Objecting to the Burden: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor and American Jewish Literature

Abstract

In his seminal book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), renowned historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argues that it is literature and culture, and not historiography, that shaped Jewish collective memory for generations. In Yerushalmi’s telling, the boundaries between historiography and literature, “truth” and “myth,” are set and strict. However, the reception of Yerushalmi’s work itself challenges this assumption and obscures the clear-cut distinctions between literature and historiography. This paper reads Yerushalmi’s book alongside its preface, written by Harold Bloom, in an attempt to understand Zakhor not only as a historiographic argument, but as a narrative of Jewish modernity, a literary meditation, embodying the very shift in collective memory that Yerushalmi himself lamented. The paper then explores the ways in which Yerushalmi’s work has inspired two prominent contemporary American Jewish writers: Joshua Cohen, in his novel The Netanyahus (2021), and Nicole Krauss, in her short story “Zusya on the Roof” (2013). In their literary work, one can hear echoes of Yerushalmi’s work, distinct and identifiable, yet incorporated in a fictional, imaginative world. Zakhor thus serves not only as an inspiration but as a catalyst for a deep, insightful rendering of Jewish history and one’s grappling with it.

1. Introduction

In the four decades since its publication, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) has become a canonical text in the field of Jewish history. Both a historiographical narrative and a personal contemplation, Yerushalmi’s book has launched lively debates in the fields of memory studies and Jewish historiography; the final chapter in particular has been the focus of continuous discussions on the predicaments of Jewish historians, on the extent to which modern Jewish historiography establishes a break with traditional Jewish forms of remembering, and, perhaps most poignantly, on the question of the impact—or lack thereof—of historiographical works on perceptions, concepts, and beliefs of Jews.1 Yerushalmi’s view of modern Jewish historiography as “the faith of fallen Jews” struck a chord with readers in North America and worldwide, many of whom saw Yerushalmi’s account not only as a meditation on Jewish history but, more generally, as a thought-provoking proposition of Jewish modernity.

This essay offers a reading of Zakhor outside of its intended context of Jewish historiography and memory, drawing it closer to the world of Jewish literature.2 The impetus for this reading derives both from Yerushalmi’s own fascination with literature in Zakhor and from one of the book’s core arguments—that Jewish culture displayed an inherent tension between the historical and the mythical, the latter representing the domain of literature. Throughout Zakhor, Yerushalmi is conscious of the allure of myth, arguing that post-Holocaust Jewry has chosen, time and again, to turn to the mythical and the fictional rather than the rigorously documented historiography. The mythical and the literary, one might argue, are the specters of Zakhor, and of the writing of history more broadly. Ostensibly, Zakhor seeks to reinstate the separation between literature and historiography, and, accordingly, between myth—the grain of literature—and history, the events of the past that are recorded in historiography and endow the historian’s craft with a sense of urgency and import. Reading the book against its explicit intentions, I argue that Zakhor itself can be understood as a work of American Jewish literature. Though by no means akin to a novel or a short story, Zakhor is rendered here as a work of creative literary non-fiction, offering a compelling and eloquent argument that, subsequently, has turned into a myth, and impacted two contemporary writers of American Jewish fiction.

This reading of Zakhor is inspired not only by Yerushalmi’s stylistic sensibilities, literary references, and essayistic tone. A crucial component of this reading is Harold Bloom’s introduction to the 1989 edition of Zakhor (Bloom 1989). Originally published, in a shorter version, as a review of Zakhor for The New York Review of Books (Bloom 1983), Bloom’s preface sheds light on Zakhor’s literary overtones, culminating in Bloom’s prediction that Zakhor may one day “join the canon of Jewish wisdom literature” (Bloom 1989, p. xiv). In what follows, I begin by reconstructing Yerushalmi’s arguments regarding the vexed relationship between history, memory, and myth, and proceed to examine these arguments through Bloom’s prism. I then turn to two contemporary American Jewish writers, Nicole Krauss and Joshua Cohen. Both Cohen and Krauss acknowledge the influence of Zakhor on their writing—separately, in interviews and public talks, and, on one occasion, in a joint conversation at the Jewish Theological Seminary3—and regard it as a canonical text within their shared intellectual milieu. Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus and Krauss’s short story “Zusya on the Roof” introduce an additional, essential element in the enduring mythical resonance of Yerushalmi’s text. By incorporating Yerushalmi’s scholarly arguments and intellectual persona into their fictional constructs, Cohen and Krauss take the path offered by Bloom, cementing the view of Zakhor as a work of literature whose arguments and ideas have been transformed into a creative myth of Jewish modernity. Thus construed, Bloom, Krauss, and Cohen represent three distinctive reactions to Zakhor, which, by situating it in the realm of literature, affect our perception of the original work and point to its interpretive horizons.

