More than half a century ago, Salo Baron—the first person to hold a chair in Jewish history at an American university—criticized the “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history, which sees the story of the Jews as one of unending travail and persecution. Dara Horn in her recent book People Love Dead Jews, explores the flip side of this phenomenon, whereby Gentiles are eager to hold up Jewish suffering for the lessons it supposedly teaches, but have little interest in, or even tolerance for, Jews’ pursuit of their national, religious, or artistic goals. Recalling a very different encounter, with people who wished to learn from Jewish successes, Horn writes:
About six years ago, I participated in a small American academic conference whose subject was modern Hebrew; . . . the reason I remember it six years later isn’t because of any of the papers presented. It’s because of three attendees who sat in the back of the sessions, taking careful notes. They were representatives of the Wampanoag Nation, Native Americans with origins in today’s eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island—the people whose ancestors, centuries earlier, first encountered the Pilgrims who arrived on American shores. Their goal was to revive the Wampanoag language, which had not been spoken in over 200 years. They were at this Hebrew conference because, as one put it, “we want to know how you did it.”
And what if others sought to learn their lessons from Jewish flourishing?
That same textbook that mentions Jews only in the context of persecutions, for example, probably also describes how mass literacy for the poor was not possible until the invention of the printing press and later industrial production. But if Jewish history were included in world history, this would be revealed to be a lie, since, of course, Jewish communities had almost universal male literacy for many centuries before the printing press, even if only in that very dead language called Hebrew. Teaching this historical fact would reveal that societies actually didn’t require advanced technology or industrial production in order to achieve mass literacy, even among the poor; they merely needed to believe that reading was important.
As a history lesson, this might be rather depressing, because it would reveal the lost potential of untold millions of people left unnecessarily illiterate—as depressing as the lost potential of untold millions of women, including Jewish women. Obviously, there are many choices Jewish communities have made over the centuries that are profoundly depressing and limiting too, including choices Jewish communities are making right now. But as lessons about the future, these retroactively depressing facts might be profoundly inspiring.
More about: Jewish education, Jewish history, Modern Hebrew
