Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

Discusses the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography

Jewish History and Jewish Memory

Zakhor

Sylvie Anne Goldberg

The deeply personal reflections of a giant of Jewish history. Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009) possessed a stunning range of erudition in all eras of Jewish history, as well as in world history, classical literature, and European culture. What Yerushalmi also brought to his craft was a brilliant literary style, honed by his own voracious reading from early youth and his formative undergraduate studies. This series of interviews paints a revealing portrait of this giant of history, bringing together exceptional material on Yerushalmi's personal and intellectual journeys that not only attests to the astonishing breakthrough of the issues of Jewish history into "general history," but also offers profound insight into Jewish being in today's world.

In Conversation with Sylvie Anne Goldberg

Transmitting Jewish History

A collection of essays, all of them published previously. They discuss Jewish survival despite the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversion in Portugal in 1497. Partial contents:

essais sur l'histoire des juifs, des marranes & des nouveaux-chrétiens d'origine hispano-portugaise

Sefardica

Moses and Monotheism, Freud's last major book and the only one specifically devoted to a Jewish theme, has proved to be one of the most controversial and enigmatic works in the Freudian canon. Among other things, Freud claims in the book that Moses was an Egyptian, that he derived the notion of monotheism from Egyptian concepts, and that after he introduced monotheism to the Jews he was killed by them. Since these historical and ethnographic assumptions have been generally rejected by biblical scholars, anthropologists, and historians of religion, the book has increasingly been approached psychoanalytically, as a psychological document of Freud's inner life--of his allegedly unresolved Oedipal complex and ambivalence over his Jewish identity. In Freud's Moses a distinguished historian of the Jews brings a new perspective to this puzzling work. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argues that while attempts to psychoanalyze Freud's text may be potentially fruitful, they must be preceded by a genuine effort to understand what Freud consciously wanted to convey to his readers. Using both historical and philological analysis, Yerushalmi offers new insights into Freud's intentions in writing Moses and Monotheism. He presents the work as Freud's psychoanalytic history of the Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish psyche--his attempt, under the shadow of Nazism, to discover what has made the Jews what they are. In the process Yerushalmi's eloquent and sensitive exploration of Freud's last work provides a reappraisal of Freud's feelings toward anti-Semitism and the gentile world, his ambivalence about psychoanalysis as a "Jewish" science, his relationship to his father, and above all a new appreciation of the depth and intensity of Freud's identity as a "godless Jew."

Judaism Terminable and Interminable

Freud's Moses

Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History David N Myers

Publication of Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor in 1982 inspired a generation of scholarly inquiry into historical images and myths, the construction of the Jewish past, and the making and meaning of collective memory. Here, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of his seminal study into topics that range from medieval rabbinics, homiletics, kabbalah, and Hasidism to antisemitism, Zionism, and the making of modern Jewish identity. Essays are clustered around four central themes: historical consciousness and the construction of memory; the relationship between time and history in Jewish thought; the demise of traditional forms of collective memory; and the writing of Jewish history in modern times.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

About

Books

Join the club