2. Yerushalmi and Bloom: Zakhor Against Itself

Following the first three chapters of Zakhor, in which Yerushalmi unfolds the particularities of history and memory in Jewish culture, the fourth chapter, “Modern Dilemmas,” begins with Yerushalmi’s personal admission that “As a professional Jewish historian I am a new creature in Jewish history” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 81). Subsequently, Yerushalmi discusses the emergence of Jewish historiography in modernity, linking it to the European Enlightenment and the political emancipation of Jews. These historical developments resulted in an internalization of European historicism and the creation of a secular, positivist Jewish historiography. This process, Yerushalmi further argues, has deepened the chasm between Jewish collective memory and Jewish historiography, which “cannot replace an eroded group memory which never depended on historians in the first place” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 94). For Yerushalmi, the Biblical commandment “Zakhor”—thou shall remember—creates the distinction between memory and historiography, the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the popular, collective search for a past and the historian’s Sisyphean attempt to explore it.

Yerushalmi shows how Jewish collective memory has been historically transmitted through liturgy, religious poetry, and memory books. In modernity, he argues, ideology and literature fill the void, providing useful and compelling images of the past. The collective view of the past has been cemented and passed on in works of poetry and fiction. Yerushalmi goes so far as to argue that the image of the past is shaped “not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 98). Contemporary Jews seem to await “a new, metahistorical myth, for which the novel provides at least a temporary modern surrogate” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 98). In its lack of impact on wide circles, the historian’s quest is rendered almost useless; wary of this conclusion, Yerushalmi assures his readers that the writing of history is still immensely significant, and that a possible solution to this conundrum is the historian’s understanding of “the degree to which he himself is a product of rupture” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 101). While historiography will perhaps never triumph, a reorientation and rethinking of the modes of history-writing can increase the impact of historiography on modern Jewish collective memory, perhaps inspiring individuals not to “choose myth over history” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 99).

Yerushalmi’s account is suffused with literary references—he mentions and cites Haim Hazaz, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, and Jorge Luis Borges—and he admits to being “far from immune to the seductions of myth” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 98). The literary gestures and awareness of the power of myth define Zakhor as much more than a historian’s account of the marginality of his profession: it is a meditation of a historian who is well aware of the cultural impact of myth and its powerful allure.4 Precisely because he does not dismiss myth and literature altogether, but rather sees them as containing deep historical insights, Yerushalmi’s narrative invites a more nuanced and fluid approach to the rigid dichotomy of myth and history.

Harold Bloom’s preface to Zakhor picks up on some of Yerushalmi’s literary sensibilities and offers a reading of the text with close attention to some of its fundamental tensions, such as the tension between history and myth. Bloom begins by reminding his readers that historically, as Yerushalmi shows, Jewish memory in the Biblical period found its manifestations in ritual and action, and, in Medieval times, in liturgy and memorial books (Bloom 1989, p. xvii). Traditional Jewish forms of commemorating the past have always been inclined towards literary and poetic modes of memory. Accordingly, history and history-writing were seen as foreign to the Jewish experience and its emphasis on memory, constituting an abyss between history and memory—Yerushalmi’s main thesis in Zakhor. And while ritual and action substituted for historiography in Biblical times and liturgy had done so in Medieval times, Bloom stresses, following Yerushalmi, that in modernity, literature and ideology are competing to “occupy the abyss that Jewish memory has become” (Bloom 1989, p. xix). The locus of modern Jewish collective memory thus becomes literature and ideological-political movements, while, in the second half of the twentieth century, literature seems to stand as the sole domain of Jewish forms of memory: “Post-Holocaust Jewry,” Bloom writes echoing Yerushalmi, “resembles the generations that followed the Spanish Expulsion, and Jews also will choose myth over history” (Bloom 1989, p. xx).

To this paraphrase of Yerushalmi, Bloom then adds his own hypothesis:

Perhaps the myth of myths that yet will rekindle Jewish memory, here in the West, can be found in the lives and works of Freud and Kafka, and in Scholem’s also. We do not know.

