Time, Memory, and Historical Consciousness in the Jewish Tradition

Time, memory, and historical consciousness are all modes of conceptualizing the ways in which people make sense of their past and thereby shape their self-image in the present and their hopes and expectations for the future. Understanding how Jews perceive the past is thus an essential component in the study of Jewish society and culture.

In this tantalizing work, which originated as the 1997 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, social anthropologist Jonathan Webber explores this theme with respect to key Jewish preoccupations, both well established and more recent. Starting from the Bible, he discusses the enigmatic nature of Jewish biblical memory and traditional Jewish concepts of time. He goes on to consider the nature of the Hebrew language as a metaphor for historical realities, and the timelessness of Jewish memories of the Promised Land. Turning to more recent preoccupations, he discusses the new Jewish battle-cries of 'continuity' and 'survivalism'; the contemporary interest in the 'history' of the Jewish people; and the memory of the Holocaust and of the Jewish past in Poland. His underlying contention is that myths are not to be seen as badly remembered history, but rather as structuring those parts of the past that Jewish society wants to treat as memorable.

From Webber's exploration of these different contexts in which Jews think about the past, it becomes clear that ritual observance is by no means the sole defining feature of Jewish identity. What we are in fact witnessing is the emergence of history as the new religion for Jews who, from a traditional perspective, are lapsed Jews. The book concludes with a fascinating discussion of the enigmatic nature of Jewish historical consciousness and what this implies for understanding the contemporary Jewish world.