From biblical times onward, traditional Jewish historical consciousness was dominated by the assumption of divine control of the natural universe and human history, especially the history of the Jewish people. For Jews living subsequent to the defeat at the hands of the Romans in the year 70 and the purported onset of a third Jewish exile, this view of history translated into the conviction of Jewish sinfulness and consequent divinely imposed suffering. Jews were certain that prophetic predictions of divine punishment for failure to fulfill the demands of Israel's covenant with God were apparent in the painful circumstances of exile discernible subsequent to the destruction of the Second Temple and throughout the diverse settings in which post-70 Jews found themselves. To be sure, the same prophets who had predicted horrific punishment for Jewish shortcomings had also assured their followers of eventual reconciliation with God and divine redemption. Precisely when and how this promised redemption would take place was a mystery; that it would take place was—for Jews—a certainty.Footnote ¹

The Christian church, born within first-century Palestinian Jewry, absorbed fully the prophetic linkage of sin and punishment, along with the conviction that Jews were in exile, suffering divine punishment for their failures. According to Christian thinkers, the sin for which Jews were being punished was Jewish rejection of the divinely predicted Messiah. This sin was so monstrous that—in the Christian view—it resulted in abrogation of the promise of eventual redemption. The covenantal relationship with the Jews was sundered, and the Church succeeded the Jews as God's human partner. Though these Christian views were vigorously resisted by Jews, the Christian sense of Jews enduring divine punishment served to reinforce for Jews their own perceptions of unrelieved suffering and to highlight the importance of their conviction of eventual salvation.

Historical causation was radically reconceptualized with the advent of the Enlightenment, with the divinity increasingly removed from an active role in the dynamics of history. Post-Enlightenment students of the Jewish past—Jews and non-Jews alike—portrayed Jewish history as the saga of a human community, buffeted by the pressures endured by all human communities. However, while understanding of the mechanisms responsible for Jewish fate was altered, the perception of the Jewish past as a sequence of persecutions and suffering did not change.

An assault on this widely accepted imagery of the Jewish past as a succession of disasters began in the late 1920s from a rather unlikely source—a young Jewish scholar, born in 1895 in Tarnów in Galicia, and brought up in a moderately traditional home environment, which surely included inculcation of traditional perspectives on the Jewish past. In his late teenage years, Salo Baron, this young scholar, made his way to Vienna, where he completed three doctorates and a rabbinical degree. During his studies, he was fully exposed to the newer views of Jewish history, which remained mired in the sense of unending Jewish tragedy, at least until the era of Emancipation if not later.Footnote ²

In 1926, Baron accepted a temporary invitation to teach at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Having rapidly established himself as a productive scholar and an effective teacher, he decided to remain in New York. Not too long thereafter, Baron was invited to fill the newly created Miller Chair in Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions at Columbia University. This new position afforded him a unique opportunity—indeed a unique responsibility—to investigate the Jewish past from a dispassionate and comparative perspective. The move to Columbia certainly had a decisive impact on the crystallization of his innovative perspectives on the history of the Jews. But Baron—as we shall shortly see—was already on his way to new perspectives on the Jewish past, even prior to his move to Columbia.

The opening salvo in the Baron assault on the traditional and modern constructions of Jewish history came in 1928, with a brief but bold challenge to aspects of the thinking of his predecessors and contemporaries committed to the reconstruction of Jewish history in a modern mode. His essay “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” appeared in the fourteenth volume of the semi-popular Menorah Journal.Footnote ³ The short and highly polemical piece argued that contemporary readings of pre- and post-Emancipation Jewish history were badly skewed and were leading to seriously misguided Jewish communal policies. The essay ended with an especially memorable sentence: “Surely it is time to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in accord with historical truth.”Footnote ⁴

This essay, widely cited because of the felicitous closing sentence, has been considered the beginning of Baron's attack on the lachrymose construction of the Jewish past. But “Ghetto and Emancipation” by no means constituted a thorough attack on the lachrymose view of the overall Jewish past; rather, it was directed at revising the lachrymose perception of the late medieval and early modern centuries only. However, this brief and polemical essay established a number of key guidelines to the writing of Jewish history that formed the foundation for the later Baron oeuvre and that have not been sufficiently appreciated.

Baron's more thorough assault on what he came to call “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” emerged in the 1937 edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, Footnote ⁵ in which he established a new periodization of the Jewish past. This new periodization represented a further challenge to his predecessors and contemporaries who had rejected divine control of history, but had retained the traditional sequencing of the Jewish past with the onset of tragedy in the year 70, intense suffering thereafter, and then one or another form of redemption, through emancipation or re-establishment of Jewish self-rule. The 1937 edition of the Social and Religious History rejected this sequencing, and established a meaningful alternative, moving in the process beyond the teleological and programmatic thrusts that characterized both traditional and prior modern depictions of the Jewish past into a fundamentally descriptive mode of historical reconstruction.

Given the enormous impact of Baron's call to reject the lachrymose perspective on Jewish history, to alter the accepted periodization of the Jewish past, and to abandon the commonly espoused teleological and programmatic constructions of the Jewish past, the evolution of his views from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is significant. A renewed look at what Baron did and did not say in his 1928 essay is useful. Equally valuable is an examination of how Baron himself subsequently defined in 1937 the lachrymosity to be abandoned, the extent to which he complied with this call in his first great piece of historical writing, the new periodization he advanced, and his abandonment of the reigning teleological and programmatic perspectives on the Jewish past, present, and future.

