In a paper entitled, “Newer Emphases in Jewish History,” published in 1963, Salo Baron wrote: “All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” … because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution….”Footnote ¹ Indeed, if one was to choose a single idea that encapsulated the legacy of Baron, perhaps the pre-eminent Jewish historian of the twentieth century, it would probably be this: Jewish history is not to be seen simply as a series of persecutions, which determined its nature and its course, but rather as a process of ongoing engagement between the Jews and their surroundings.Footnote ²

It would be hard to overstate just how influential this viewpoint has become––even despite the withering attacks initially mounted upon it by the Israeli academy, particularly Yitzhak Baer.Footnote ³ Today, Baron's approach is almost universally accepted, and academic students of Jewish history are warned off “the lachrymose conception.”

The shift away from lachrymosity has shaped Jewish historical writing in fundamental ways, particularly in the last two decades. In fact, so pronounced has this become that in a 2006 study, David Engel identified what he termed a “neo-Baronian school” of Jewish historiography, which has sought “continuities instead of ruptures in Jewish history, stressed Jews’ achievements over their suffering, and professed the advantages and creative possibilities of diaspora existence.”Footnote ⁴ Though attacks on Jews are not totally ignored, their significance is downplayed in favor of other factors. In recent years, this has become even more dominant in Jewish historical research, with medieval Jewish life in Germany described almost as a “convivencia” of Jewish and Christian shared values and social experiences, the 1492 expulsion from Spain given as an example of Jewish migration, and the history of the Jews in late Tsarist Russia discussed largely without reference to antisemitism.Footnote ⁵

Perhaps the time has come to re-examine Baron's interdiction and ask what the focus––one might almost say fetish––on avoiding the lachrymose conception might have caused us to lose in our understanding of the Jewish past. To do this, a first step should be to try to clarify what Baron himself meant by the lachrymose conception and to examine the assumptions that underlay his view of Jewish history. Once these have become clear, it should be possible to assess the extent to which adopting them unquestioningly might prevent us from grasping the full significance of persecution and violence in the Jewish historical experience.

Baron gave the clearest formulation of his outlook in the first edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews:

Baron was here positioning himself against Heinrich Graetz, whom he considered as having written a history focused mostly on “Sufferings and Scholars” ––a Leidens und Geleherten-geschichte.Footnote ⁷ What Baron was looking for was a social history of Jewish experience, privileging the flow of everyday life over the ruptures of violence.Footnote ⁸ It is worth noting, however, that, as his biographer, Robert Liberles, argues: ”Baron was far from negating the extent of medieval persecution as demonstrated by pogroms and expulsions. But [he]… sought to emphasize that there was more to Jewish history than suffering and tragedy and that daily life revealed a more positive perspective.”Footnote ⁹ So, antisemitism was no longer to be seen as a moving force in Jewish history. Instead, it was the ways in which Jewish society interacted with the world around it (and, of course, vice versa) that shaped the course of Jewish history. Baron also never negated the importance of creative forces within Jewish culture, but always saw them as acting within a Jewish society embedded in the structures of the wider world.Footnote ¹⁰

Two aspects of Baron's formulation are particularly important. The first is the emphasis on the medieval period, the second his usage, “the ordinary flow of life.” As David Engel has shown, Baron was specific about periodizing his attack on the lachrymose conception. For him, it was the pre-emancipatory age that needed to be recast in much more stable terms. The emancipation of the Jews, he felt, actually plunged Jewish society into a period of instability and persecution. Thus, what he was calling for was not a total abandonment of the lachrymose conception, but a revision of “the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe.”Footnote ¹¹ As for the second point, more significant here, Baron's view of the past juxtaposed two different, even diametrically opposed states––what he termed, “the ordinary flow of life,” and “extraordinary events,” by which he meant outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence. The first, he posited, was a long-lasting norm, while the second was a short-lived exception, going on, in his words, for “only a few days.” It was these two assumptions––that the “ordinary flow of life” was a realm full of the calm of neighborly living and that violence was essentially an extra-ordinary and short-term phenomenon––that allowed him more-or-less to bracket out persecution from the historical processes he described.

