Jewish history and memory

This chapter is a sustained reflection on religion and the ethics of historical belief, specifically related to the representation of Jewish pasts. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s landmark work Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory presents a fundamental dilemma for the historian of Judaism(s) – especially the observant Jewish historian. Present-day critical historical work, as described by Yerushalmi, is fundamentally alienated from the machinations of collective Jewish memory encountered in longstanding rabbinic traditions. While Jews in these traditions have been continually implored to remember the past, these pasts are not the same as produced by contemporary academic historians. The “historian” dedicated to the retrieval of the Jewish past “as it actually happened” is a recent invention. Hutt explores the seemingly intractable chasm between Jewish history and memory, offering his Dewey-inspired pragmatist path forward.