Conclusion: Jewish History and Postmodernity–Challenge and Rapprochement

Summary

IT IS POSSIBLE to incorporate postmodern sensibilities and methods into researching and writing Jewish history while preserving—and even enhancing—the fundamental coherence of the subject and the basic integrity of traditional historiographical methodology. Research, evidence, close reading, rational enquiry, and the positivist assumptions that historical description really does have a referent, and that logic or empirical proof can confirm new knowledge, still are the touchstones of the historical endeavour.

This positivism, however, is a reformed one. It is both critical, deconstructing sources and reading them ‘against the grain’ (that is, exposing alternative views of reality to those their authors intended to convey), and self-critical, being candid about perspectives and presumptions. It is self-conscious about its epistemological assumptions, its interpretative principles, its rhetorical strategies and devices, and its practitioner's metahistorical biases. It accepts its own constructed, contingent, and tentative nature: that it is but one of many probative narratives and is therefore more open and more responsive to criticism. However, this approach to historiography still insists that the narrative it creates is not arbitrary. While my construction of the past may be only one of many true stories, it is demonstrably not a false one. It can and should be judged by intersubjective—and modifiable—standards of evaluation shared by the community of historians.

The historical description-cum-interpretation proffered accounts for a range of perspectives, both from the past and in the present, and refers to the broad scope of human experience (from political to social to cultural to economic) and experiencers (the voiceless as well as the voiced, the dominating and the dominated, the female and the male, the elite alongside the plebeian).

The relationship between Jewish and other cultures is an example of how a problem can be analysed usefully from multiple perspectives, although not every conceivable perspective might be appropriate. In the case of this relationship, juxtaposing and comparing Jewish and non-Jewish culture, considering autonomous origins and mutual influences, seeing Jewish culture as embedded in the non-Jewish, and positing a shared band of cultural axioms—all can contribute to comprehension of the basic issue. However, despite historiographical fashion, standard postcolonial cultural hybridity theory cannot be applied mechanically to the Jewish case. If it is to be used profitably in Jewish history, the notion of cultural hybridity must be significantly modified and then employed with due diligence.