Zakhor

Zakhor, by Josef Hayim Yerushalmi (1982)

Summary
About the troubling, possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography.

Hebrew memory: acting rather than curiosity of the past, selective, heroic individuals or national deeds don't matter. God's acts and Israel's responses matter.

Kept its belief in the meaning of history (after 2nd cent. CE) while teaching habits of thought that were/are profoundly ahistorical.

Middle ages: Jewish memory moved through ritual and liturgy, rabbinic custom and law.

Vehicles of medieval Jewish memory: 1) penitential prayers inserted into liturgy, 2) memorial books, 3) 2nd Purims, 4) Special fast days. These modes, with law, abbalah, philo, subsumed all possibilities of history.

* Although Judaism throughout the ages was absorbed with the meaning of history, historiography itself played at best an ancillary role, often no role. While memory of the past was always a central component to Jewish experience, the historian was not its primary custodian.

Medieval example: the 20th of Sivan--a fast day for 1171 martyrdom (crusades) as well as 1648 slaughter in Eastern Europe. Writers depicted it as a repetition of the crusades martyrdom. In Poland, leader Heller took old Selihot and ordained they be recited on the 20th of Sivan because of 1648--because "it is all one."

Quotes
"Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people."

"The meaning of history is explored more directly and more deeply in the prophets than in the actual historical narratives; the collective memory is transmitted more actively through ritual than chronicle."

"They had the written and the oral law, and they trusted in the covenant, which assured them the future."