Description
Book SynopsisDiscusses the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography.
Trade Review"A remarkable book that discusses the millennial tension between the age-old Jewish commandment - and tradition - of remembrance and the relatively new Jewish interest in history."
* American Historical Review *
"Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is an exemplary Jewish historian of the Jews, and with Zakhor he becomes an exemplary theorist of the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography. . . [Zakhor] may well be a permanent contribution to Jewish speculation upon the dilemmas of Jewishness, and so it may join the canon of Jewish wisdom literature."
* New York Review of Books *
"Mr. Yerushalmi’s previous writings, on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews . . . established him as one of the Jewish community’s most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking of a very high order —- mature speculation based on massive scholarship."
* New York Times Book Review *
Table of ContentsForeword by Harold Bloom
Preface to the 1996 Edition
Preface to the 1989 Edition
Prologue to the Original Edition
1. Biblical and Rabbinic Foundations - Meaning in History, Memory, and the Writing of History
2. The Middle Ages - Vessels and Vehicles of Jewish Memory
3. In the Wake of the Spanish Expulsion
4. Modern Dilemas - Historiography and Its Discontents
Postscript - Reflections on Forgetting
Notes
Index
