This work would surprise today’s readers, because this first modern attempt to tell the complete history of the Jews, written by a historian who saw himself as a Jew, skipped over the biblical period. Jost’s long story opens with the kingdom of Judea under the Hasmoneans, followed by monographs reconstructing the histories of various Jewish communities up to modern times. This is a nonconsecutive narrative, broken into numerous stories, but its most memorable aspect is the fact that it lacks the “beginning” that would later be viewed as integral to the history of Jews in the world. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the time of nationalist formation, which saw the “restoration” of the Bible to many Jewish literati in Europe, this historiographic feature must have seemed strange.
To understand this first methodical study of the history of Jews through the ages, we must remember that its gifted author was not yet a national historian or, more precisely, not a national Jew. We have to look over Jost’s shoulder and appreciate his sensitivities as part of the new mental fabric of the young intelligentsia emerging from the old Jewish world. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the self-perception of German-Jewish intellectuals—even those who were “very Jewish”—was largely cultural and religious. At that time, the young Germany was not so much a political entity as a cultural-linguistic concept. This society of speakers of various dialects of German—a society of which the Jews constituted 1 percent—had recently begun the relative unification imposed by the French invader. Most of the intellectuals, whether of Jewish or of Christian background, had not yet fully responded to the political seduction of nationalism, though a few of them, including Jost, were already aware of its first hammer-blows. Most literati of Jewish background were gripped by the project of emancipation, namely, the process of achieving equal civil rights, that had begun to be implemented in part in various German principalities and kingdoms in the second decade of the century, and was a crucial element in the nationalization of politics. Everyone was hoping that the longed-for German state would break away from its clerical foundations and completely privatize all its religions.
Jost was born in Bernburg in central Germany, two years before the founder of critical historiography, Leopold von Ranke. He started his literary career as a typical Enlightenment liberal. He was raised as a Jew, attended a rabbinical school, and continued to cherish certain aspects of Jewish religious culture. Nevertheless, he favored the rising tide of reform, and believed that his life and the life of his community could be harmonized with the emerging historical-political vision of German citizenship.
With a number of friends and colleagues, all of Jewish background, he took part for a short while in creating a “science circle,” out of which would emerge the important current that would come to be known as “the science of Judaism”—Wissenschaft des Judentums, in German. is movement influenced all Jewish studies in modern times. The members of the circle and their successors were quite conflicted about their identity, and experienced some distress over this issue.8 These literati belonged to the first generation of German Jews to study at the universities, although their “exceptional” religious background barred them from academic posts. They subsisted as teachers, journalists or Reform rabbis and worked on their philosophical or historical studies in their spare time. As intellectuals whose symbolic capital lay principally in their Jewish heritage, they were unwilling to forgo their cultural distinction and sought to preserve whatever was best in it. At the same time, they longed to be integrated into the emerging Germany. They therefore set out on a complex and difficult intellectual journey, believing that to research the Jewish past and highlight its positive aspects would help build a bridge that could enable the Jewish community to participate in this future Germany.
Thus, at the early stages of writing Jewish history in modern times, the project was not characterized as a national discourse, which accounts for the writers’ ambivalence about including biblical history as part of that history. For Jost, as for Leopold Zunz, the second important historian in the early days of the science of Judaism, Jewish history began not with the conversion of Abraham, or the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai, but with the return of the exiles from Babylonia. It was only then, they argued, that historical-religious Judaism began, its culture having been forged by the experience of exile itself. The Old Testament had nurtured its birth, but it then grew into a universal property that would later inspire the birth of Christianity.9
Besides aspiring to civil emancipation, Jost, Zunz and, later, Abraham Geiger, and indeed most nineteenth-century supporters of reform, were guided by the non-Jewish biblical research that was gaining impetus at this time. Jost had been a pupil of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, one of the gifted pioneers of this critical trend, and was familiar with the new philological criticisms, most of which he willingly adopted.10 He knew that the Scriptures were written fairly late by various authors and, in addition, lacked external evidence that could substantiate them. This does not mean he doubted the truth of the myth about the rise of the Hebrews and the later consolidation of their kingdom. But he assumed that the period in question was too obscure to serve as the basis for a meaningful historical study. Moreover, the Hebrews in Canaan, despite having the laws of Moses imposed upon them, did not differ from the surrounding pagan peoples. Until their exile to Babylonia, they persistently rejected the divine commandments, which were followed only by a narrow stratum of priests and prophets. The Bible became the work that shaped identity and belief after it was edited and disseminated among a faithful public that truly needed it. “When the Children of Israel came out of Egypt they were primitive and ignorant,” writes Jost. “The Jews in Persia studied and learned from the Persians a new religious outlook, a civilized life, language and science.”11 Hence, it was the period of exile, in the broadest sense, that ought to represent the start of Jewish history. The breach between ancient Hebraism and Jewish history came to be the underlying concept for most of the German pioneers of the science of Judaism.12
Every historical corroboration depends on ideology, whether overt or hidden. Jost’s approach was consistently fair. His great work sought to convince German readers, Jewish and Christian alike, that despite the distinct faith of the “Israelites,” they were not an “alien” people in their far-flung habitations. Long before the destruction of the Second Temple, their forefathers preferred to live outside the Holy Land, and despite their traditional religious self-isolation, they were always an integral part of the peoples among whom they lived. “They remained Jews, although also members of other nations,” Jost reiterates. “They loved their brethren in Jerusalem and wished them peace and prosperity, but they cherished their new homeland more. They prayed with their blood brothers, but they went to war with their country brothers. They were friendly toward their blood brothers, but they shed their blood for their homeland.”13
In the distant past, their homeland had been Babylonia or Persia, whereas then it was mainly post-Napoleonic Germany. Jost was well aware of the early signs of German nationalism and, like most literate individuals of Jewish origin, looked for indirect ways to join it. This accounts for the creation of a historiographie work of amazing scope and originality, which remains utterly unlike all the Jewish histories that followed. In the nineteenth century, a person setting out to write a history of the collective of which he regarded himself to be a member usually did so from nationalist motives. Jost, however, was impelled by quite different intellectual and mental stimuli to reconstruct his history of the Israelites. His premise was that the Jews might share a common origin, but the different Jewish communities were not separate members of a single body. The communities differed widely from place to place in their cultures and ways of life, and were only linked by their distinctive deistic belief. No supra-Jewish political entity separated Jews from non-Jews; hence in the modern world they were entitled to the same civil rights as all the other communities and cultural groups that were rushing to enter the modern nation.
Writing to a friend when his first volume appeared, Jost revealed the political thinking that underlay and motivated his historiographic work:
The state cannot recognize Jews as legitimate as long as they will not marry the inhabitants of the country. The state exists only by virtue of its people and its people must constitute a unity. Why should it elevate an association whose main principle is that it alone possesses the truth and therefore must avoid all integration with the