Great Discoveries and Pathbreaking Books

DISCOVERIES IN THE JUDEAN DESERT Book Series. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955–2011. SACRED TRASH: THE LOST AND FOUND WORLD OF THE CAIRO GENIZA. By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. New York: Schocken, 2011. ZAKHOR: JEWISH HISTORY AND JEWISH MEMORY. By Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982; 2nd ed., 1996. THE JEW IN THE MODERN WORLD: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY. By Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; 2nd ed., 1995; 3rd ed., 2010. THE TEXTURE OF MEMORY: HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS AND MEANING. By James E. Young. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. The past half-century has seen the efflorescence of Jewish Studies scholarship. In the American context, this coincided with the postwar acceptance of Jews into mainstream culture and the lifting of anti-Semitic quotas across elite universities. Jews entered the academy, and soon after, Jewish history, culture, and religion did too. The inclusion of Jewish Studies in Religious Studies Review, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2024, is but one example of this newly found acceptance. While traditional Jewish scholarship endures in the increasingly vibrant Yeshiva or rabbinical school system, an academic alternative now competes for the hearts and minds of a much enlarged Jewish and non-Jewish reading public (see Neusner 2011). However, it would be almost impossible to adequately survey the thousands of outstanding works that have shaped Jewish Studies. Instead, we have chosen five representative books or book series that help tell the story of the past fifty years of scholarship on Jews and Judaism, starting with the monumental Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. We note, however, that this list is necessarily subjective and incomplete. Rather, it should be considered an opportunity for further discussion. Every year, new discoveries are made in the many archaeological digs that take place in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. While the impact of these discoveries is often limited, every now and again, a discovery is made that significantly impacts the direction of scholarship. Without a doubt, the discovery of manuscripts in the Judean desert by Bedouin shepherds in the late 1940s is one of those finds that alters the direction of scholarship. These manuscripts, which became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, are widely regarded as the most important discovery of the twentieth century. Over the course of about ten years, scrolls and other items were found in eleven caves near the site of Qumran. The total number of manuscripts found in these eleven caves is over 1000. Scrolls were also found in additional caves, but it is the ones found near Qumran that are the most well-known. While many of the scrolls contain texts that were already known, including the oldest versions of many of the biblical texts, the majority of the scrolls are texts that were previously unknown. The Dead Sea Scrolls have provided new windows into the ancient Jewish world. While news of the discovery of the scrolls was quickly released, the publication of the scrolls was delayed and marred in controversy (Collins 2019, 1–32; Flint 2013). The majority of the scrolls are published in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) series by Clarendon Press.1 The first volume appeared in 1955, but only seven more volumes followed in the next thirty-five years (culminating in the publication of Volume 8 in 1990). Some scrolls were published outside the DJD series during this time and after (e.g., Schiffman and Gross 2021), but the vast majority of scrolls remained unpublished (for more information, see Tov 2002). In 1990, the study of the scrolls and their publication was re-organized under the auspices of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the editorship of Emanuel Tov, then the J. L. Magnes Professor of Bible at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (emeritus since 2009). Publication of the scrolls rapidly increased, and the final volume was published in 2011. The series now stands at 40 volumes. As one looks back on the last fifty years of the study of Second Temple Judaism, one can confidently say that the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls is among the most important scholarly activities in the field of Jewish Studies. The DJD series itself is a testimony to the ingenuity and creativity of scholars. The reconstruction of the scrolls, particularly when one remembers how deteriorated many of the scrolls are, requires extreme patience and attentiveness. The photographs, even of the earliest publications, are truly remarkable. In the DJD volumes, scholars are provided not only the translations and reconstructions of the editors but are given access to the texts themselves through the photos. The inclusion of the photographs invites others into the study of scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls have united scholars from across the disciplines and backgrounds: archaeologists, textual critics, specialists in Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, the New Testament, and Rabbinic Literature; Jews, Christians, and those of other or no faith tradition; scholars from different regions and languages. Despite the challenges that beset the publication of the scrolls for so many years, the eventual publication of the scrolls showcases the collaborative nature of good scholarship. While humanities scholars, particularly those working in history and with ancient texts, are often described as lone rangers, isolated individuals, the DJD series dismantles that notion. Individual scholars have come together to showcase what can happen when each of us together pursues a common goal. William F. Albright is reported to have said that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was “the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times” (Collins 2019, 3). Claims of this nature usually turn out to be sensationalist nonsense. But in this instance, history has proven Albright right. And the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series is evidence of this. The only modern Jewish discovery to rival the Dead Sea Scrolls is the retrieval of the Cairo Geniza. In the late nineteenth century, a treasure trove of worn-out texts was rediscovered in the Geniza—or “concealed” storeroom—of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo. This discovery fundamentally changed the academic study of medieval Mediterranean Jewish life and beyond. The Geniza contained documents spanning a huge historical time frame from the 10th through the 19th centuries and represented the largest cache of medieval