 1984, the same year that Zakhor appeared in French (in Éric Vigne’s translation). It was in that same period that Yerushalmi began to go to France regularly. During his visit in 1984, he met Nora, and the two discussed the affinities in their respective work on the formation of collective memory, an area of research in which the two scholars would gain international acclaim.

In the second half of his remarks, Yerushalmi reflected on the malleability of history. He noted the irony in the fact that the very city, Paris, in which rabbinic literature was now the subject of serious academic study was where the Talmud was consigned to flame in 1242, on the very site where brutal executions later took place during the Terror. That swing of the historical pendulum reminded Yerushalmi that history, like life, is open.

Yerushalmi followed on that point by addressing the utility of historical knowledge. History served as an antidote to both excessive despair and excessive hope by navigating between the poles of apocalypse and utopia. This realization led Yerushalmi to conclude that history was contingent and open-ended, resulting not in “ultimate knowledge” but rather “unexpected turns and byways”—exactly the stuff of the historian’s craft and delight.

This is for me above all an occasion for gratitude and I have many to thank. I had the good fortune to study with great masters in Jewish and other fields, prodigious scholars who guided me while allowing me to become myself. But it seems to me more appropriate today to focus on my relation to France. I will begin with Lillian Krotky, an unforgettable teacher in an obscure Jewish school in New York who never received an “honoris causa,” but who, when I was ten years old, introduced us with love and passion to the French language, and taught us to sing the “Marseillaise” as fervently as though we were storming the barricades. Thanks also to the stern teacher in my high school who forced us to memorize a French poem every week (out of all of Baudelaire he chose “L’Albatros,” no doubt because he thought this “Fleur” contained no “Mal” that could corrupt us).

In college I read history for pleasure, but my field of study was comparative literature—English, Hebrew, German, and of course—French. My professors, less charismatic than Mlle. Krotky, at least exposed me systematically to texts from the Chanson de Roland through Albert Camus. When, still a student in New York, I met the young Israeli pianist who would soon become my wife and fill my life with music, not the least of her attractions was her knowledge of French (our son has by now surpassed both of us), and it was she who revealed to me the profundities of Debussy’s Préludes, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, and so much else.

Yet I confess that even now I am not entirely secure in speaking French, and, while I accept that my spoken Portuguese in Lisbon is far from perfect, only in Paris do I feel that if I make a verbal slip I have committed a sin. No one can imagine the anxiety I felt before I taught my first seminar in French at 54 Boulevard Raspail, nor my embarrassment when, after a lecture in Geneva, a Parisian friend said to me: “C’était vraiment beau. Mais—qu’est-ce que c’est les ‘zazards’”? (That was really good. But what is “zazards”?) It took me a moment to realize that at one point I had said “lesazards” instead of “le[s] hazards.” Other nuances are not grammatical but cultural. Outside of France it is not immediately evident that an École can be both “Normale” and “Supérieure,” and only later did I fully appreciate the “Pratique” in L’École Pratique des Hautes Études. For an Anglophone, “Sciences Religieuses” translates into an impossible “Religious Sciences” or “Sciences of Religion” unless, perhaps, if one thinks of the German Religionswissenschaft. “Histoire du Judaïsme” becomes in English “The History of Judaism,” where “Judaism” can only mean the Jewish religion, whereas the more elastic “Judaïsme” includes both the Jewish religion and the Jewish people, as in Wissenschaft des Judentums. I am a historian of the Jewish people, and as such I am inevitably also a historian of its religion. I would not feel at ease in a “Department of Religion” at an American university; I am delighted to be linked to “Sciences Religieuses” at the École Pratique which, in its breadth and scope, remains unique.

If I still lapse occasionally while speaking French, I believe I have been a good reader, and the decades of reading have brought me untold riches. I cannot express fully, in this brief time, what I owe to France and to French culture, and this is so even if I limit myself to scholarship. My debt to French Jewish historians from Isidore Loeb to Isaac Salvador Révah and to the inexhaustible Revue des Études Juives is directly reflected in my work and requires no further comment. Less obvious but no less important to me has been the impact of French historical scholarship beyond Jewish historiography per se.

The names come easily but I shall mention only a few. Marc Bloch—not La société féodale or even Apologie pour l’histoire, but—Les rois thaumaturges! Lucien Fèbvre on Rabelais, and his seminal essay “La sensibilité et l’histoire.” Philippe Ariès on childhood and on death. Louis Massignon on Al-Hallaj. Marcel Bataillon, Érasme et l’Espagne. It is not that I became a disciple of any of these or have necessarily pursued their themes. It is just that when one is young, in one’s twenties, an apprentice historian, certain books come like revelations; they stretch the mind and the imagination beyond their prior limits. So this is what a historian is capable of writing! Such history is possible! And suddenly other possibilities unfold…

I have reached an age when I ask myself what I have learned beyond what I have read or written. For myself I can say I have learned that life is open, full of the unexpected whether for better or worse, full of surprise. In the long years when I was studying for my doctorate in Jewish history I did not know whether there would even be an academic position available when I finished. I certainly did not dream that I would have the privilege of teaching at the two institutions that were the first secular universities in the Western world to fully integrate postbiblical Jewish studies as part of the patrimony of world civilization (Harvard—Jewish Literature and Philosophy—1925; Columbia—Jewish History—1930). Needless to say, the thought that one day I might be honored here, at the Sorbonne, never crossed my mind.

Yet here I stand, and I am deeply moved. My sincere thanks to Prof. Jean Baubérot, President of the École; to Prof. Claude Langlois, president of the Cinquième Section and to his colleagues; and in particular to Professors Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, who had much to do with this honor, and who continue with distinction the admirable tradition of Études Juives forged by their predecessors at the École—Israel Lévi, Georges Vajda, Charles Touatti, Gérard Nahon.

I take this occasion also to express publicly my gratitude to Éric Vigne, my French editor and translator, my dear friend. Whatever reputation I have in France I ultimately owe to him. For it was he, on his own initiative, who translated and published Zakhor in 1984. I arrived in Paris that year to find that the first volumes of Pierre Nora’s monumental work, Les lieux de mémoire, had just appeared. A new friendship began when Nora and I met, both astonished that, separated by an ocean, unknown to one another, within totally different historical contexts, we had been working along strikingly parallel lines. Another surprise. How to explain it? It has been suggested that there must have been “something in the air,” an explanation that turns historiography into meteorology…

If life is open, the same is true of history. Rather than speak abstractly, I choose one specific and for me poignant example that is not, perhaps, without relevance.

The beauties of Paris and the glories of its history have long been celebrated, not least by Americans. But for a historian of the Jews with a long historical memory, Paris has yet another, darker claim to fame. It is the city in which, in 1242, in the Place de G...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi “in the Midst of History”
• Part I: Self-Reflection
• Part II: Early Patterns
• Part III: Iberia and Beyond
• Part IV: Jews and Politics
• Part V: The Yoke of Memory
• Index