Abstract
Rosenzweig has recently argued that those who live by the Law, because the Law is unchanged and unchanging, are removed from ‘all the temporality and historicity of life’.1 But this fails to take account of the flexibility of the Law and its ability to adapt itself to ever novel circumstances. To take the Jews from the world and the life of history and to transport them to a point beyond history, to a meta-historical location, assuredly challenges the customary association between Judaism and the world.
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Notes
Israel Abrahams, A Companion to the Authorised Daily Prayer Book (London, 1922) pp. lix, 159.
N. Glatzer, Untersuchungen zur Geschichtslehre der Tan- naiten (Berlin, 1932).
Pesikta de Rav Kahana, ed. S. Buber (Lyck, 1868) p. 151a.
See also A. Momigliano, ‘Time in Ancient Historiography’, History and Theory, Beiheft 6 (1966) esp. pp. 19ff.
B. S. Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, Studies in Biblical Theology, no. 37 (London, 1962) pp. 50ff).
J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London, 1969) Parts i and ii.
The findings of social psychology confirm that frustrated expectations of reality can to a large extent be compensated for by a firm social anchorage (see e.g. Hans Albert, Plädoyer für kritischen Rationalismus, Munich, 1971, pp. 30ff).
R. R. Geis, ‘Das Geschichtsbild des Talmud’, Saeculum, vi (1955) 121.
Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, ed. H. Nohl (Tübingen, 1907) pp. 214ff.
J. Neusner, ‘Religious Uses of History’, History and Theory, v, no. 2 (1966) 170.
Lazar, Die Geschichtsauffassung der Propheten in Verhältnis zur Geschichtsphilosophie des Idealismus der Gegenwart (Lodz, 1935) p. 7.
See the references cited in M. Elon, Ha’Mishpat Ha’Ivri (Jerusalem, 1973) i, p. 191.
See M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, iii (Tübingen, 1923) p. 6.
H. H. Ben-Sasson, ‘L’Magamot ha’Kronografiya ha’Yehudit shel ymei ha’beinayim u’Bayoteha’, Historiyonim v’askolot historiyot (Jerusalem, 1962) pp. 29–49.
Pirkei Avoth, i. This was the very model of a traditional society that conceived its past ‘as an immemorial continuity, its structure as inherited from an infinitely receding chain of trans-mitters’ (J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, London, 1972, p. 238).
A. Funkenstein, ‘Gesetz und Geschichte: Zur historisierenden Hermeneutik bei Moses Maimonides und Thomas von Aquin’, Viator, 1 (1970).
See M. Grossberg, introduction to Seder Olam Zuta (London, 1910) p. 12.
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© 1977 Lionel Kochan
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Kochan, L. (1977). The Affirmation of History. In: The Jew and His History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02830-6_2
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