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“Can there be a history of a slave?” When Isaak Markus Jost asked this question, in the introduction to his “General History of the Israelite People,” published in 1832, it was by no means clear that Jewish history was a viable scholarly discipline. To many people, Jost knew, it might seem that the important part of the Jewish story had ended with the Bible, leaving only a long sequel of passive suffering. “It is commonly held that where independent activity has ceased, there too history has ceased,” he noted. And where was the independent activity in Jewish history? Ever since Judea was crushed by the Roman Empire, the Jews had possessed none of the things that made for the usual history of a nation: territory, sovereignty, power, armies, kings. Instead, the noteworthy events in Jewish history were expulsions, such as the ones that drove the Jews out of England, in 1290, and Spain, in 1492, or massacres, such as the ones that cost thousands of Jewish lives in the Rhineland during the Crusades and in Ukraine in the seventeenth century.

To a generation of German scholars engaged in inventing what they called Wissenschaft des Judentums, “the science of Judaism,” it was crucial to overcome this despairing view. Above all, it was necessary to rebut the greatest historical thinker of the age, Hegel, who had elevated the writing of history into a branch of philosophy. Hegel saw the entirety of world history—or, at least, of European history, which for him was what counted—as a progressive revelation of the spirit. Each civilization had its contribution to make to the formation of humanity; when it had done so, it inevitably crumbled, making way for the next stage.

This scheme had trouble explaining one civilization in particular. In the early nineteenth century, there were no more Egyptian dynasties, Greek city-states, or Roman emperors; but there were still Jews, practicing the same religion that their ancestors had, millennia earlier. For Hegel, the historical function of Judaism ceased once its values had been universalized by Christianity: “The Temple of Zion is destroyed; the God-serving nation is scattered to the winds.” So what explained the Jewish refusal to fade into history?

The first modern historians of Judaism converged on the idea that it endured because its contribution to human civilization was of eternal relevance. This contribution was characterized by various writers as “the unlimited unity of the all,” “the universal spirit which is within us,” or “the God-idea.” What they shared was a conviction that Judaism was defined by ethical monotheism and Messianic hope. If Jews never stopped preaching these ideas, it was because the world always stood in need of them. In the words of Heinrich Graetz, the greatest of nineteenth-century Jewish historians, “Judaism is not a religion of the present but of the future,” which looks “forward to the ideal future age . . . when the knowledge of God and the reign of justice and contentment shall have united all men in the bonds of brotherhood.”

Such arguments spoke to and for a generation of European Jews who wanted to enter the mainstream of European society, not as supplicants but as the proud bearers of a valuable tradition. If Judaism was less a set of ancient customs and dogmas than a progressive, eternally renewed spirit, then it could take new forms suited to the modern world. It is no coincidence that the era of the “science of Judaism” also saw the birth of the Reform movement, which sought to reimagine Jewish worship. Since Jewishness was defined by an idea rather than by a nationality, for instance, it stood to reason that Jews would no longer need to pray for the restoration of their lost state in the land of Israel. It was unnecessary, a group of Reform rabbis announced in 1845, because “our newly gained status as citizens constitutes a partial fulfillment of our messianic hopes.” They meant as citizens of Germany, where it seemed that Jews could look forward to a future free of ancient prejudices.

As this bleak irony suggests, every generation of historians draws a picture of the Jewish past that is bound up with what they think about the Jewish future. And those visions of the future generally turn out to be wrong, because the past two centuries have seen continual, radical upheavals in Jewish life. After the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquests brought legal emancipation to Jews in much of Western Europe, for instance, many Jews began to think of their Jewishness as a private matter, an individual religious choice. They were not Jews who happened to live in France, say, the way other Jews in the past had lived in Spain or Persia, but “Frenchmen of the Mosaic faith.” But the persistence of anti-Semitism, as demonstrated in the Dreyfus Affair, convinced a later generation of Jews that this was a vain hope—that Jews were indeed a nation, and had better find a state of their own if they were to survive. This was the conclusion that turned Theodor Herzl, a highly assimilated Viennese journalist who barely observed Jewish customs, into the founder of modern Zionism.

The Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, the rise of American Jewry—each of these developments put its own stamp on the meaning of Jewishness, and of the Jewish past. How, then, does that past appear from the vantage point of our own moment? What does being a Jewish historian in the twenty-first century allow one to see, and what does it obscure? These are the questions raised by two major new surveys of the subject: “A History of Judaism” (Princeton), by Martin Goodman, and “The Story of the Jews: Volume Two: Belonging, 1492-1900” (Ecco), the newest installment of a trilogy by Simon Schama.

In certain obvious ways, the two books present very different approaches to the topic. Goodman, as his title declares, is interested in the history of Judaism—that is, of the religious ideas and practices that have defined Jewish life over the millennia. He discusses matters like the order of sacrifices in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, the doctrinal arguments between different Jewish sects in the Roman Empire, and the varieties of Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah. Schama, on the other hand, is less interested in Judaism than in Jews—individual human beings who have thrived and suffered. His subjects are by no means the people who did most to shape the Judaism of their time: we meet only a few theologians or rabbis in these pages. Rather, Schama is fascinated by figures like Dan Mendoza, a celebrity boxer in late-eighteenth-century England, and Uriah Levy, a Jewish lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, who purchased Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, in 1834. “The Story of the Jews” is a pageant of microhistories, told in an engaging and dramatic style, which some novelist or playwright ought to plunder for material, the way Shakespeare used Holinshed’s Chronicles.