Memory

Jewish studies have long since recognized remembrance as a vital factor in the formation of Jewish religion, cultures, and identities. It was not, however, until Maurice Halbwachs’ Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (The Social Frameworks of Memory) (1925) that memory became more widely described as the social process of recalling the past. Sigmund Freud in his Moses and Monotheism (1939) presupposed the existence of a biological basis for the transmission of memory. He also promoted the view of memory as something stored. His “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) set the model, wherein he argued that memories can be reproduced at any time with certainty as long as one knows where these memories are deposited in the mind. To Freud the challenge was facilitating their retrieval, but not the question of storage (Freud 1961). Yet remembrance is a process that actively shapes what it recalls. It does not supplant the past but transforms it and warrants a wider multi-disciplinary exploration that remains mindful of the particular practices of articulation, representation, and reenactment of the past.