As to the chronological extent of persecution, Baron contended that this was a phenomenon that was essentially limited in time. Such was, of course, not necessarily the case. Though a single act of violence, a scuffle, or a riot, might take only a few minutes, hours, or days, attacks that took place during wartime could last on-and-off for years. The Chmielnicki uprising, with its widespread massacres of Jews, popularly known as Gzeires Taḥ ve-Tat, began in the spring of 1648 and lasted to 1654.Footnote ¹² It was immediately followed by two other wars that ravaged Poland-Lithuania and its Jews until 1667.Footnote ¹³ Clearly, Jews were not attacked on a daily basis for a period of nineteen years, but throughout the period they suffered not only from an extended series of targeted attacks, but also from heightened levels of daily violence on the part of soldiers and their neighbors.Footnote ¹⁴ In this case, Baron's sharp distinction between violence and normalcy simply does not hold up.

However, it was not just in the case of wars that the effects of persecution could be felt for long periods of time. The violent attacks on the Jews of Spain in 1391, though they themselves lasted only a couple of months, sparked processes of religious change, tension, and further persecution, whose effects were felt in Spain itself for over a century––and elsewhere for considerably longer.Footnote ¹⁵ Once again, though the physical acts of violence might have been limited in scope and time, their consequences reverberated, affecting the daily life of Spanish Jewry, long after the mobs themselves had dispersed.

The same is true of another of the persecutions, whose significance Baron wanted to downplay––expulsions of Jews. His message was clear: if Jews and Christians had lived together in one locality for centuries, why should we characterize those relations solely (or even largely) on the basis of their tragic end. That is, of course, a point well taken. It ignores, however, the consequences of the expulsion. In material terms an expulsion involved a loss of property and earning capacity, leading to impoverishment. Not only the period of the expulsion itself, but also the relocation to a new community was fraught with physical danger and often involved great expense. Finally, we should remember that such dislocation could have psychological implications, too. These were consequences the Jews had to deal with in their new homes for years and even decades to come.

For example: when some 4,000 Jews were expelled from Vienna and its surroundings in 1669/70, they had to leave their private homes and communal property, such as the synagogue, all of which were expropriated by the Emperor and sold to the city. The refugees were forced to fan out across central Europe, with the wealthier ones finding a place in Prague, Fürth, and Berlin, and the rest settling where they could––in small communities in the German lands, Bohemia, Moravia, and even Hungary. This was a hugely traumatic moment in the history of early modern European Jewry, deeply etched on the memory of the local communities where the refugees settled, probably because these communities, too, were called upon to devote resources and energies to helping them.Footnote ¹⁶

The price for helping refugees could be very high. In her memoirs, Glikl of Hameln describes the efforts made in Hamburg to help a different group of Jewish refugees––those from the Muscovite invasion of Vilna in 1655: “… many of them came to Hamburg, suffering with contagious disease…. At least ten of them were sent to rest in our attic. Father… was to look after their needs. Some of them recovered, others died. My sister, Elkele, and I also contracted the disease. My pious Grandmother… tended to the sick and ensured that they had everything they needed… she would visit them in the attic three or four times a day. Eventually, she also caught the disease and languished for ten days before she died.”Footnote ¹⁷

When those anxious to avoid the lachrymose approach consider the expulsions of Jews from their homes, they do not concern themselves much with such stories of human suffering, preferring to take a long perspective that allows them to view the events as important––often positive––moments of change. The expulsion of 1669 from Vienna is thus seen as giving an important boost to the development of Central European Jewry, the expulsions from Spain and Portugal create not only the vibrant communities of the Ottoman Empire but also the hugely dynamic Sephardic diaspora, and the series of expulsions from the German lands from 1348–1520 lay the foundations for the development of the cultural powerhouse that was to become Polish Jewry.Footnote ¹⁸ Of course, this perspective is not wrong; it just ignores the costs––economic, physical, and psychological––that were involved in bringing these changes about.

