All cultures remember their past. They do so with monuments or statues, through commemorative events, books, poems, songs and stories. They educate their children, hoping they will become familiar with their history. If the culture is driven by faith or values - for example a religion or an ideology, they may create rituals to memorialise their past. Remembering the past is a fundamental human activity, and Jews seem to do it more than most. Indeed, it is almost impossible to be a Jew and to be unaware of the past.
Some cultures express their identity through a shared set of ideals (or at least aspirations, since they are not always adhered to). America, for example, is the land of the free, France extols liberty, equality and fraternity, Britain believes itself defined by values of tolerance and civility. But Jewish identity is largely expressed through memory; religiously as the people liberated from slavery in Egypt, more commonly today as the nation persecuted more than any other.
Jewish history has a history of its own. The importance of remembering the past was built into the very foundations of Jewish culture. The three biblical festivals were designed to recall the passage of the Israelites from subjugation to liberation: the Exodus from Egypt, the revelation on Mount Sinai and the journey towards the Promised Land.
In the sense that these events provide the rationale for the Jewish faith their function is no different from the foundational stories of any other religion. But the idea of Jewish history developed from them. By the 2nd century CE Jewish history had become cyclical. The Mishnah records that “five things happened to our ancestors on the 17th of Tammuz and five on the 9th of Av”. In other words, each date in the calendar had its own recurring histories. One of the students in Alan Bennett’s play History Boys complained that “History is just one damn thing after another.” Not in early Judaism it wasn’t. History was something that went round and round.
Gradually Jewish thinkers realised that history is something to be learned from. In the Middle Ages the idea developed that the biblical narratives could be understood, not just to underpin religious belief, but to open a window onto the present. They noted, for example that Bible stories could be regarded as allegories, indicating how Jewish history will unfold. They coined the proverb, “The deeds of the ancestors are a sign for their descendants.”
To the religious mind, this idea that the narratives in the bible allude to events that will occur in the time ahead, is extremely comforting. It means that our existence follows a predetermined pattern, that our lives make sense, even if we don’t understand how or why, and that we can be optimistic about the future. But relying on the bible to understand the present doesn’t fully suit the world we live in. Life is too complicated. So most of us no longer look back at the Bible to illuminate the present. Instead we take a much broader view of history.
History matters because we can learn from the past, even from events that we have only heard of and not directly experienced. Appreciating the background to the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, helps us to understand the major cultural divisions between the Sefardi, Mizrachi and Ashkenazi traditions. An awareness of the great split in the Jewish world caused by the false Messiah, Shabbetai Tzvi in the 1660s helps to some degree to understand the emergence of Hasidism. And by learning about the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, we recognise the forces that led to the various strands of Judaism that exist today..
History is particularly useful when we are trying to respond to adversity. Our reaction to the horrors and tragedies of October 7 would almost certainly have been different had we been ignorant of the of the Shoah or had never heard of pogroms. It is only because we see the barbarity of Hamas within the lengthy context of Jewish history that we are mindful of the existential threat we face.
History can also help us to respond to antisemitism. It would be far harder to dismiss antisemitic jibes about Jews and money, if we didn’t know that moneylending was one of the very few occupations open to Jews in the Middle Ages. Similarly, knowing that our forebears took advantage of their worldwide dispersion to trade with contacts in far off places refutes the antisemitic nonsense about global conspiracies.
Yet history is not just about the big things, about anticipating existential threats or refuting antisemites. It also reminds us of our strengths, and shapes our identity. Because Jews have lived in almost every place in the world, over such a long time, we are far more diverse than most other cultures. In previous ages, when travel and opportunity were limited, we tended to form relationships only with people whose culture we shared. Today we, or our children, are just as likely to be descended from parents with widely differing upbringings. Understanding our stories, and the stories of our families, their joys and fears, adventures and disasters helps us to appreciate the richness of our heritage and the strength that comes from diversity. Knowing where our immediate ancestors came from and what they went through, helps us to set our personal Jewish identity into context, and to decide what our personal relationship to our heritage should be.
Jewish culture has a specific way of relating to history. Time and again the Bible, the text that first shaped our culture, instructs us to remember. But remembering, by itself, is passive; many of our memories are little more than fleeting thoughts, some of the things we remember to do are little more than habits. However, if we look closely at the Bible text, we see that it has a much more positive stance on what it means to remember. The clue lies in the Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Bible, once in the Book of Exodus, once in Deuteronomy. The two versions are virtually identical but there are a few small differences. Most prominently, the Exodus version reads, ‘remember the Sabbath day’ whereas Deuteronomy says ‘keep (or observe) the Sabbath day.’ Yet, irrespective of the question of authorship, nobody suggests that the two versions have fundamentally different meanings. Instead we interpret the act of remembering as akin to the act of keeping or observing. Remembering, it seems, means more than just bearing things in mind. Remembering means acting upon our memories. Remembering is performative.
It is not easy for us to fully appreciate how remembering can be an active process. But the ancients understood. These days we remember things by writing them down or typing them into our phones. In the old days, they couldn’t do that. So they developed mental techniques to help them remember. One of the most common, fascinatingly explained by Dame Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory, was for a person to imagine a room full of furniture that they would walk around in their mind. As they mentally walked around the room they associated each piece of furniture with something they needed to remember. When the time came to recall it, they simply reimagined the room and walked around it again until they came to the object associated with the thing they needed to remember. It is similar to when people speak about tying a knot in their handkerchief to remember something. Or in Judaism too, where the purpose of the strings, or tzitzit, that we tie onto a garment, is to remember the commandments.
And that is the justification for reading or learning about Jewish history. It is not just about passively remembering what has happened. It is about being aware of the past, bringing it to mind and acting upon it if necessary, when we are trying to understand, anticipate or influence the present. History will never give us all the answers. But by understanding how our culture evolved, how Jewish communities and individuals were influenced by events in the past and how they reacted to them, we put ourselves in a far better position to respond successfully to the challenges and opportunities we face today.