Michael Brenner - A Short History of the Jews

A Short History
of the JEWS

A Short History
of the JEWS

Michael Brenner

Translated by Jeremiah Riemer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

English tranlsation copyright 2010 by Princeton University Press

This is a translation of Kleine Jdische Geschichte by Michael Brenner,

Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Mnchen 2008

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work

should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2012

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15497-8

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Brenner, Michael, 1964

[Kleine jdische Geschichte. English]

A short history of the Jews / Michael Brenner ; translated by Jeremiah Riemer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14351-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. JewsHistory. I. Title.

eISBN 978-1-400-83426-6

DS117.B7213 2010

909'.04924dc22

2009046777

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften

InternationalTranslation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences

from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation,

the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT

and the German Publishers & Booksellers Association.

R0

TO MY MICHELLE

Foreword

THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS has been told in different versions ever since the end of the seventeenth century. The first historian who composed a comprehensive post-Biblical history of the Jews was a French Huguenot living in exile in the Netherlands. Jacques Basnage and many other Christian authors after him wanted to show that the Exile was divine punishment for the Jews failure to recognize the True Faith, namely Christianity. In their interpretation, Jewish history was part of a Christian plan for salvation. Modern Jewish historians, in turn, who since the beginning of the nineteenth century devoted their careers to studying Jewish history using scholarly methods, wrote with other motives in mind. Many German-Jewish scholars of the early nineteenth century wanted to prove that their contemporary fellow Jews deserved emancipation. Therefore they told Jewish history as the story of a religious minority that adapted to the states in which they lived and contributed to their well-being. Later Jewish historians in Eastern Europe, by contrast, depicted the Jews as an independent nation among other nationsa nation, however, that had no territory of its own and also needed none, and whose political autonomy was expressed in the institution of the Jewish community. Zionist historians, finally, placed the land of Israel center stage. For them, the dispersion of the Jews among other nations was merely an interim phase. Wherever they lived, according to the Zionist historians, Jews have awaited return to their ancestral homeland, Israel.

In the face of such different interpretations of Jewish history, it would be presumptuous to attempt now, at long last, to write a true history of the Jews. Every historian today knows that one cannot, as Leopold Ranke believed in the nineteenth century, tell history as it actually was. Historians, like all human beings, are products of their time, their background, their teachers, their environment, and their political convictions. They may regard one source as more reliable than another. It is important that they consider the questions that generations before them have posed, and also consider those sources that contradict their own interpretations, that they are self-critical enough to recognize where their own perspective on history threatens to serve political or religious interests.

Telling the history of the Jews is not easy, because people in almost every corner of the world have not only heard something about the Jews, but also have opinions about them. For a group that never made up more than one percent of the worlds population, this may be no small honor. The perspective of distance that is essential to the historians craft, however, is hampered when one encounters talk about the Jews as Gods Chosen People or as deicidal, when Jewish intelligence is invoked or international Jewish finance is pilloried, when Israel is praised as a bastion of civilization in the midst of barbarism or condemned as a brutal regime in the midst of a peace-loving world.

For many Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the Bibleand therewith the origin of the Jewsis the Word of God and cannot be doubted. Many nonreligious people who grew up in the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim worlds also know stories and sayings from the Biblefrequently in a secularized form detached from their original religious contentand have thus also acquired a certain picture of the Jews early history. The later history of the Jews, especially in light of the Holocaust, is often perceived as an unbroken sequence of persecutions in which the Jews were always victims. The genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the twentieth century thus appears as the logical outcome of a precursory antisemitism. Finally, today the nature of the medias focus on Israel overshadows all other perspectives on the Jews. They are frequently viewed above all else as players in the Middle East conflict, and their history is then often understood as the cause behind the escalation of this conflict.

A history of the Jews must broaden the horizon so that it reaches beyond these themes. Within the given framework of this book, however, some chapters of the larger three thousand-year history can only be touched upon tentatively, while others must remain completely unmentioned. The golden thread that runs throughout this book is migration. Jews were not always wandering, but wandering has characterized Jewish history across all epochs and continents. Thus, every chapter is introduced with a story about some relocation. At the very beginning of each chapter there is an illustration from a Passover Haggadah. That often richly illustrated collection of Biblical passages, legends, and prayers is read in family circles on the evening of the Seder, the beginning of the Passover festival that recalls the Exodus from Egypt. Every era and every region has found and continues to find its own images for this story. The selected illustrations can thus stand for the many-sidedness of Jewish history.

No historian today, in light of the copious literature, can claim to be an expert on all periods and geographic regions of Jewish history. So I am especially grateful to a number of colleagues who took the time to provide critical reviews of some chapters in this book. My special thanks goes out to Eli Bar-Chen, John Efron, Jrg Frey, Eva Haverkamp, Matthias Lehmann, Christoph Levin, Jrgen Matthus, Michael A. Meyer, Ken Moss, Marcus Pyka, Jonathan Sarna, Daniel Schwartz, Avinoam Shalem, Stephen Whitfield, and Israel Yuval. At Princeton University Press I enjoyed the support of Brigitta van Rheinberg from the first to the last minute. Clara Platter was an excellent editor, Terri OPrey a most careful production editor. Jeremiah Riemer has been more than a wonderful translator. The English edition also profited from his valuable suggestions to improve the German original. I would like to thank the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where I was a Fellow during the academic year 2007/2008, for allowing me to take time off from teaching duties so that I could finish this book. My final thanks go to my wife Michelle who contributed the most valuable of all suggestions to make this a more appealing book.