Overcoming disaster was not just communal in nature––it had significant psychological implications, too. Those who had survived extreme violence or expulsion had to deal with the traumas of their past in order to rebuild their lives. This is not an insignificant issue, though one which it is hard for an historian to come to grips with.Footnote ¹⁹ A major problem is that of sources: most of the testimonies that we have were written by rabbinic authors as autobiographical fragments in the introductions to their books. Here is an example from a survivor of the 1655 massacre of Lublin:

This searing text, written by Aharon Shmuel Koidonover as part of the introduction to a book that he published in 1669, shows that nearly fifteen years after the event, the images of his trauma still lived on with him. Despite the fact that he was by then enjoying a distinguished rabbinic career (he had only recently moved from Fürth to become rabbi of Frankfurt a.M.), in his own mind, he remained a survivor.

While there is not enough evidence to discuss this text as evidence of a pathological state, it is absolutely clear that the author had been severely traumatized in the wars and that those feelings had stayed with him. He was by no means the only one. The rabbinic literature of his generation is replete with similar testimonies, some written decades after the end of the violence.Footnote ²¹ These men (and, of course, the many traumatized women who have not left us written testimonies) resumed their lives, raised families, and were active members of the Jewish societies where they lived. In the case of rabbis, they even stood at the head of their communities. I do not wish to claim that they created traumatized forms of life for those around them. But I would like to suggest that they made living with violence and persecution––and more particularly their consequences––an accepted part of what Baron called “the ordinary flow of Jewish life” for communities across Europe.

At the heart of Baron's conception of Jewish normalcy was the idea of the Jewish community living at peace with its neighbors on a daily basis, with acts of violence just punctuating this co-existence. However, the outbreak of genocidal ethnic violence in the twentieth century, and particularly its recrudescence in recent decades––in the Balkans and in Africa––has put this rather simplistic view in question. In Jewish historical research, Jan Tomasz Gross's 2002 book, Neighbors, has shown how a Polish society, which had co-existed with Jews in the small town of Jedwabne, for centuries, was able, with little or no prompting from outside, to round up their Jewish neighbors in the summer of 1941 and burn them alive in a barn.Footnote ²² Implicit in the study is the question: what kind of neighborliness was it that allowed such a thing to happen?

In an interesting parallel, the great chronicler of the 1648 massacres of Ukrainian Jews, Natan Notte Hanover, described his Ukrainian neighbors in the following terms: they “first appear to the Jews as friends, and speak to them pleasant and comforting words, beguiling them with soft and kind speech, while they lie with their tongues and are deceitful and untrustworthy.”Footnote ²³ As Hanover and pre-modern Jewish society clearly understood, not all neighborly relations are based on friendship, and, under certain conditions, they can sometimes take the form of open hatred and murder.

One possible means of understanding this phenomenon was proposed by Anthony Oberschall in his sociological study of the outbreak of ethnic violence between Serbs and Croats during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.Footnote ²⁴ He identified two frames of thought on ethnic relations that both groups held concurrently. The first was a co-operative frame, which allowed Croats and Serbs to live in peace for long periods. However, alongside that, they both held what he called a “crisis frame,” anchored in family history and collective memory of wars, ethnic atrocities and brutality. For long periods of time, these feelings of fear, hatred and loathing, though present in the minds of both Serbs and Croats, were not dominant, allowing for peaceful co-existence. However, they always remained below the surface, and could be activated in times of crisis. This, it seems to me, is a model that might help explain the fluctuation between periods of co-operation and periods of violence in Jewish history without one or another becoming a dominant pattern.

