ABSTRACT
The concept of “civilization”, a loaded term which the sociological discourse began to re-emphasize in the 1970s, is subject of historiographical construction that can potentially serve contemporary, political national ends. Eisenstadt’s Jewish Civilization (1992), conceptualizing the ancient Jewish existence in terms of an axial civilization, exemplifies this potential. A critical reading underscores how Eisenstadt’s descriptions of the Jewish civilization grew out of the historical imaginary formulated by Zionist historiography and reaffirmed by sociological terminology based on the civilizational analysis and axiality. Typifying this is, first, Eisenstadt’s claim of “Jewish continuity”; second, his emphasis on the “Second Temple” period as the Jewish civilization’s axial charismatic base; and last, his teleological view regarding the course of the “Jewish historical experience” as leading to the emergence of the state of Israel. Eisenstadt’s conceptualization of the Jewish civilization corresponds with the evolving tendency to conceive of Judaism as a culture, an approach that became predominant among Israeli secular elites of the last decades of the 20th century. Examining Eisenstadt’s Jewish Civilization as a sociodicy that idealized the nation’s primordial past attends to the general and more fundamental problem of the reproduction of historiographical narratives in comparative historical sociological research.
