Abstract: This article puts two thinkers, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Walter Benjamin, into conversation for the first time to consider the affective structures at work in historical writing. In Zakhor (1982), Yerushalmi announces a "rupture" between Jewish collective memory and modern historiography. History, Yerushalmi declares, has superseded sacred text as the arbiter of Judaism and become "the faith of fallen Jews." Despite this melancholic diagnosis, Yerushalmi remains committed to historicism and to transmission: what Jews hold onto, nonetheless, even as the possibility of collective memory recedes into the past. A deep ambivalence underscores Yerushalmi's work: although he identifies historical writing as a violent rupture, he is reluctant to name its political implications and clings to the hope that it offers. I read Yerushalmi in light of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" (1940), which, in contrast, offers an uncompromising critique of historicism and an account of the emotions that structure it. I compare Benjamin's and Yerushalmi's orientations toward time (past and future) to distinguish the way that each thinker conceives of "hope," as well as to reveal what, for them, is at stake in historical temporality—namely, the possibility of redemption. I argue that Yerushalmi's historicism is the kind that Benjamin critiques: it affords the reader a sense of comfort in Zionist futurity. In sum, this inquiry seeks to demonstrate the affective qualities of historical writing by considering how history relates to both past and future as a mediator of concepts, feelings, and political involvement in the world.
Tsiona Lida (Sun,) studied this question.