Ben Halpern Brandeis University
History, as everyone knows, is to a people as memory is to an individual: the source and assurance of its identity. An identity is a principle that peoples, as well as persons, construct in order to give direction to their existence. It is a bridge they seek to build between the past that no longer exists and the inevitable future, between what has happened and is unalterable and what will happen and is uncertain. History, like memory, pins an identity to the certainty of its past; it is a sheet-anchor to windward that holds a people to its own course in the face of the uncertain future.
But, as everyone also knows, both memory and history are far from reliable, either as to what really happened in the unalterable past or as to the proper direction for the risky exploration of the future. For one thing, the certainty of the past is often a matter of belief and desire more than of well-warranted knowledge and when there are aspects of the past one may not wish, but cannot help knowing, they present severe problems for the project of rooting ones identity in a secure and desirable base. For this reason, memory and history, as constructions of the past, are often more clearly adjusted to what serves present intentions than to what may really have happened and cannot in fact be altered.
History, consequently, is as troublesome for peoples as memory is for persons. This is a fairly universal and widely-observed problem. The form in which it appears in the case of the Jews, as in any other particular case, is a reflection of the special relation between the people and its peculiar history.
A peoples identity, and the self-image in which it is grounded, is an exercise in self-definition as against the world that it constructs as its imagined environment. What is important in the imagined world varies according to the circumstances of each people. There is a major difference between the world as it appears to peoples whose lives are largely determined by their physical environment, or who are sparsely settled and relatively isolated from menacing strangers, and the world as it appears to peoples who manage rather than adjust to their physical environment, or find themselves in long-lasting relations of mutual tension with other peoples. In the first case, the collective identity may be defined primarily in terms of creation myths and similar cosmological genealogies; in the latter case, ideologically colored political history may serve as the symbolic framework of identification. In the first case, totem poles or the shrines of household gods and patron saints; in the second case, statues commemorating national heroes and monuments symbolizing famous victories assert the peoples identity.
