“Mr. Yerushalmi’s previous writings . . . established him as one of the Jewish community’s most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking of a very high order - mature speculation based on massive scholarship.” - New York Times Book Review
Authors & Contributors
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society, and director of the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University.
Contents
Foreword by Harold Bloom Preface to the 1996 Edition Preface to the 1989 Edition Prologue to the Original Edition
1. Biblical and Rabbinic Foundations - Meaning in History, Memory, and the Writing of History 2. The Middle Ages - Vessels and Vehicles of Jewish Memory 3. In the Wake of the Spanish Expulsion 4. Modern Dilemas - Historiography and Its Discontents
Postscript - Reflections on Forgetting
Notes Index
Reviews
A remarkable book that discusses the millennial tension between the age-old Jewish commandment - and tradition - of remembrance and the relatively new Jewish interest in history.
-
American Historical Review
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is an exemplary Jewish historian of the Jews, and with Zakhor he becomes an exemplary theorist of the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography. . . [Zakhor] may well be a permanent contribution to Jewish speculation upon the dilemmas of Jewishness, and so it may join the canon of Jewish wisdom literature.
-
New York Review of Books
Mr. Yerushalmi’s previous writings, on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews . . . established him as one of the Jewish community’s most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking of a very high order —- mature speculation based on massive scholarship.
-
New York Times Book Review
Advance Praise
A brilliant and fundamentally new appraisal of collective Jewish historical memory. . . . It opens up new horizons of thinking in a style that is beautiful and a scholarship that is overwhelming.
-
Gerson D. Cohen, former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
