Throughout his career Salo Baron wrote about emancipation. In his scholarship on the modern period, it was perhaps the subject that concerned him most and, not surprisingly, he offered the most geographically comprehensive and conceptually inclusive understanding of emancipation of all his contemporaries. Baron freed himself from the parti pris positions of both emancipationist and nationalist historians, as well as other ideologically constrained, often mono-causal explanations.

In a paper entitled, “Newer Emphases in Jewish History,” published in 1963, Salo Baron wrote: “All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” … because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution….” Indeed, if one was to choose a single idea that encapsulated the legacy of Baron, perhaps the pre-eminent Jewish historian of the twentieth century, it would probably be this: Jewish history is not to be seen simply as a series of persecutions, which determined its nature and its course, but rather as a process of ongoing engagement between the Jews and their surroundings.

The three papers by Elisheva Carlebach, David Sorkin, and Adam Teller refreshingly do not merely invoke the name of Salo Baron as a sacred authority but actually reflect critically upon significant pieces of his scholarly corpus. As Adam Teller has pointed out correctly, academic historians of the Jews have sought for decades to align themselves with what they have taken to be the fundamental thrust of Baron's approach to his subject and have warned their students against too great a deviation from it. In the discourse of the field, to claim Baron's mantel is altogether bon ton, while “lachrymose” has long served as a term of severe reproach. Yet, many more people appear to have claimed to be Baron's acolytes in abjuring lachrymosity than have actually read a significant portion of Baron's corpus, much less seriously engaged with what he had to say in those writings. The three contributors are, happily, not among them: in their papers they all have entered into a genuine conversation with certain key propositions in Baron's work, with a mind to refining his insights and building upon them. Baron has served them not as an icon but as an interlocutor in the continuing discussion of significant problems to which he devoted much thought and study. That is a salutary development. Baron's contribution to the study of Jewish history was hardly exhausted by his articulation of a particular conceptual approach to it. As anyone who takes the multiple volumes of A Social and Religious History of the Jews or The Jewish Community in hand becomes aware immediately, Baron was a prodigious researcher whose painstaking mining (and in some cases even discovery) of a vast array of source materials laid the empirical foundations for future scholarship on a broad range of Jewish historical subjects. On that level, as well, reading his work returns significant rewards.