(Bloom 1989, p. xx)

This illuminating quote underlines not only Bloom’s own reading of Zakhor but also his unique approach to the question of Jewish modernity, which differs immensely from Yerushalmi’s. Whereas for Yerushalmi, Jewish modernity and the advent of academic Jewish historiography have intensified the conflict of the Jewish historian—that of studying the history of a people who have seldom turned to historiography to understand their past, and whose past has been transmitted through memory, ritual, and text—Bloom, as a literary scholar, is clearly attempting to trace the foundational myths of Jewish modernity, whose eminent shadow is cast upon the intricacies of the modern Jewish experience. For Bloom, the hallmarks of modern Jewish mythology are Kafka, Freud, and, to a lesser extent, Scholem, though “we do not know.” In Bloom’s reading, Yerushalmi’s text transcends the dichotomy of history and memory, fact and myth; his meditation is situated ipso facto within the modern Jewish existence, the guideposts of which are Kafka, Freud, and Scholem, and, one might argue, Yerushalmi himself. Freud and Kafka no longer offer a competing mythical framework to Yerushalmi’s historiographical narrative, but rather “become the hidden presences in Zakhor” (Bloom 1989, p. xxii).

A further argument in Bloom’s preface buttresses his reading of Zakhor along the lines of modern Jewish myths. Bloom mentions Richard Rorty, who has emphasized the contingency of human histories and actions in his notable work Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity from 1989, the same year Bloom was writing his preface. Bloom points to an affinity between Rorty and Yerushalmi. According to Yerushalmi, as we have seen, the origins of modern Jewish historiography were conditioned by the European Enlightenment and the emergence from the ghetto. It is Rorty, Bloom reminds us, who has stressed the contingency of human individuality. This establishes the initial connection between Yerushalmi and Rorty: both insist on the contingency of human affairs. Contingency, Rorty adds, is best grasped by poets, and not by philosophers or historians. Works of poetry can draw our attention to the contingency of human life, something that historians and philosophers fail to account for.5 Yerushalmi, Bloom writes, is “taking up the Nietzschean, or strong poetic, stance toward the contingency of… modern Jewish selfhood” (Bloom 1989, p. xxi). Zakhor, in this interpretation, follows the Nietzschean-Rortian view of contingency and perceptiveness, which can be grasped poetically rather than historically. Zakhor expresses Yerushalmi’s own gesture towards the conditionality of Jewish modernity, a Nietzschean-Rortian stance in favor of the contingency of history, which may expand, against Yerushalmi’s own explicit intentions, to a view of Jewish modernity which embraces the poetic, in which the poetic no longer poses a threat to the memory of the past, but rather is seen as the profound embodiment of the human experience in all its contingency.

Bloom’s preface to Zakhor, and his reading of Yerushalmi as taking a “poetic stance,” suggests a view of Yerushalmi’s text as Jewish literature. Whereas Yerushalmi criticizes the turn to myth over history, Bloom’s category of the modern Jewish myth suggests a framework for understanding Zakhor itself as a myth of Jewish modernity. If for Bloom, Yerushalmi’s meditation is haunted by modern Jewish myth-makers such as Freud, Kafka, and Scholem,6 it is plausible that Zakhor itself has the potential of becoming a myth. The examples of Joshua Cohen and Nicole Krauss, to which I will now turn, demonstrate this process of transformation into myth, which Bloom had only hinted at.

3. Nicole Krauss: Zakhor and the Burden of the Past

Nicole Krauss’s work has been widely discussed in relation to Holocaust memory and Jewish identity (See Lang 2009; Codde 2011; Berger and Milbauer 2013), while her dialogue with historiography—and specifically with Yerushalmi—has received little attention. Nowhere is this dialogue more central than in her short story “Zusya on the Roof,” published first in The New Yorker in 2013, and reprinted in Krauss’s short story collection To Be a Man (Krauss 2020). The main protagonist, Brodman, is a retired professor of Jewish History at Columbia University who recently passed away, but, thanks to his doctors, returns to life two weeks later, only to find that, in his absence, his daughter had given birth to his first grandson. In the days following his grandson’s anticipated Bris, Brodman reflects on his intellectual trajectory and confronts his frustrations and sense of failure in his personal and academic objectives—his position as a Jewish historian, and his relationships with his parents and his two daughters. Integrated into American society, Brodman, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had wished to establish a new life in America, became a university professor and dedicated his career to the study of the Jewish past. His final project, which he did not complete, was a book on “the predicament of the Jewish historian”; Brodman would share some of his preliminary, unwritten thoughts with students who came to visit:

The Jews had finished writing history long ago, he said. When the rabbis closed the canon of the Bible, it was because they felt they had more than enough history. Two thousand years ago the door was shut on sacred history, the only kind a Jew had any use for. Then came the zealotry and the messianism, the savagery of the Romans, the river of blood, the fire, the destruction, and, finally, exile. From then on, the Jews decided to live outside history. History was what happened to other people while the Jews were waiting for the Messiah to come. In the meantime, the rabbis busied themselves with Jewish memory only, and for two millennia that memory had sustained an entire people. So who was he—who were any of them—to rock the boat?

