These plain statements show that Jost clearly identified the basic principles of his time’s surging nationalism. But he had doubts about the possibility of a symbiosis between Jews and non-Jews in the emerging German nation, and these doubts would intensify following the wave of conservatism during the 1830s with all its anti-Jewish currents.
The later writings of this pioneering historian show a number of developments. German identity politics would undergo a conceptual upheaval after midcentury, but the first signs of it were discernible even before the revolutions of 1848, and they affected the early reconstruction of the Jewish past. Already in his General History of the Israelite People, Jost’s short second book that appeared in 1832, the biblical period occupies a larger portion of the story, while the Jews are presented as a unit with a tighter historical sequence.15 From here on, the tone is rather political, though not yet nationalistic, and the Old Testament becomes a more legitimate source in the narrative of “the Israelite people.” In the following years Jost’s political opinions became more cautious and hesitant, and he also began to retreat from the biblical criticism he had followed in his first book. This change became manifest in the relative length of the eras he assigned to the early Hebrews and later Jews.
Thus, right from the start, there was a close connection between the perception of the Old Testament as a reliable historical source and the attempt to define modern Jewish identity in prenationalist or nationalist terms. The more nationalistic the author, the more he treats the Bible as history—as the birth certificate attesting to the common origin of the “people.” Some of the reformists were interested in the Bible for quite different reasons, such as opposition to the Orthodox rabbinical attachment to the Talmud, or in imitation of Protestant fashions. But from Isaak Jost, through some of the intellectuals who joined the second stage of the science of Judaism, to the appearance of the great innovator Heinrich Graetz, the Old Testament came to serve as the point of departure for the first historiographical exploration into the fascinating invention of the “Jewish nation,” an invention that would become increasingly important in the second half of the nineteenth century.
THE OLD TESTAMENT AS MYTHISTORY
Jost’s History of the Israelites, the first Jewish history composed in modern times, was not very popular in its day, and it is no accident that the work was never translated into other languages, not even into Hebrew. While it suited the outlook of the German-Jewish intellectuals, secular or not, who were involved in the emancipation movement, most of them did not wish to look for their roots in misty antiquity. They saw themselves as German, and insofar as they continued to believe in a providential deity, they described themselves as members of the Mosaic religion and supported the lively Reform current. For most of the literate heirs to the Enlightenment in Central and Western Europe, Judaism was a religious community, certainly not a wandering people or an alien nation.
The rabbis and the traditional religious figures—that is, the “organic” intellectuals of Jewish communities—did not yet have to examine history in order to affirm their identity, which for centuries had been taken for granted.
The first volumes of the History of the Jews from the Oldest Times to the Present, by Heinrich Graetz, began to appear in the 1850s. It was very successful, and parts of it were relatively soon translated into Hebrew, as well as into several other languages.16 This pioneering work, written with impressive literary flair, remained a presence in national Jewish history throughout the twentieth century. It is hard to measure its impact on the rise of future Zionist thought, but there is no question of its significance and centrality. Though this expansive work is short on descriptions of Jewish history in Eastern Europe (Graetz, who was born in Poznań, then part of Germany, and whose mother tongue was Yiddish, refused to have his book translated into his parents’ “shameful dialect”), the early nationalist intellectuals in the Russian empire embraced it enthusiastically. We can stilfind traces of his bold declarations in all their recorded dreams of the “ancient homeland.”17 His work fertilized the imagination of writers and poets eagerly seeking new fields of historical memory that were no longer traditional but nonetheless continued to draw on tradition. He also fostered secular, if not quite atheistic, interest in the Old Testament. Later the first Zionist settlers in Palestine used his work as their road map through the long past. In today’s Israel there are schools and streets named after Graetz, and no general historical work about the Jews omits mention of him.
The reason for this massive presence is clear: this was the first work that strove, with consistency and feeling, to invent the Jewish people—the term “people” signifying to some extent the modern term “nation.” Although he was never a complete Zionist, Graetz formed the national mold for the writing of Jewish history. He succeeded in creating, with great virtuosity, a unified narrative that minimized problematic multiplicity and created an unbroken history, branching but always singular. Likewise, his basic periodization—bridging chasms of time, and erasing gaps and breaches in space—would serve future Zionist historians, even when they renovated and reshaped it. Henceforth, for many people, Judaism would no longer be a rich and diverse religious civilization that managed to survive despite all difficulties and temptations in the shadow of giants, and became an ancient people or race that was uprooted from its homeland in Canaan and arrived in its youth at the gates of Berlin. The popular Christian myth about the wandering Jew, reproduced by rabbinical Judaism in the early centuries of the Common Era, had acquired a historian who began to translate it into a prenational Jewish narrative.
To create a new paradigm of time, it was necessary to demolish the “faulty and harmful” previous one. To begin the construction of a nation, it was necessary to reject those writings that failed to recognize its primary scaffolding. It was for this reason that Graetz accused his predecessor Jost of “tearing holes” in the history of the Jews:
He tore to shreds the heroic drama of thousands of years. Between the old Israelites, the ancestors and contemporaries of the Prophets and Psalmists, and the Jews, the disciples of the rabbis, Jost hollowed out a deep chasm, making a sharp distinction between them, as if the latter were not the descendants of the former, but of entirely scaffolding. stock.18
What stock produced so many Jews? The next chapter will address this question. For now, it should be noted that a nationalist history—or, strictly speaking, a prenationalist one, since the platform in this case did not include an unambiguous call for political sovereignty—does not tolerate lacunae or perverse aberrations. Graetz sought to mend the unbearable gash that he claimed Jost, Zunz, Geiger and others had caused by their “blindness,” and that prevented them from seeing the ancient kingdom as a legitimate chapter in Jewish history—thereby condemning the Jews to continue seeing themselves as members of a mere religious civilization rather than as an eternal people or tribe (Volksstamm).
Graetz’s sharp criticism doesn’t appear in the early part of this work but toward its end, in the volume about the modern era, which he wrote several years after Jost’s death in 1860. When Graetz began publishing his immense oeuvre in 1853, he too, like Basnage and Jost, began the Jewish narrative after the biblical period, and the first volume covered the time of the Mishnah and Talmud, after the fall of the Temple. Shortly afterward, he returned to the period of the Hasmonean kingdom, but only twenty years later—that is, after the rise of the Second Reich and the unification of Germany by Bismarck’s Prussia, with nationalism triumphantly increasing throughout Central and Southern Europe—did Graetz’s protonationalist position achieve its final, mature form.19 Only after he had summed up the history of the Jews in his time, and concluded his book with the mid-nineteenth-century present, in a defiant and bitter tone, did Graetz retreat chronologically in order to reconstruct the birth of the “chosen moral people.” It was no accident that what was presented as the first national-historical epic ever written about the Jews should culminate with the biblical era.
For there to be a national consciousness, a modern collective identity, both mythology and teleology are required. The foundation myth was, of course,