Heinrich Graetz - Legacy

Legacy

Graetz's history became very popular and influential in its time. The material for Jewish history being so varied, the sources so scattered in the literatures of all nations, and the chronological sequence so often interrupted, made the presentation of this history as a whole a very difficult undertaking; and it can not be denied that Graetz performed his task with consummate skill, that he mastered most of the details while not losing sight of the whole. Another reason for the popularity of the work is its sympathetic treatment. This history of the Jews is not written by a cool observer, but by a warm-hearted Jew. On the other hand, some of these commendable features are at the same time shortcomings. The impossibility of mastering all the details made Graetz inaccurate in many instances. A certain imaginative faculty, which so markedly assisted him in his textual emendations of the Bible, led him to make a great number of purely arbitrary statements. Typical in this respect is the introductory statement in the first volume: "On a bright morning in spring nomadic tribes penetrated into Israel," while the Bible, which is his only source, states neither that it was in spring nor that it was on a bright morning. His passionate temper often carried him away, and because of this the eleventh volume is certainly marred. Graetz does not seem to possess the fairness necessary for a historian, who has to understand every movement as an outgrowth of given conditions, when he calls David Friedländer a "Flachkopf" (xi. 173) and "Moses Mendelssohn's ape" (ib. p. 130), or when he says of Samuel Holdheim that since the days of Paul of Tarsus Judaism never had such a bitter enemy (ib. p. 565). His preconceived opinions very often led him to conclusions which were not borne out and were even frequently disproved by the sources. His feelings often led him to make unwarranted attacks on Christianity which have given rise to very bitter complaints. He also showed extreme paranoia in his "conspiracy theories", such as a holiday gathering being the front for a plan to overturn the government, despite all evidence pointing to the meeting's innocence.All these short-comings, however, are outbalanced by the facts that the work of presenting the whole of Jewish history was undertaken, that it was executed in a readable form, and that the author enriched Jewish history by the discovery of many an important detail.

Some characterize Graetz's main elements of Jewish experience through the ages to be 'suffering and spiritual scholarship', while later Jewish scholarly works like Salo W. Baron's 1937 A Social and Religious History of the Jews, opposed the view of Jewish history as being 'all darkness and no light' and sought to restore balance, by writing a social history. Baron strove to integrate the religious dimension of Jewish history into a full picture of Jewish life and to integrate the history of Jews into the wider history of the eras and societies in which they lived. Baron brought very distinctive views to his scholarship. He inveighed against what he termed the "lachrymose conception of Jewish history," sometimes identified with Heinrich Graetz. In a 1975 interview Baron said: "Suffering is part of the destiny, but so is repeated joy as well as ultimate redemption." According to Arthur Hertzberg, Baron was writing social history, insisting that spiritual creativity and the political situation were all borne by a living society and its changing forms,