(Krauss 2020, p. 26)

Brodman’s historiographical hypothesis is a condensed version of the first two chapters of Zakhor, in which Yerushalmi outlines Biblical and rabbinical notions of memory and history, and the development of devices and rituals of memory as alternatives to the meticulous recording of the past. Krauss was clearly inspired by Yerushalmi’s personal tone, particularly in the final chapter of Zakhor, but whereas Yerushalmi elevated his concerns and uneasiness with his profession into a series of lectures and a subsequent book, Krauss’s fictional historian struggled in writing his book, and ultimately failed: since retiring, Brodman “was said to be writing the masterwork that would synthesize a lifetime of scholarship. But no one had seen the pages, and rumors circulated around the department at Columbia.” Brodman’s failure to write his final work, along with the grim revelation that historians have little influence on the shaping of collective memory—the glum understanding that he had spent “fifty years trying to write unnecessary books” (Krauss 2020, p. 21)—translate in Brodman’s experience to a more fundamental, personal failure: the failure to live an authentic life.

At the heart of Krauss’s short story is a retelling of the Hasidic tale of Zusya, the eighteenth-century rabbi of Hanipol and disciple of the Maggid of Mezeritch, who, legend has it, stood before God shortly after his death and conveyed his sense of shame for not being Abraham or Moses; God then tells him that he should not have tried to be Moses or Abraham, but rather to be himself, Zusya (Buber 1947, p. 141).7 In Krauss’s story, Brodman, while in the hospital, hanging between life and death, is reminded of the Zusya tale and whispers to his doctor: “I wasn’t Zusya” (Krauss 2020, p. 24). Brodman then changes the end of the tale: rather than Divine reprimand, Brodman envisions a subsequent conversation, with Zusya stating that he was not even himself, “because I was a Jew, and there was no room left to be anything else, not even Zusya” (Krauss 2020, p. 25). Brodman’s addition alters the original meaning of the tale: whereas the Hasidic story—albeit in Martin Buber’s popularization—speaks to a pious virtue of authenticity, in Krauss’s telling, one’s authenticity remains an elusive, even impossible goal, in light of the constraints of Jewish tradition. The Zusya tale is understood as a narrative about the unattainable quest for authenticity and emancipation from tradition, rather than a narrative of liberation from the weight of the patriarchs. While the original tale asserts that tradition and authenticity can coexist, Brodman’s retelling renders this impossible. Indeed, following the death of his father, a depressed Brodman comes to realize that the forceful presence of his father prevented him—Brodman—from escaping Jewish tradition, cutting ties with “what his father had asked of him, just as it had been asked of his father, and his father before that, and back and back through the chain of relentless begetting … ‘I simply object to the burden!’” (Krauss 2020, pp. 33–34), Brodman says to his analyst. Only now, coming back to life for a short period of time, Brodman “saw the true shape of his life, how it had torqued always in the direction of duty” (Krauss 2020, p. 23).

Considering the centrality of the Zusya tale to Krauss’s story, and Brodman’s overall conclusion that he spent his life succumbing to external duties and burdens rather than being himself, the Zusya story becomes an epitome of the modern Jewish experience, of the struggle between a commitment to the past and a desire to liberate oneself from “the three thousand years of treacherous remembering, highly regarded suffering, and waiting” (Krauss 2020, p. 23). Brodman’s intellectual trajectory is part and parcel of this unfortunate condition—rather than freeing himself from the past, Brodman maintains his commitment to it, though in a secular, academic environment. Only after his death does Brodman realize that historiography fails to create a critical, secular type of Jewishness, which Yerushalmi referred to in Zakhor as “the faith of fallen Jews.” Inherent to the Jewish experience is a deep sense of indebtedness, which undermines any pursuit of existential self-realization. The academic study of the past creates the illusion of a critical distance and an emancipation, but rather than easing the indebtedness to the past, the indebtedness is strengthened. Brodman goes so far as to blame his teacher, Salo Wittmayer Baron, for his situation, and, in his hallucinatory vision, desperately cries: “Salo, what have you brought on us?” (Krauss 2020, p. 22).8 As Brodman’s—and Yerushalmi’s— teacher, and the eminent Jewish historian of the previous generation, Baron is seen as responsible for the trap that Brodman had fallen into: the illusion that the academic study of Judaism can somehow ease the weight of tradition and the burden of the past.

