The Crisis that Changed Little: Jewish History before and after the Holocaust

Five of the twentieth century’s leading historians of the Jews—Salo Baron, Ben Zion Dinur, Yitzhak Baer, Jacob Katz, and Raphael Mahler—began their careers before the Nazi accession to power in Germany and remained active for many years following the Second World War. All of them reexamined, in light of the Holocaust, the historical paradigms they had developed early in their careers. However, the reexamination did not lead to any significant change in their earlier approaches, even though four of the five preached the need for precisely such a change and worked to lay the foundations for research that would support it. Their students have effectively banished the Holocaust from their scholarly bailiwick, going so far as to raise the “sequestering of the Holocaust” to the level of a professional principle. The Holocaust is not to be allowed to cast its shadow upon the manner in which the Jewish past is understood.

One of the primary roots of this counterintuitive phenomenon lies in a reaction to the role the Holocaust has played as a symbol of the failure of modern Western civilization. The academic study of Jewish history is fundamentally a modernist project: It arose out of the processes of secularization that were part and parcel of the modernization of Jewry and its integration into European society. As a result, many historians of the Jews have looked with suspicion on the manner in which scholars from other academic disciplines have used the Holocaust to expose the dark underside of modernity and have determined to hold to the minimum the place that the Holocaust occupies in the master narrative of modern Jewish history. Thus, the modernist paradigms according to which Jewish history was analyzed before the Second World War have continued to hold sway for decades afterward.