What stock produced so many Jews? The next chapter will address this question. For now, it should be noted that a nationalist history—or, strictly speaking, a prenationalist one, since the platform in this case did not include an unambiguous call for political sovereignty—does not tolerate lacunae or perverse aberrations. Graetz sought to mend the unbearable gash that he claimed Jost, Zunz, Geiger and others had caused by their “blindness,” and that prevented them from seeing the ancient kingdom as a legitimate chapter in Jewish history—thereby condemning the Jews to continue seeing themselves as members of a mere religious civilization rather than as an eternal people or tribe (Volksstamm).
Graetz’s sharp criticism doesn’t appear in the early part of this work but toward its end, in the volume about the modern era, which he wrote several years after Jost’s death in 1860. When Graetz began publishing his immense oeuvre in 1853, he too, like Basnage and Jost, began the Jewish narrative after the biblical period, and the first volume covered the time of the Mishnah and Talmud, after the fall of the Temple. Shortly afterward, he returned to the period of the Hasmonean kingdom, but only twenty years later—that is, after the rise of the Second Reich and the unification of Germany by Bismarck’s Prussia, with nationalism triumphantly increasing throughout Central and Southern Europe—did Graetz’s protonationalist position achieve its final, mature form.19 Only after he had summed up the history of the Jews in his time, and concluded his book with the mid-nineteenth-century present, in a defiant and bitter tone, did Graetz retreat chronologically in order to reconstruct the birth of the “chosen moral people.” It was no accident that what was presented as the first national-historical epic ever written about the Jews should culminate with the biblical era.
For there to be a national consciousness, a modern collective identity, both mythology and teleology are required. The foundation myth was, of course, the textual cosmos of the Old Testament, whose narrative, historical component became a vibrant mythos in the latter half of the nineteenth century, despite the philological criticisms aimed at it.20 For Graetz, the teleology was nurtured by a vague and not yet wholly nationalist assumption that the eternal Jewish people were destined to bring salvation to the world.
The centuries-old Jewish communities never thought of the Old Testament as an independent work that could be read without the interpretation and mediation of the “oral Torah” (the Mishnah and Talmud). It had become, mainly among the Jews of Eastern Europe, a marginal book that could be understood only through the Halakhah (religious law) and of course its authorized commentators. The Mishnah and Talmud were the Jewish texts in regular use; passages from the Torah (the Pentateuch) were introduced, without any narrative continuity, in the form of a weekly section read aloud in the synagogues. The Old Testament as a whole remained the leading work for the Karaites in the distant past and for Protestants in modern times. For most Jews through the centuries, the Bible was holy scripture and thus not really accessible to the mind, just as the Holy Land was barely present in the religious imagination as an actual place on earth.
Mostly products of rabbinical schools, educated Jews who were feeling the effects of the secular age and whose metaphysical faith was beginning to show a few cracks longed for another source to reinforce their uncertain, crumbling identity. The religion of history struck them as an appropriate substitute for religious faith, but for those who, sensibly, could not embrace the national mythologies arising before their eyes—mythologies unfortunately bound up with a pagan or Christian past—the only option was to invent and adhere to a parallel national mythology. This was assisted by the fact that the literary source for this mythology, namely the Old Testament, remained an object of adoration even for confirmed haters of contemporary Jews. And since their putative ancient kingdom in its own homeland presented the strongest evidence that Jews were a people or a nation—not merely a religious community that lived in the shadow of other, hegemonic religions—the awkward crawl toward the Book of Books turned into a determined march in the imagining of a Jewish people.
Like other national movements in nineteenth-century Europe that were searching for a golden age in an invented heroic past (classical Greece, the Roman Republic, the Teutonic or Gallic tribes) so as to show they were not newly emerged entities but had existed since time immemorial, the early buds of Jewish nationalism turned to the mythological kingdom of David, whose radiance and power had been stored across the centuries in the batteries of religious belief.
By the 1870s—after Darwin and The origin of Species—it was not possible to begin a serious history with the story of Creation. Graetz’s work, therefore, unlike Josephus’s ancient history, opened with the “settlement of Israel in the land and the start of their becoming a people.” The early miracles were omitted to make the work more scientific. Reducing the tales of the patriarchs and the Exodus from Egypt to brief summaries was, oddly, supposed to make the work more nationalistic. Graetz describes Abraham the Hebrew succinctly, and Moses in a couple of pages. To him it was mother earth, the ancient national territory—rather than migration, wandering, and the Torah—that bred nations. The land of Canaan, with its “marvelous” flora and fauna and distinctive climate, produced the exceptional character of the Jewish nation, which in infancy took its first bold, precocious steps in that setting. The nature of a people is determined in the very beginning, and thereafter will never change:
And if when this nation was still in its infancy, the spiritual seeds were already burgeoning in its spirit, and its heart felt, though dimly, that it was destined to do great deeds, which would distinguish it from the other peoples and make it superior, and if its teachers and mentors instructed it till that dim feeling grew into a mighty faith—then it was not possible that such a nation in such a setting would not develop special qualities that would never be expunged from its heart.21
Having made this statement, Graetz begins to follow the biblical story closely, highlighting in fine literary language the heroic deeds, the military prowess, the sovereignty of the kingdom, and above all the moral vigor of the “childhood of the Jewish nation.” While he voices some cautious reservations about the later books of the Old Testament, he presents the story following the conquest of Canaan as a solid block of unquestionable truth, a position he upheld to his dying day. To him, “the Children of Israel” who cross the river and conquer the land of Canaan, which had been willed to their forefathers, were the descendants of a single primeval clan.
Graetz strives to provide rational explanations for the miracles, but he also demotes them from central narrative to addenda. The prophecies he leaves intact, however, though it was human action that made them decisive. Thus the actions of the heroic judges and the triumph of young David over Goliath, for example, are related in some detail, and the rise of the redheaded young man to power and the consolidation of his kingdom fill many pages. Although David was quite a sinner, God and Graetz forgive the bold king, who became a paragon in Judaism “on account of his great deeds,” which were always done for the people. The kingdom of Solomon also receives a whole chapter, because it was “a vast and mighty realm that could rival the greatest kingdoms on earth.” Graetz estimates its population as some four million; its division into two kingdoms marked the beginning of its decline. The sinful kingdom of Israel caused its own destruction, and eventually the same fate overtook the last kings of Judah.
The story of the sad fate of the children of Israel is bound up with the religious concept of sin, but greater blame is placed on the daughters of Israel: “It is a striking fact that Israelitish women, the appointed priestesses of chastity and morality, displayed a special inclination for the immoral worship of Baal and Astarte.”22 But fortunately, the ancient children of Israel also had prophets, who struggled with all their might to guide the people to a high, sublime morality, a unique ethos known by no other people.
Graetz remains faithful to the central narratives and is always full of awe for the Old Testament; when he runs into contradictions in biblical ideology, he sometimes presents the different approaches without trying to reconcile them. For example, parallel with the isolationist policy of Ezra, leader of the returnees from Babylonian