Brodman tries to redeem his grandson from the perpetual bifurcation of past and present. Moments before the Bris ceremony, he takes the newborn baby to the roof, a shelter from the act of circumcision. Circumcision, as Brodman sees it, irreversibly forces his grandson to enter the male Jewish covenant, a life of self-denial and inevitable devotion to a higher, foreign cause. Here, as well as in the story’s title, the allusion to Fiddler on the Roof is evident. But whereas the 1964 Broadway musical, inspired by Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye der Milkhiker and popular books such as Zborowski’s and Herzog’s Life is with People, revived the Eastern European Jewish ghetto in an Americanized, sentimentalized setting (Zipperstein 1999, p. 35; Solomon 2013), Brodman ascends to the Manhattan rooftop in order to rebel against the Jewish past, not to preserve it. Krauss employs one of the most well-known symbols of Jewishness in American popular culture, only to reverse its meaning: not a nostalgic reminiscence of the fictionalized shtetl, but the refusal to subscribe to its cultural and religious implications. Fiddler on the Roof is famously preoccupied with questions of tradition and Jewish continuity, with Tevya embodying the quixotic—and ultimately tragic—effort to resist the tumultuous tides of modernity, alongside the emblem of the fiddler, representing the precariousness of Jewish life on the cusp of modernity. Conversely, Brodman sees the roof not as a symbol of the instability of modern Jewish life, but as a safe haven from the constraints of the same tradition that Tevya celebrates. Tradition is no longer a beacon of balance and strength, but that to which Brodman tragically devoted his entire life, and finally wishes to escape.

Krauss’s reading of Zakhor builds on Yerushalmi’s observation regarding the historian’s lack of impact on collective memory and turns it into a modern Jewish myth. The myth is comprised not only of Brodman’s personal sense of failure as a scholar, but, more importantly, of the burden of Jewish history, and the intrinsic inability to resolve the tensions of modern Jewish identity by studying the Jewish past. Krauss uses Yerushalmi’s lament over the rift between Jewish collective memory and historiography as the personal failure of her protagonist, in light of what he conceives as the irrelevance of his scholarship to a larger community. This reading of Zakhor highlights its personal overtones, which have only occasionally been picked up by reviewers and respondents. But while Yerushalmi intended his study to be a contemplation on Jewish history and Jewish memory, which nevertheless maintains the importance of delving into the Jewish past, in Krauss’s telling, this lament leads to Brodman’s belated desire to emancipate himself from Jewish history. He goes so far as expressing antagonism towards traditional commemorations of the past: in response to his daughter’s idea to buy a “Moses’s basket” for the newborn child, Brodman dismissively describes the theatrical reenactment of the slavery in Egypt at the Passover seder as a “charade” (Krauss 2020, p. 31), envisioning a world in which “there must be children who were born and raised without precedent” (Krauss 2020, p. 31). While Yerushalmi emphasizes the chasm between Jewish history and collective memory, Krauss’s Brodman—a defeated Yerushalmi—abandons both.

A product of American Jewish modernity, Brodman senses the failure both of the modern Jewish premise and of the Western academic world. His life has been an amalgamation of the two, as part of a generation of Jewish scholars who, in the aftermath of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, created the twentieth-century field of Jewish studies from within their positionalities as modern Jews. Their redemption, to use a theological term—or, as Yerushalmi would have it, their “faith”—was grounded in the belief that the conditions of Jewish experience can be deciphered with the scientific means of modern Western academia. Krauss’s mythical rendering of Yerushalmi, vis-à-vis the character of Brodman, questions this narrative. For Brodman, the way out of the Jewish condition of self-denial, the escape from the binding force of the past, lies not in scientifically delving into it, but, quite the contrary, in completely negating it. The challenge put forward by Yerushalmi, which ultimately led him to strengthen his commitment to Jewish historiography, serves in “Zusya on the Roof” as a catalyst for the abandonment of this commitment. Yerushalmi’s work of historiography becomes the mythical cornerstone of Krauss’s contemplation on Jewish modernity, in which the modern Jewish individual is trapped between the binding legacy of the past and the possibility, or impossibility, of abandoning the past and objecting to its burden.