There are signs that pre-modern Polish Jews at least, had some sense of this situation. When they tried to talk about their attitude towards the country where they lived and flourished, they would often quote the verse from Leviticus 26:44, “Yet even when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them…” In their own eyes, they were enjoying God's grace and flourishing even though they were living among enemies in a hostile place. Here is evidence of the kind of dualism that Oberschall identified in the former Yugoslavs.Footnote ²⁵

It is more difficult to determine just how widespread this view was among pre-modern Jews. I would like here to suggest one approach to the issue focusing on the early modern period. In her work on the calendrical almanachs––called in Hebrew, Sifrei Evronot––from that period, Elisheva Carlebach has identified and analyzed the short chronographs (lists of important dates) that the authors often inserted into their manuscripts.Footnote ²⁶ These were, by their nature, personal documents reflecting the historical understanding of the individual authors. However, such chronographs were also a permanent fixture in the small calendars, printed up and sold cheaply to Jewish merchants. These calendars allowed the calculation of the Jewish date and its comparison with the Christian calendar, and made particular show of the different fairs frequented by Jewish businessmen, together with their dates. These were neither personal, nor genuinely local documents. The chronographs they included were meant to make them more interesting and attractive to the broad market of Jewish merchants. Typically, these were short lists of dates, calculated back from the present. Until the nineteenth century, they included mostly events of Jewish interest, starting from the Bible and continuing more or less to the present.

Of interest to us here is the choice of important dates following the destruction of the Second Temple that were included in the chronographs.Footnote ²⁷ These fell into two broad categories: the dates of the composition of the great rabbinic works––the Mishnah, the two Talmuds (Jerusalem and Babylonian), and the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, and those of great disasters that had befallen the Jewish people. Particularly popular in the second category were expulsions: from France in 1306, from Spain in 1391 and 1492,Footnote ²⁸ and from Portugal in 1497. The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 were also universally mentioned. From events of the eighteenth century, it was mostly community-destroying fires that were given prominence, with the 1749 explosion in Breslau, in which 39 Jews were killed, also finding a place. More positive occurrences––even returns from exile when they happened (for example, following the expulsion from Frankfurt a.M. in 1616)––were not mentioned. These could find their place in more local or personal chronographs, but when the focus was widened for the mercantile calendars, it was the catastrophes not the victories that were chosen.Footnote ²⁹

When asked to pick the most important events, then, pre-modern Jews seem to have viewed their own recent history simply as a series of catastrophes. This suggests that we need to think of the lachrymose conception not just as a modern historiographical strategy, but rather as an historical phenomenon in its own right.Footnote ³⁰ When pre-modern Jews thought about themselves and their place in the world, they did so not in liberal, but in lachrymose terms. And if those were the terms in which they understood their own “normality,” then when we try to do the same, we should not dismiss them, but take them very firmly into account.

In conclusion, it needs to be made clear that my comments do not advocate a return to an old model of Jewish history whose outlines are determined by persecutions of Jews and whose moving force is antisemitism. Baron's conception of Jewish history as embedded in a range of broader contexts, all of which need to be studied and understood, is so obviously correct that it needs no restatement here. What this paper is suggesting, however, is that the dichotomy Baron drew between normalcy and persecution, which allowed him to downplay the significance of violence and antisemitism as factors in the historical process, was too sharp. The everyday life that he wanted to understand in order to assess the complete range of factors that shaped Jewish history was not an arena free of violence and persecution––and certainly not of their consequences. In almost every time and place, Jewish societies found themselves dealing with difficult and troublesome issues of persecution and its after-effects. These shaped their view both of their history and place in the world, and of their status in non-Jewish society and relations with their neighbors. What this re-examination of Baron's opposition to the lachrymose conception seems to be pointing towards, therefore, is the need for the balanced re-insertion of hatred, persecution, and violence as factors in the way “normal” Jewish life is understood in its various historical settings. Baron, who was nothing if not a balanced historian, would probably have found much to agree with in this point of view.