Abstract
Probably the last attempt to construct a Jewish history in terms of rabbinic scholarship came from R. Yehiel Halperin of Minsk. His Seder Ha’Dorot (Order of the Generations, 1769) is precisely such a work. He saw himself in the same tradition as Zacuto and Ibn Yahya. Indeed, he castigated them for their defective pre- sentative of the Kabbalah, whilst giving qualified praise to Gans. The ignorance of his own generation appalled Halperin. He emphasised that ‘a knowledge of the generations’ will show who is the teacher and who the pupil — following the precedent established by Maimonides and Alfassi. cIn this way you will be able to understand how to correct many errors in the Talmud and you will find hundreds that need correction.’ Halperin undertook to cite ‘two great men who erred because of their defective knowledge of the sequence of the generations’.1
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Notes
Y. Halperin, introduction to Seder Ha’Dorot (repr. Jerusalem, 1970) pp. 3–5.
Megilat Sefer, ed. D. Cahana (Warsaw, 1896) pp. 96–8.
Israel Rabin, ‘Stoff und Idee in der jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung’, in Dubnow Festschrift, ed. Elbogen, Meisl, Wisch- nitzer (Berlin, 1930) p. 51
Baer see his ‘Le’Berur ha’Matzav shel ha’limudim ha’historiim etzlenu’, Sefer Magnes (Jerusalem, 1938). Baer writes: ‘the influence of the Torah and the prophets and the pressure of a hard destiny’ transformed a realistic historical approach into a religious system which conditioned the activity and thought of Israel until the eighteenth century. But the religious relationship to historical experience ‘is absolutely opposed to the basic aspirations of modern historiography’ (p. 31).
See also A. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn (London, 1973) pp. 455ff and 472ff.
See the material quoted from R. Isaiah Hurewitz and others in H. H. Ben-Sasson, Hagut Ve’Hanhaga (Jerusalem, 1959) pp. 91, 124.
B. Mevorah (ed.), Napoleon u’tekufato (Jerusalem, 1968) pp. 173ff, 186ff
Israel Berger, Esser Tsahtsahot (Piotrkow, 1910) p. 87.
See e.g. F. Kobler, The Vision Was There (London, 1956) pp. 42ff
See e.g. F. Kobler, The Vision Was There (London, 1956) pp. 42ff, and M. Vereté, ‘The Restoration of the Jews in English Protestant Thought 1790–1840’, Middle Eastern Studies (Jan. 1972).
See B. Mevorah, ‘The Problem of the Messiah in the Emancipation and Reform Controversies 1781–1819’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Jerusalem, 1966).
For a convenient guide to views expressed at these conferences see Isaac Barzilay, Shlomo Yehudah Rapaport (Israel, 1969) pp. 115ff.
Simon Kaplan, Das Geschichtsproblem in der Philosophie Hermann Cohens (Berlin, 1930) pp. 96ff.
M. D. Herr, ‘Role of the Halacha in the Shaping of Jewish History’, Contemporary Thinking in Israel, i (Jerusalem, 1973) pp. 42ff.
Gesammelte Schriften, V. Briefe, ed. G. B. Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1844) 16 Feb 1765, p. 342. But there were exceptions, e.g. Mendelssohn found Hume’s History of England ‘incomparable’ and particularly admired Hume’s ability to ‘develop characters and events’ (ibid., 2 Nov 1762, p. 268).
See E. Cassirer, Die Idee der Religion bei Lessing und Mendelssohn, Festgabe zum zehnjährigen Bestehen der Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums 1919–1929 (Berlin, 1929) p. 32;
S. Bernfeld, Mendelssohns Wirken im Judentum, Men-delssohn-zur 200-jährigen Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages, Encyclopaedia Judaica (Berlin, 1929) pp. 69ff.
Ibid., 22 July 1766, p. 368. The perplexities of Mendelssohn were of course intensified and multiplied in the following generation of German Jews to whom there existed a real possibility of entering German society-but on what terms? (See Rosenthal, op. cit., pp. 52ff and Leo Baeck, Aus drei Jahrtausenden, Tübingen, 1958, p. 32.)
For a short account of these developments see N. N. Glatzer, ‘The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Studies’, in A. Altmann (ed.), Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) pp. 27–45;
B.-Z. Katz, Rabbanut, Hasidut, Haskala (Jerusalem, 1956, 1958) i, pp. 230ff, ii, pp. 204ff.
R. Michael, ‘Trumat ktav-ha’et “Shulamit” la’historiografiya ha’yehudit ha’hadasha’, Zion, xxxix, nos. 1–2 (1974).
Quoted Glatzer, op. cit., p. 40; see also Georg Herlitz, ‘Three Jewish Historians’, Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, ix (London, 1964), 71–6;
Barzilay, op. cit., pp. 15–16; and M. Meyer, ‘Where Does Modern Jewish History Begin?’ Judaism, xxiv, 3 (1975) 330.
H. G. Reissner, ‘Rebellious Dilemma’, Year Book of Leo Baeck Institute, ii (London, 1957) 179–93;
Michael A. Meyer, ‘Jewish Religious Reform and Wissenschaft des Judentums’, ibid., xvi (1971) 19–41.
M. Meyer, Origins of the Modern Jew (Detroit, 1967) pp. 158ff;
F. Bamberger, ‘Zunz’s Conception of History’, Proceedings of the American Academy for JewishResearch, xi (1941) pp. 11ff.
N. Glatzer, ‘Klalim b’tfisat-ha’historiyashelZunz’, Zion, xxi (1961) 208–14.
Kurt Wilhelm, ‘Zur Einführung in die Wissenschaft des Judentums’, Wissenschaft des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich, i (Tübingen, 1966) pp. 5–6.
Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. G. Himmelfarb, Boston, 1948, p. 23
E. Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, 1961) p. 4.
Igrot Shadal, pt vii, ed. Graeber (Cracow, 1884) p. 1367.
D. Rudavsky, ‘S. D. Luzzatto and Neo-Orthodoxy’, Tradition, vii, no. 3 (1965) 21–42.
Dr I. Grunfeld, Judaism Eternal (London, 1956), i, pp. 133–5.
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© 1977 Lionel Kochan
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Kochan, L. (1977). The Decline of the Messiah. In: The Jew and His History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02830-6_5
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