4. Joshua Cohen: Zakhor, Zionism, and Historical Mythologies

A telling observation midway through The Netanyahus (Cohen 2021) captures what is arguably the crux of Joshua Cohen’s novel. Describing the eventful decade of the 1950s both in Jewish American life and in the nascent State of Israel, the narrator, Ruben Blum, asserts that “Regardless of where they [the Jews] were … it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at midcentury in becoming something else” (Cohen 2021, p. 51). Understanding the novel with this proposition in mind, The Netanyahus—presumably based on a true story told by Harold Bloom,9 and featuring fictionalized versions of the real Benzion Netanyahu,10 his wife Tzila, and their three children, one of whom will become the Israeli prime minister—is essentially a novel about the two prominent postwar Jewish communities, two very different efforts to craft a modern Jewish identity. Both experiments—the integration into secular American life, and the Israeli exercise in political sovereignty—were motivated by different ideals and sought different outcomes; both involved a radical break with traditional forms of Jewishness. The Netanyahus summons these two identities to a dramatic confrontation, in a relatively early stage in their development, a confrontation—in the images of two historians, Ruben Blum and Benzion Netanyahu—which constitutes the deep social and theoretical dimensions of Cohen’s novel.

Born to parents who immigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States, Ruben Blum became a historian specializing in American economic history, the founder of the academic field of taxation studies. His trajectory testifies to his conscious attempt to escape the Jewish ghetto and immerse himself in secular American life, away from his archaic Orthodox upbringing: “for every minority,” he says of the United States in the 1950s, “the best advice was to assimilate, not differentiate” (Cohen 2021, p. 9). Blum’s childhood memories of Hebrew School illuminate his decision to distance himself from the study of Jewish history: the rabbis and teachers represented a dreary alternative to everything that modern American life had to offer; their arcane historical worldview in particular left a negative imprint on Blum. Rather than accepting secular Western ideas of historical progress, the Hebrew School rabbis favored a uniform concept of time, in which the perpetually persecuted Jews are forever expecting the coming of the Messiah. This historical consciousness intentionally conflated eras and loci, blending them into a mesh of indiscernible events that all amount to the Jews as eternally awaiting redemption, and, concomitantly, apprehensive of any attempt to integrate into secular life.11 Against this religious worldview, Blum, who had come to believe that “no one was going to murder me in this country” (Cohen 2021, p. 33), emerged from the ghetto and excelled in the world of secular American history, became a professor at Corbin College, and tried to disregard the mildly anti-Semitic condensations of his non-Jewish colleagues.

Blum’s attempt to escape obsolete Jewishness is put to the test when he is asked by his department chair to escort Benzion Netanyahu, an Israeli historian of medieval Iberian Jewry, on a campus visit. Netanyahu, both a political activist from the extreme right-wing sect of Zionism and a scholar whose primary work is on fifteenth-century Spanish Inquisition, presented the theory that, contrary to the prominent understanding of the Inquisition amongst historians, the intention of the Spanish Inquisition was not to convert Jews to Catholicism, but rather to drive converted Jews out of their new Catholic identities and restore them as Jews. The reason for that, Netanyahu argued, was the Catholics’ theological interest in the degradation of the Jews, which would reaffirm the supremacy of Christendom: “as long as the Catholics still required a people to hate,” explains Blum based on his study of Netanyahu’s theories in preparation for his visit, “the Jews had to remain a people doomed to suffer” (Cohen 2021, p. 39).

This historical claim, which the real-life Benzion Netanyahu cultivated throughout his life and published in his magnum opus (Netanyahu 1995)12, is situated in the fictional setting of the novel in the larger context of Netanyahu’s political convictions. For Netanyahu, the Spanish Inquisition “introduced the idea that a person could not essentially change” (Cohen 2021, p. 209), and that the Catholic rejection of converted Jews emphasized the perpetual roles of Jews as oppressed and of gentiles as oppressors. This pessimistic view of the relations between Jews and non-Jews, in which diaspora Jews are eternally bound to persecution by the “all-powerful goys” (Cohen 2021, p. 41), challenges Blum’s social and political beliefs; Blum regards Netanyahu’s ideas as no different from the dogmatic sermons of his rabbis, albeit in an academic guise: a “theologized anti-history” (Cohen 2021, p. 42). The novel exploits Netanyahu’s and Blum’s radically different historical worldviews and their concomitant different political and social ramifications.

