Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) — Four Stroum Lectures, University of Washington, 1980. Published in 1982. Translated into French by Eric Vigne (Gallimard, 1984).
The very name of our platform, Zakhor (זָכוֹר, « remember »), is borrowed from the founding book of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, professor at Columbia, holder of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Chair of Jewish History, Culture and Society. Delivered as the Stroum Lectures at the University of Washington in 1980 and published in 1982 under the title Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, this slim volume of four essays profoundly renewed the way Jews and non-Jews think about transmission, the archive, and the responsibility of remembering.
This book is not only our intellectual reference: it is the matrix of our method. In it Yerushalmi shows that memory (the liturgical zikkaron, transmitted through rite and narrative) and history (the critical science of sources, born in the nineteenth century) are not the same thing, do not say the same thing, and do not substitute for one another. Our site attempts to hold them together without confusing them — precisely Yerushalmi's wager.
Yerushalmi recalls that the verb zakhar (זכר, « to remember ») and its noun zakhor (« remember ») appear 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. The commandment is hammered home: « Remember what Amalek did to you » (Deut 25:17), « Remember the Sabbath day » (Ex 20:8), « Remember the days of old » (Deut 32:7). Israel is constituted as a people by and for memory.
But — and this is one of the paradoxes Yerushalmi brings to light — the Bible commands remembrance without ever commanding the writing of history in the Greek, Herodotean, sense of the term. The Hebrews do not write Histories in the manner of Thucydides. Their relation to the past passes through liturgy, the Passover narrative, the public reading of the Torah, hagiography, the lamentation of the Temple's destructions — not through the critical labour of the historian.
Yerushalmi observes a decisive rupture: from the 1820s onward, in Germany, the Wissenschaft des Judentums (« science of Judaism ») is born, carried by Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and then Salo W. Baron — Yerushalmi's own American master. For the first time, Jews write the history of their people according to the canons of modern scholarship: philological erudition, critical examination of sources, historicity against legend.
This revolution is an immense gain — without it, neither the rediscovery of the Cairo Genizah manuscripts, nor the deciphering of ancient Hebrew inscriptions, nor the mapping of the diasporas would have been possible. But Yerushalmi poses the disquieting question: what have we lost? The modern historian, in replacing memory with history, in disqualifying hagiographic legends in the name of scrutinised sources, has perhaps severed a thread that liturgy had held for centuries. He knows much. He transmits otherwise.
« For the first time, » writes Yerushalmi, « history — and no longer a living memory — became the principal mediator between the Jew and his past. »
The fourth and final essay of the book — « Dilemmas of the Jewish Historian in the Contemporary Era » — confronts the post-Shoah world. There Yerushalmi observes with lucidity that never has so much Jewish history been written, and never has so little Jewish memory been transmitted. Universities produce theses; communities forget. Archives open; rites fade away.
Yerushalmi identifies a specific risk: that in which collective memory, deprived of its ritual and liturgical frameworks, would take refuge solely in family transmission (« my grandparents survived... »), or solely in official commemoration (Yom HaShoah, monuments, museums) — at the risk of becoming simultaneously too private to make a people, and too public to be inhabited.
His conclusion is tragic and lucid. He proposes no solution, but a task: to acknowledge the rupture, not to mask it, and to seek — patiently, with neither blithe nostalgia nor narrow positivism — new practices that allow memory and history to nourish one another rather than to exclude one another.
Three operational principles structure Zakhor.ai, drawn from Yerushalmi:
« If rabbinic Judaism did not create a historiography, it is perhaps because it had no need of one. Its memory, living and fruitful, sufficed. Which is no longer possible for us moderns. » — Y. H. Yerushalmi
Born in New York in 1932 into a family originating in Central Europe, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi studied at Yeshiva University, then at Columbia under Salo Wittmayer Baron, the great historian of the Social and Religious History of the Jews (18 volumes). He taught at Harvard from 1966 to 1980, then succeeded his master in the Salo Baron Chair at Columbia, which he held until his retirement in 2008.
A specialist in the Sephardic Jews of the modern era — his thesis and first book concern Isaac Cardoso, a seventeenth-century Portuguese Marrano physician and apologist — Yerushalmi also wrote on Sigmund Freud (Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, 1991), on the Jewish Passover through illustrated Haggadot, on medieval Jewish serfdom, on memory and forgetting.
He died in 2009 in New York. His book Zakhor remains, nearly half a century after its appearance, a classic taught in all the great universities of the world — and the source of every contemporary debate on Jewish memory.
