| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David N. Myers. Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 253. $29.95.
The challenge of historicism to religion generated a vast and sophisticated theological literature within the Christian tradition, primarily among German Lutherans, the first to be confronted with historical-critical methods applied to biblical studies. Historicism served different kinds of purposes for Jews, affirming Jewish cultural identity and political interests. Historians such as Leopold Zunz and Moritz Steinschneider saw their task as gathering the products of Jewish creativity over the centuries, collecting manuscripts from libraries around Europe, while others wrote local histories of the Jews to demonstrate their rootedness in certain regions and legitimize their contemporary presence within Germany. When it came to religious texts, Jewish thinkers tended to avoid historicist studies of the Hebrew Bible until the twentieth century, although they gave considerable attention, starting in the nineteenth century, to rabbinic literature, also traditionally considered to have been divinely revealed. Reading the Talmud historically could be used to justify religious reform, raising suspicion toward historicism among the Orthodox.	1
Jewish scholarship did not exist in isolation but responded to Protestant scholarship and hoped that Protestants would take Jewish findings to heart, especially since studies of rabbinic literature were often presented as bearing revisionist implications for an understanding of Christian origins. The collegiality Jews hoped for did not materialize, and their disappointments led, in many cases, to a reconsideration of historicist methods and goals.	. . .

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