Yerushalmi enters the sphere of the novel in Netanyahu’s Bible class, one of the public lectures he is required to give during his campus visit. The Jewish People, Netanyahu asserts, are anti-historical—“of all the peoples of the world, none is less historical” (Cohen 2021, p. 175)—a declaration seemingly tantamount to Yerushalmi’s thesis on the Jewish disinterestedness in historiography. Netanyahu says the following:

But history, I have to tell you the bad news, is not always reliable. And Jews, whose life was the communication of God’s words from generation to generation, and from faith to faith, knew this better than most. This was because they lived under foreign rulers. Their history in Christian lands was a Christian history; their history in Muslim lands was a Muslim history; written by non-Jews under the patronage of despots who insisted on being flattered, or at least who insisted on the centrality of their roles … In exile, where non-Jews made the history that Jews had to suffer, could the details matter? Why care about the facts, when you can’t create them? What would be the point of recording the name and coordinates of every city that kicked you out and the exact specific date of your every misery and slaughter? When it came to chronicling Jewish life, what difference could there be between Rome and Greece and Babylon? Weren’t they all just ultimately variations on Egyptian bondage, and all of their rulers essentially incarnations of the Pharaoh? Through this process of repeatedly relating the Bible to the present, history was negated.

(Cohen 2021, pp. 169–70)

Netanyahu’s thesis only partially derives from Yerushalmi. First, Yerushalmi notes—perhaps not clearly enough—that his argument pertains to historiography, not history per se.13 More importantly, the crucial difference between Yerushalmi’s theory and Netanyahu’s fictionalized supposition lies in their different reasoning and subsequent political outcomes. Yerushalmi sees the Jewish disregard for historiography as the result of a religious concept of time, which does not value history qua history, but only its religious implications. For the rabbis, Yerushalmi argued, history had an ultimate purpose and final goal, and current events did not affect this goal whatsoever (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 21). The rabbis had “all the history they required” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 25), and therefore had no interest in current events.

Cohen’s Netanyahu expands this notion and interprets it politically. Jewish indifference towards historiography was a result not of religious concepts of time, as Yerushalmi suggests, but of the status of Jews as a political minority, which deemed the documentation of the past irrelevant. For Netanyahu, Jews were not invested in historiography due to their minor influence on the political events that occurred in their places and times. Netanyahu’s view, as Cohen describes it, is seemingly close to that of Yudka, Haim Hazaz’s fictional hero in the short story “The Sermon” (Hazaz 1975). An avid secular Zionist, Yudka declares in front of his kibbutz fellows that he is opposed to Jewish history, for history was written and documented by victors and conquerors, while Jewish history “is dull, uninteresting … just a collection of wounded, hunting, groaning, and wailing wretches, always begging for mercy” (Hazaz 1975, p. 275).14 Unlike Yudka on the one hand and Yerushalmi on the other, Netanyahu views Zionism as the opportunity to reenter the sphere of history—an opportunity which Blum, the Jewish American historian, avoids: “the only way out of gentile history was through Zion” (Cohen 2021, p. 210), Netanyahu says, viewing Blum as being “out of history” (Cohen 2021, p. 212), living a dull and meaningless life compared to the exciting Biblical prospects of Jewish nationalism. Zionism, according to Netanyahu, while not changing the fundamental historical animosity towards Jews, allowed them to transform their political conditions and escape perpetual marginalization and subjugation; with Zionism, Netanyahu claims, “the true history of my people can finally begin” (Cohen 2021, p. 171).

In Cohen’s employment of Yerushalmi, the anti-historicity of the Jews is contingent on their political status. It follows, therefore, that Yerushalmi’s conundrum of the centuries-long Jewish neglect of historiography is, according to the fictional Netanyahu, resolved with the advent of Zionism, enabling Jews to reclaim history. Yerushalmi’s observation that “the rabbis had all the history they required,” and their lack of interest in the writing of history, is seen by the fictional Netanyahu as a problem that Zionism seeks to solve. Furthermore, while Yerushalmi argues that Jewish collective memory is shaped by myth and literature and not by rigorous historiographical work, Netanyahu sees the historian’s task as providing the national movement with solid historical anchors, along the lines of the role historians such as Benzion Dinur had in shaping Zionist historiographical ideology (Ram 1995, pp. 91–124; Myers 1992, pp. 138–39). Contra Yerushalmi, Cohen’s Netanyahu believes that historians can and must, in fact, shape collective memory, particularly in the wake of Jewish nationalism. While Yerushalmi maintains the exceptionality of the modern Jewish historian in the historical experience of the Jews, and reluctantly accepts the gap between Jewish collective memory and the work of historians, Netanyahu contextualizes the neglect of history writing, sees Zionism as a potential return to history, and designates the role of the historian in providing the quasi-scientific grounds for Jewish national emancipation in Palestine, against the “petty and forgettable” (Cohen 2021, p. 212) diasporic Jewish existence, deemed to remain outside of history. Contrary to the gap between historiography and myth in Zakhor, Netanyahu sees his task as creating historically based myths in the service of the national movement.

