Conflicted Disciples: Graetz Through the Eyes of Dubnow, Baron, and Scholem

Abstract

This essay analyses the twentieth century reception of the German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz. Specifically, it traces the ways in which three of Graetz’s most significant intellectual and professional heirs—Simon Dubnow, Salo Baron, and Gershom Scholem—utilized, judged, conceived of, and measured themselves against Graetz’s historiographical oeuvre. The figure of Graetz loomed large in the writings of all three historians, his scholarship and ideological positions constituting the point of departure from which they sought to diverge. This essay argues that Dubnow, Baron, and Scholem may aptly be described as “conflicted disciples” of Graetz. All three figures formulated their own identities as historians and thinkers upon their repudiation of Graetz and called for a comprehensive rearticulation of Jewish history based upon a historiographic framework they constructed over Graetz’s methodological grave. Despite this, all three may be understood—and indeed often understood themselves—as expanding, bolstering, and perfecting Graetz’s vision of producing a comprehensive national history that met both the scientific standards and the ideological needs of their own generation. Furthermore, each scholar’s process of intellectual maturation was marked by an increasingly complex and conflicted attitude towards Graetz, as they sought to simultaneously overthrow and fulfill his mission.