Definitions of Jewish Modernity

When Is Modern?

From the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, a recurrent theme of discussion wherever Jewish history was taught was historical periodization, especially the question of when the modern period of Jewish history began. A standard exercise or examination question, then, was to summarize and critique the various periodization schemes or dates that had been proposed for the starting point of Jewish modernity by scholars from Isaac Marcus Jost (1793–1860) through to Shmuel Ettinger (1919–88).

By highlighting this subject, teachers aimed to demonstrate to their students that periodization, in addition to its function of defining conventional starting points and caesuras for historical narratives, is a coarse form of historical interpretation. In picking a certain date or event as indicative of the beginning or end of a historical period, each scholar telegraphed what to his mind was the most significant feature, theme, or process of that period. Periodization is an attempt to capture in shorthand the ‘essential nature’ of a historical era. For example, Heinrich Graetz believed in the primacy of ideas in history and that the primary idea animating Jewish modernity was Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah. He also possessed a ‘penchant for reducing historical trends and intellectual currents to personalities’. Thus he dated the Jewish modern period from the late eighteenth-century rise of the figure that symbolized the Haskalah, Moses Mendelssohn, who, to Graetz's mind, did the most to shape the foundations of Jewish modernity. Simon Dubnow thought that the key trans formation of the Jews in their attempts to live in the modern world was political integration into their countries of residence and their accompanying loss of communal autonomy. He therefore dated Jewish modernity from the French Revolution, and specifically from the granting of citizenship to the Jews, that is, political emancipation (28 September 1791).

Another lesson that discussions and exercises on periodization taught was the elusiveness of the ‘noble dream’ of objectivity. It seemed that one could discover in scholars’ definitions of periods—and especially of the modern period in which they themselves lived—their constructions of their own historical experience and their own general metahistories. The Zionist Ben-Zion Dinur consciously attempted to create a usable historical past for what was in his day the new Israeli society and polity, and was active in establishing many important Israeli cultural institutions.