Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MYTHISTORY 103
Baer at first objected to this strange academic division but soon became its
devoted supporter, as it actually suited his approach to history. The year before
this fateful decision was taken, he had launched—together with Ben-Zion
Dinur (Dinaburg), the other historian who obtained a position in the Jewish
history department in Jerusalem—the magazine Zion, which came to be the
leading venue for discussions of Jewish history in Mandatory Palestine, and
later in independent Israel 75 Zmanim ("Times"), the first periodical in Hebrew
to deal with "general" history, was founded in Israel only in the late 1970s.
As the above quotations show, Baer saw the Bible as the decisive starting
point of the organic development of the entire Jewish past. Yet he did not
specialize in ancient history but in the Middle Ages. Only later, in the 1960s, did
he turn to the Hasmonean kingdom. The age of grand syntheses had passed,
and no individual professional historians in the Hebrew academic world would
undertake on their own to repeat the pioneering projects of Graetz, Dubnow
and Baron. 76 The requirements of the international academic world, especially
in the latter half of the twentieth century, forced on the young Hebrew
scholars certain norms that could not be easily circumvented. Baer, a cautious
pedant in his empirical work (he was a typical product of German academia
and a diligent explorer of archives), always asserted that he was professionally
committed to the facts. He therefore admitted that Julius Wellhausen and his
colleagues had eroded the biblical historical discourse, which may have caused
his hesitation about dealing directly with the biblical period. At the same time,
his duty as a national historian prevented him from undermining the founding
myth, and prompted him to write the following:
Graetz was the only Jew who wrote out of an original and independent
understanding of Israelite history up to the fall of the First Temple, and but
for the revolutionary conclusions that were reached in his final years in Bible
criticism and the history of the period, the first two volumes of his work
would have been rightly regarded as among the finest books about that time,
75 The guideline of the periodical was "Jewish history is the history of the Israelite
nation ... Jewish history is united by a homogeneous unity through all the periods and in all
places, each of which reflects the others. Our history in the Middle Ages, like our modern
history, can shed light on the period of the Second Temple, and without the Bible, it is not
possible to understand the struggles of the following generations, and the problems of our
own time." Yitzhak Baer, Zion, vol. 1, 1.
76 There were occasional attempts at a general history, but these were always collective
efforts of several scholars See for example Benjamin Mazar (ed.), History of the People of
Israel, Tel Aviv: Masada, 1967 (in Hebrew); or H, H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), History of the Jewish
People, Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1969 (in Hebrew). Here, as elsewhere, transliterated English titles are
used for books available only in Hebrew.