Cohen’s mythical reading of Yerushalmi follows, I argue, Bloom’s preface to Zakhor, in that Cohen approaches Yerushalmi’s text mythically—as if stripping the historian’s scholarly arguments from their historiographical, academic nature and reinstating them as the mythical material of his literature. Cohen differs from Bloom, though, in one important aspect: While Bloom’s rendering of Zakhor focuses on the poetic, in Bloom’s implicit attempt to craft a canon of modern Jewish myth-makers, Cohen employs Yerushalmi as a myth in an ideological context. Cohen’s literary account of Yerushalmi goes beyond a mere influence; for him, the myth is reiterated by the fictional Netanyahu in order to justify his own political faith.

Cohen’s reading of Zakhor is centered around the notion of a long-lasting Jewish disdain for historiography. He departs from Yerushalmi not only in his portrayal of an ideological, Zionist Netanyahu, but, more importantly, in a fundamentally different view of the Jewish past. Netanyahu’s claim that “a person could not essentially change” testifies to a broader worldview, in which Jews and non-Jews are perpetually cast in their same respective roles: Jews as victims, non-Jews as aggressors. If human beings cannot essentially change, Netanyahu seems to argue, their historical positionality reveals their true essence. Accordingly, Netanyahu dismisses Blum’s attempts to integrate into Gentile America and win the respect of his colleagues. For Cohen’s Netanyahu, only Zionism enables a return to history, in which Jews can become powerful and redeem themselves from their eternal inferiority. This revisionist reading of Jewish history clearly stems from a mythical reading of Zakhor. At the same time, it stands in stark opposition to Yerushalmi’s own anti-essential convictions, as Harold Bloom’s preface and mention of Rortyian contingency make clear. Far from essentialism and historical determinism, Yerushalmi’s understanding of the Jewish past emphasizes its contingencies, ruptures, breaks, and crises. Rather than a linear view of Jewish history and its Manichean protagonists, Yerushalmi insists on the open-endedness of Jewish history and warns against the allure of myth.

5. Conclusions

This essay presented a reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor in the context of Jewish literature. Three responses to Yerushalmi’s work point to its potential reception as a work of literature, which offers new myths to understand the modern Jewish experience. Harold Bloom, in his preface to Zakhor, suggests the mythical approach to Jewish modernity and identifies Yerushalmi’s work as embracing contingency and taking a “poetic stance.” Nicole Krauss is inspired by Yerushalmi’s idea of the historian’s lack of impact on collective Jewish consciousness, and crafted a Yerushalmi-like protagonist whose failure leads him to question his own belief that the study of the Jewish past will ease its burden. Joshua Cohen’s protagonist accepts Yerushalmi’s notion of the a-historicity of the Jews, and explains it as resulting from a lack of political power; the historian must join forces with the return to political power and provide a usable past for the Zionist movement. For Krauss and for Cohen, Yerushalmi becomes a critical source of inspiration, alongside other writers, American and non-American, Jewish and non-Jewish, who have influenced their oeuvres and shaped their distinct literary voice. Following Bloom’s authoritative preface, Krauss and Cohen read Zakhor mythically and poetically, using Yerushalmi’s text as the foundation of their literary exploration of modern Jewish identity.

In response to a question about the reception of Zakhor, Yerushalmi asked: “Why should I be answerable for the way people read my books?” (Yerushalmi and Goldberg 2021, p. 1). But despite this strong proposition, in the years following the publication of Zakhor, Yerushalmi had occasionally corrected, in interviews and prefaces, what he took to be wrong impressions, misunderstandings, and misconceptions of his work. Inevitably, Bloom, Cohen, and Krauss have suggested readings of Zakhor which are, in many ways, detached from Yerushalmi’s own intentions, explicit and implicit. This fact is a testament not to Yerushalmi’s failure as a historian and a writer, but rather to the richness and singularity of his text. Zakhor’s afterlife as a catalyst for literary imagination demonstrates the power of an evocative text to inspire other texts, not despite its literariness, but precisely because of it.