A History of Tears?

In 1928 the American Jewish historian Salo W. Baron published an article entitled Ghetto and Emancipation. In it he argued against the generally accepted view that medieval European Jews had lived wretched lives subject to incessant persecution and violence, a state of affairs that only came to an end with the French Revolution.

It was true, argued Baron, that there had been periods of extreme misery and persecution, but these were interspersed with much longer periods in which Jews got on with their lives peacefully and quietly, without very much in the way of external interference. In contrast to the view of other historians, Baron argued that the French Revolution was not the dawn of a new day for the Jews. He pointed out that, unlike most of Europe, Jews did not live in a state of serfdom before the French Revolution. Whereas serfs were tied to a local landowner and had very little in the way of personal freedom or autonomy, Jewish communities were by and large left alone to regulate themselves. They were subject to their own laws and had their own courts, they could marry whoever they wanted and with few exceptions were free to move around as they wished. And although they could not own land and were excluded from many trades and commercial activities, Baron considered these to be restrictions on the privileges that had been granted to them, rather than limitations on their rights. 

The French Revolution put an end to all this; Jews became subject to the same duties and obligations as the rest of the population. This emancipation of the Jews, Baron argued, led to the separation of the Jewish religion from Jewish nationality. Rather than constituting a separate nation, Jews were now obliged to owe allegiance to the countries in which they now lived. The French revolution may have seemed like a new dawn to the historians against whom Baron was arguing, but that was only because their view of medieval Jewish history before the upheaval in France was unduly pessimistic. He concluded his article saying that it was time ‘to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe and adopt a view more in accord with historic truth’.

Baron wrote this article before the rise of Nazi Germany, and the horrors of the Shoah. We might have imagined that the slaughter of European Jewry would lead him to revise his view that Jewish history was not as unrelentingly tragic as other historians had made it out to be. But he did not. He insisted that while we should not overlook the tragedies of Jewish history, he had not changed his view. In 1936 he wrote ‘all my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history…because I felt that by exclusively overemphasizing Jewish sufferings, it distorted the total picture of Jewish historic evolution.’

Baron set out his position most clearly in his landmark work Social and Religious History of the Jews: He wrote that it would be a mistake, “to believe that hatred was the constant keynote of Judeo-Christian relations, even in Germany or Italy. It is in the nature of historical records to transmit to posterity the memory of extraordinary events, rather than of the flow of life. A community that lived in peace for decades may have given the medieval chronicler no motive to mention it, until a sudden outbreak of popular violence, lasting a few days, attracted widespread attention. Since modern historical treatment can no longer be satisfied with the enumeration of wars and diplomatic conflicts, the history of the Jewish people among the Gentiles, even in medieval Europe, must consist of more than stories of sanguinary clashes or governmental expulsions.”

Baron’s phrase, ”the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” has become almost a mantra for contemporary Jewish historians. Brave would be the scholar who dared argue against it, who claimed that medieval European Jewish history was indeed as miserable and oppressive as historians before Baron had made it out to be. Students of Jewish history today are taught to regard their subject as a continuous flow of events, developments and achievements, interspersed admittedly with moments of great tragedy and horror, but not solely defined by those horrors, and certainly not as a continuum of suffering.

Recently however, there has been some pushback against Baron’s lachrymose conception. An article by Adam Teller suggests that the time may have come “to re-examine Baron's interdiction and ask what the focus - one might almost say fetish - on avoiding the lachrymose conception might have caused us to lose in our understanding of the Jewish past.” Teller quotes Elisheva Carlebach’s research into medieval Hebrew calendars, some of which contained lists of memorable dates in Jewish history. The historical events that they listed included expulsions, massacres, wars and plagues: tragedies that had befallen communities in times gone past. Of more cheerful events there was no mention. Teller comments that “When asked to pick the most important events, then, pre-modern Jews seem to have viewed their own recent history simply as a series of catastrophes…. When pre-modern Jews thought about themselves and their place in the world, they did so not in liberal, but in lachrymose terms.” And if that’s how medieval Jews thought about their history, then maybe we too, looking back on those times, should think about it in the same way. As lachrymose.

Most of us are not historians. We are not obliged to consider how we approach history. But we all have some sort of idea of what the past was like, and we all make judgements as to how we see it. The religious view of Jewish history is positive. The Passover Haggadah, our best known non-biblical, historical narrative is overwhelmingly optimistic; it tells the story of national liberation and freedom. Much of today’s Jewish media by contrast is overwhelmingly negative, pick up certain Jewish newspapers and one might think that our lives are nothing but an unrelenting struggle against antisemitism and people who want nothing more than to destroy us.

The Shoah, as it should be, is ingrained into our consciousness, we cannot diminish it or explain it away as mere history. But although it dominates our view of the twentieth century, we would be hard pressed to describe that period as unrelentingly lachrymose. Because the twentieth century also saw the birth of the State of Israel, along with the many personal triumphs and achievements of Jews around the world.  And if our view of the twentieth century is not lachrymose, can we justify having a tearful perspective on earlier periods in history? When no matter how terrible many events may have been, none come even remotely close to what happened during the Shoah.

Baron was probably right to criticise the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. But there are good reasons not to downplay the history of Jewish suffering, not to insist that for all the bad things that happened, things were better for most of the time. Because that is how history works. History, as studied and taught, focuses on major events, on wars and empires, tragedies, revolutions, power and conspiracies. The good times are part of history too, but they don’t get much attention. We should be conscious of the suffering of previous generations. But we shouldn’t forget that Jewish life today is arguably better than at any time in the past. Our history, we trust, is getting better.