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Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds. Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives . Leiden: Brill, 2007. xxii, 658 pp.

The editors open this ambitious volume with the observation, by now commonplace, that modernity has seen the rise of a new way of understanding Jewish history. While earlier biblical and rabbinic approaches to the past understood events of the past and present in archetypal terms, Wissenschaft des Judentums and Haskalah scholars brought a historical-critical lens to Jewish texts and sought to transform the history of the Jews both into a respected contributor to the academy as well as a tool for political change. While this development transformed Jewish life, the editors write, the development of Jewish studies has since stalled. Not only does Jewish studies lack the sort of methodological critique that has characterized the broader academy since the 1970s, but also the continuing dominance of history has relegated other approaches within the field of Jewish studies to a distinctly secondary status. With this collection, which grew out of a 2003 conference in Berlin, Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese aim to jump-start a process of reflection on and development of the current state of Jewish studies. As they see it, this process must begin with a greater awareness of the development of modern Jewish historiography and its methodologies, and it must include a deeper appreciation of historiography’s influence on Judaism and Jewish identity; they also hope to bring the insights of poststructuralism and cultural studies that have so affected the broader study of the humanities into the study of Jewish history, Jewish text, and Judaism. The book’s twenty-one essays approach this task from a variety of angles, which the editors have grouped into five separate sections. The book’s first section addresses the development of modern Jewish historiography. Most of the essays in this section describe sweeping trends in Jewish historiography (e.g., David Myers’s “Glaube and Geschichte: AVexed Relationship in GermanJewish Culture”), but Jonathan Hess’s “Moses Mendelssohn and the Polemics of History” offers an incisive analysis of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem that complicates Book Reviews