Jewish manuscripts in the world. A huge body of scholarly literature on social and intellectual Jewish history has been written based upon the Cairo Geniza, most prolifically by S. D. Goitein (1967–1993), and more recently by other outstanding scholars (e.g., Cohen 2005; Reif 2011; Rustow 2020; Jefferson 2022). The most widely accessible work to tell the story of the Geniza, however, remains Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole's Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, published by Schocken in 2011. Hoffman and Cole detail the history of the Geniza's rediscovery, the materials included in the Geniza—such as marriage and divorce contracts, midrashic and biblical texts, responsa literature, Karaite legal codes, philosophical treatises, court depositions, property leases, shopping receipts, and much more—and the cast of characters involved in discovering and disseminating the Cairo Geniza. Perhaps the most famous figure in the story is Rabbi Solomon Schechter, the second President of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York and the namesake of the Conservative Movement's Jewish day school system. In the late 1890s, Schechter was a lecturer at Cambridge University, where, together with his colleagues, he helped Cambridge acquire a vast collection of Geniza documents, some 190,000 fragments. After moving to the United States, Schechter continued to acquire and publish Geniza materials, which are today housed in the venerable JTS library. The Geniza was not only a great scholarly discovery, from which Schechter and later Goitein and many others have employed to reconstruct medieval Jewish history; its discovery was also infused with religious import by some of its early exponents. Rabbi Solomon Aaron Wertheimer, a Talmudic scholar and bibliophile in Ottoman Jerusalem, managed to acquire a variant midrashic text preserved in the Geniza prior to Schechter (e.g., Wertheimer 1894, 1896). Wertheimer was one of the first individuals to recognize the significance of the Geniza, and although maligned in the Jewish Quarterly Review (e.g., Neubauer 1896), he believed he was engaging in a sacred act of uncovering God's word.2 At the same time, he facilitated the sale of Geniza fragments to Cambridge and Oxford, among other university libraries. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo Geniza has fundamentally reshaped Jewish Studies scholarship in the past fifty years. Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole offer an outstanding panoramic view of nearly a thousand years of Mediterranean Jewish life preserved in the repository of a little synagogue in Old Cairo. Indeed, as Hoffman and Cole suggest, the Cairo Geniza might be dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls,” a monumental discovery from which scholars will continue to mine. If the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series and Sacred Trash made accessible the colossal material discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Geniza, then Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor should be understood as a conceptual landmark in Jewish Studies. In 1982, the eminent historian of Sephardic Jewry published a small volume entitled Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory that has had an outsized impact on the field of Jewish Studies, especially among scholars of the Holocaust and the modern Jewish experience. Building upon Maurice Halbwachs' and later Pierre Nora's ruminations on collective memory, Yerushalmi's main theoretical contention was that unlike history, which records contingent events in an objective and empirical manner, memory asserts an interpretive, selective, and meaningful understanding of that record of things through myth, narrative, theology, and ritual. Memory, in other words, is about meaning-making and, therefore, fundamentally about group identity. For most of Jewish history, Yerushalmi contended, Jews engaged with their collective past through memory practices and not historiographical ones. In fact, the term “history” does not exist in biblical Hebrew. The verb “to remember” (zakhar and its variants), however, appears no less than 169 times in the Torah. God commands the ancient Israelites to remember the Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 13:3; Deuteronomy 16:3), to remember the Sabbath (Exodus 20:7), and to remember Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17–19). The Rabbis in the Mishna and Talmud debate the nature of the obligation to remember the Exodus (b. Berakhot 12b), which is famously repeated in the text of the Haggadah on Passover, the paradigmatic holiday of Jewish memory. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Yerushalmi documented various other “vehicles of memory”—things like reciting penitential prayers and writing local memorial books. Together, these forms of memory maintenance and construction helped to both inscribe and solidify Jewish identity in the pre-modern context. What happens, though, in the modern disenchanted world? Can memory continue to sustain Jewish identity? Yerushalmi maintained that the nineteenth century represented a profound rupture, which saw “the rise of modern Jewish historiography and the decay of Jewish memory” (99), by which he meant Jewish tradition. Here, Yerushalmi advanced a quasi-secularization argument. There is a “chasm that separates modern Jewish historiography from all the ways in which Jews once concerned themselves with their past” (101), wrote Yerushalmi. But if history is devoid of religious import and rather simply asserts facts, how then can modern Jews derive meaning from their past? This is the metahistorical challenge posed by Yerushalmi's analysis. Yerushalmi's tentative answer was something to the effect of “if you break, you buy it,” and argued that Jewish historians have some responsibility to manage this new relationship with the past, even as he understood that “modern Jewish historiography can never substitute for Jewish memory” (101). What Yerushalmi did not anticipate, and here he was not unique, was Jewish religious and cultural revival, especially new forms of memory construction in the State of Israel and the efflorescence of Haredi Jewish life in both Israel and the diaspora (e.g., Heilman 2006). While Yerushalmi's contentions have been subject to intense academic debate—Amos Funkenstein, among other scholars, has challenged, modified, adapted, applied, and reinterpreted both the core arguments and the more subtle points discussed in Zakhor (e.g., Funkenstein 1989; Morgan 1992; Zerubavel 1995; Fine 2016)—the work has had an indelible impact on the field of Jewish Studies (Kurtzer 2012; Myers and Kaye 2014). It put memory on the map. Perhaps the most salient work to broadly survey the modern Jewish experience is Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz's The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. This work provides no easy solution to the perplexity of the modern Jewish condition, or what Yerushalmi referred to as the “decay of Jewish memory,” but rather offers a documents-based guide “through the dynamic forces that shape” the Jews' experience of the modern world, including the “dialectical tension between religious tradition and secularity” (x), emancipation, antisemitism, Zionism, and more.3 In this regard, The Jew in the Modern World, more so than any book or book series in this essay, represents a notable pedagogical advancement in the field of Jewish Studies. Significantly expanding upon several earlier source readers, Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz set out to make accessible hundreds of primary sources from across the globe in multiple languages, many of which were translated into English for the first time by the editors. Published originally in 1980 by Oxford University Press and currently in its third edition (2010), The Jew in the Modern World has captivated thousands of students for over four decades. The volume begins in the seventeenth century with the great Sephardic scholar Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel and his appeal to Oliver Cromwell for the readmission of Jews into England (1655) and concludes in the twentieth century with a classic Jewish feminist text by Rabbi Dr. Rachel Adler (1971). In between, Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz effectively document over three hundred years of Jewish history, considering the harbingers of political, economic, cultural, and ideological change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political emancipation in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the emergence of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jewish religious movements in the nineteenth century—although dating Conservative Judaism to the nineteenth century is disputed historically and sociologically (Sklare 1955; Cohen 2012)—broad surveys of East European, Sephardic and Middle Eastern (3rd edition), and American Jewry, Jewish theological, political, and historical aspects of Zionism, and much more. The first two editions of The Jew in the Modern World concluded with a chapter on the Holocaust, while the third edition concludes with a more philosophically oriented section on Jewish identity (a shorter Chapter Four in the second edition), and a penultimate chapter on “The Shoah,” employing the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. Extremely useful for students, Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz contextualize all the documents in the volume with concise introductions to each chapter, as well as an opening discussion on periodization and Jewish modernity in the book's Introduction, a topic that has been further problematized by scholars of early modern Jewish history (e.g., Israel 1998; Carlebach 2002; Ruderman 2010). Additionally, all three editions include a helpful appendix on the demography of modern Jewish history, updated in each subsequent edition. Of course, one can quibble with some editorial and those have subtle history can be For the volume history, were in the third edition to the Sephardic and Jewish and it the two the sources included are from the late and early as a for students and of modern Judaism, is no primary source in the English one not with Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz's of which like a of of Jewish with their that “the most of the Jewish experience of modernity is with the Holocaust at its However, as the has the Holocaust itself is a of In that it is an Mendes-Flohr and in their with modernity the Jews and, the however, with the meaning of the Holocaust for the modern Jewish is For we turn to final which the topic of Holocaust memory. with the of the State of the Holocaust has fundamentally the nature of Jewish identity. to the of American Jews reported that the is the most of what Jewish to By only reported that Jewish was that and Yerushalmi were While the their as Peter of Jewish tradition has across a of At the same time, Holocaust memory is a James as early as in The of Holocaust and published by Yale University In this a of Holocaust and across including the United States, and Building upon Yerushalmi's earlier theoretical that of historical events and the this memory have been to Jewish and the of Jewish memory and the of Holocaust has on sacred to Young. In the and political of the out that the of and to the majority of Jews in have increasingly to the Holocaust as their memory” At the same time, a tension between Holocaust meaningful Jewish and the and to the Holocaust for The opening of the United Holocaust in for is of the This American and as a to the Holocaust and the by the and their his of the of Holocaust memory in the a then almost with the of Holocaust and in Israel and especially in and While much has changed in the years since published of Memory, his other scholars to and his of (e.g., and not only the of Holocaust but also their social and political the that their their significance to the Jewish and their meaning over time, and the and of Memory in a new and to the and political of Holocaust memory in the of Jewish Studies and beyond. It is an work for the of the Holocaust as a of the modern Jewish experience. In this we can James as a of both Yerushalmi and Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz. Indeed, all the works in this have the of Jewish Studies scholarship over the past fifty years, some for their profound theological, and textual of the ancient and medieval Jewish past, and others for their understanding of the modern Jewish The story of the past fifty years of Jewish Studies scholarship not be the of Dead Sea scholars, particularly those involved in the monumental publication of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series. scholarship on and based upon the Cairo Geniza, including Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole's widely accessible work Sacred has of Mediterranean religious and social history, and These Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo fundamentally reshaped what we about the ancient and medieval Jewish world. At the same time, modern Jewish Studies has also significantly In no small this can be to the impact of the final chapter of Yerushalmi's with profound for of Jewish identity and the meaning of Jewish history, Israel and Zionism, and Holocaust memory. of the more important books to survey and these are, no doubt, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz's The Jew in the Modern World and James The of

Archaeology · Judaism · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Law

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