Jew in a Blog

Shortly before the war broke out, the library of Matisyahu Strashun, the first Jewish public library ever established, consisted of some 50,000 volumes, many unique and rare and hundreds of years old.  According to oral accounts from that confused time, it was put into the safekeeping of the YIVO Institute.  This library and others, as well as the rest of YIVO’s holdings, were divided into three parts after the German invasion.  The Germans looted one part, taking it to Frankfurt; another part they destroyed or did not have time to process; the third part was hidden by YIVO workers in 1941-1942 during the heroic period of the Paper Brigade, in which many thousands of books and documents were concealed by YIVO workers in the Vilna Ghetto or given to Gentile friends on the outside.  The books and documents removed to Frankfurt were discovered after the war by the U.S. Army.  This material was eventually shipped to the United States, where it became the core of the library and archive of the reconstituted YIVO Institute, which had relocated to New York in 1940.

Jonathan Brent, the director of New York’s YIVO, writes about his trip to Lithuania and YIVO’s history there.

"The most significant chronicler of postbiblical Jewish history, Jacques Basnage, inevitably identified to some extent with the Jews who had been scattered all over the world, for as a Huguenot he himself had been driven out of France and had to live in exile in Holland. As a pastor in Rotterdam, Basnage consolidated the French Reformed Church in the Netherlands. He regarded his fifteen-volume History of the Jews, from Jesus Christ to the Present: To Serve as a Continuation of Josephus’s History (1716), as a continuation of the work of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. He recognized that his work was unparalleled, even among Jewish authors. Basnage remarked that Jewish readers were satisfied “with the Sincerity & the Moderation with which this History has been written,” and emphasized—as did the French Encyclopedists, to whose circle he belonged—his impartiality: “I thought that I ought to be neither partial nor extravagant. I allowed the Jews their Reasons and their Apologies. I reported Events in the circumstances which appeared true and certain to me. I censured Injustice, Violence & Persecution. I followed the most exact Historians without heat of Faction, without having regard to the Preference of Persons.” Thus, he angered some Catholic readers with his open critique of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, or his rejection of the pope’s anti-Jewish policy. On the other hand, he proposed his Dutch exile as an example of religious tolerance for the Jews who had fled the Iberian Peninsula. Nonetheless, throughout Basnage’s whole work is found the unconcealed missionary conviction that the Jews must ultimately end up in the lap of the church. “If I offended some article of Religion, all Roman Catholics are interested in defending it with me, since I only worked to prove the Truth of Christianity against the Jews."

More evidence that the origins of “objectivity” and “rationality” and “pure thought” are based in Christian proselytization? And that “universalism” or “humanism” are Christian culture in disguise?

Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpretations of Jewish History, 18-19.

Collection of essays, including one by Martin Goodman, author of the excellentRome and Jerusalem

On the shiny glass table lay jewelry, coins and metal utensils - similar to those in a catalog of antiques. The years have left their mark on the items, but they are still in good shape. Some collector would probably pay a nice amount for them.

But these items are not for sale. It is doubtful whether anyone even would think of buying them if they knew where they came from. They were found about a year ago in Kovno, Lithuania, also known as Kaunas. Vladimir Orlov, a young local archaeologist, found the items - and revealed a dark secret hidden for 70 years.

In the course of the past two centuries historians have constantly redefined the history of the Jews. In the meantime, some of them have themselves become the subjects of scholarly studies. But whereas a great deal has been written about Jews and Jewish history, and important studies of particular aspects of Jewish historiography in the modern period have appeared, astonishingly enough there is still no general, comparative overview and interpretation. This is all the more surprising because in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish historiography was seen as having a considerable political function. Jews had relatively little substantial political or even military power to exert in support of their various claims to individual emancipation in Western Europe and the United States, collective autonomous rights in Eastern Europe, or the construction of a state in Palestine. On the other hand, what they could show was their consciousness of an especially long history. The early promoters of these three claims derived their legitimation from history. Whereas the advocates of individual emancipation emphasized the Jews’ millennial rootedness on European soil, the supporters of autonomy emphasized the historically developed community as the basic form of Jewish existence. Finally, the Zionists proclaimed the historic right to the Land of Israel. In each case historians, as prophets of the past, played a key role in the process of political legitimation. For Jews, more than for most nations and religious communities, history was the primary weapon in this struggle. (Page 2)

Goddammit

How do people fucking write history papers without getting theoretical, or, at the very least, analytical?  I have no patience for research; but my history professor probably has no patience for Chela Sandoval and the consciousnesses of marginalized peoples.  Well, he’d probably think it’d be cool, but then get pissed that I didn’t do what he asked. 

Anyways people, it’s worth noting that due to the ever-shifting power balances and geography of Eastern Europe, what we think was a fractured Jewish community arguing over Zionism and socialism and Autonomism and religion is actually just a “kaleidoscope” of means to achieve liberation, functioning as an [inessential] cultural nation.  The “indicisiveness” with which the Bund addressed the National Question was a brilliant move that gave them political flexibility to focus on liberation; they didn’t need to define their identities (even Sandoval says her feminism is inessential) because they were busy fucking shit up. 

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

“For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, from Illuminations page 255