* * * * *

For all the attention Baron's “Ghetto and Emancipation” has attracted—predominantly because of its closing sentence—the essay is rather slight. It was not intended by Baron as an essay on Jewish history and/or history writing, but rather as a polemical statement on Jewish political circumstances and policies, grounded in an appeal to the realities of the Jewish past. This rather terse piece shows none of the characteristics of the later Baron oeuvre, renowned for lengthy, somewhat ponderous, and carefully balanced writing and rich in extremely long and detailed footnotes. Nonetheless, the essay became immensely influential among later historians of the Jews, whose enterprise owed much to the stature and leadership of Salo Baron. Especially important was the memorable closing sentence, its critique of perspectives on the “Jewish Middle Ages” as steeped in lachrymosity, and parallel criticism of Jewish thinking about emancipation as far too optimistic. Extending Baron's 1928 call for abandoning lachrymosity well beyond its originally limited parameters, many subsequent historians of the Jews dedicated themselves to this effort.

In his introductory remarks to the polemical 1928 essay, Baron established his focus as comparative. For the sharp contrast between pre- and post-Emancipation Jewish life, he cited at some length the views of the then-dominant authority on Jewish history Heinrich Graetz, adding critique of other predecessors:

Identification of the prevailing consensus led immediately to the brash Baron challenge.

While this introductory statement articulates sharply the polemical objectives of the piece, intended to stimulate a rethinking of pre- and post-Revolutionary Jewish life, it also contains a curious and insufficiently noted ambiguity. On the one hand, these rich sentences seem to presage a dual focus—revising the prevailing negative portrait of the Jewish Middle Ages that preceded Emancipation and at the same time reconsidering the rosy projection of the post-Emancipation Jewish experience. However, the final sentence in this citation highlights a changing grasp of the medieval Jewish experience only. If that experience was not as dire as widely assumed, then the gains attendant upon its replacement could not be as great as normally projected. Baron seems to point to a genuinely comparative study on the one hand, but to a focus on the premodern Jewish experience on the other.

The contents of Baron's famous essay are heavily oriented toward revision of the prevailing understanding of the Jewish Middle Ages. Baron divided his essay, short as it was, into three unequal segments: the widely accepted and intensely negative imagery of Jewish legal and theoretical circumstances during the Middle Ages and its shortcomings;Footnote ⁸ the equally widely accepted and equally intensely negative perceptions of the realities of Jewish life during this period and their inaccuracies;Footnote ⁹ and limited but significant reflections on some of the threatening aspects of post-Emancipation Jewish life.Footnote ¹⁰ The actual content of the essay thus focuses heavily on the medieval Jewish experience and what Baron saw as modern misrepresentation of this experience. The dramatic final sentence, already noted, exhorts historians “to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe,” without an explicit call for similar re-evaluation of the modern Jewish experience. To be sure, Baron clearly believed that reconsidering the pre-Emancipation realities would necessarily entail new understandings of post-Emancipation realities as well, but he also called, in his very brief comments on the post-Emancipation era, for separate and independent reflection on the new contours of Jewish life and the dangers they pose.

In a stimulating study, my colleague David Engel has subjected the 1928 Baron essay to careful consideration, raising the question of the range of perceptions of Jewish experience that Baron considered steeped in lachrymosity and in need of revision.Footnote ¹¹ According to Engel, in 1928 the young Salo Baron did not issue an overarching challenge to prevailing perceptions of the lengthy course of Jewish history. In fact, for Baron, study of the post-Emancipation history of the Jews requires more lachrymosity rather than less, greater attentiveness to the negatives and not less. Thus, the 1928 Baron call for a “break with the lachrymose theory” was not intended to encourage overall reconsideration of the entire course of Jewish history; rather, it was meant to initiate a narrower rethinking of the medieval Jewish experience that closely preceded Emancipation.

In his essay, Engel identified the so-called “Neo-Baronianism” as the tendency among some recent Jewish historians to see in the 1928 call an injunction to change emphases in the study of Jewish history altogether, both premodern and modern Jewish history. But, as David Engel's essay argues, Baron in his call for abandoning lachrymosity was not addressing the broad trajectory of Jewish history; instead he was urging a rethinking of the widely shared nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paradigm that portrayed the immediate pre-Revolutionary Jewish experience in Europe as unrelievedly dark and dismal and the post-Revolutionary Jewish experience as entirely salutary. While extrapolation of the Baron call to include a more far-reaching re-evaluation of the Jewish past is not necessarily objectionable and while Baron himself undertook in 1937 precisely such a re-evaluation, it does represent for Engel a distorting imposition on Baron's “Ghetto and Emancipation.”

The title of the Engel article—“Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History”—indicates that the author was interested in more than simply the original meaning of the Baron challenge and its subsequent evolution into neo-Baronianism. As a historian of the modern Jewish experience, Engel was also concerned with Baron's treatment of the post-Emancipation period and Baron's perceptions of the negative elements discernible in this period. The bulk of Engel's essay is devoted to Baron's treatment of the disadvantages and dangers associated with the changes from medieval to postmedieval Jewish circumstances.Footnote ¹²

In his analysis, Engel argued—once again convincingly—for a strong set of convictions on the part of the still-young Salo Baron as to beneficial and baneful modern political circumstances for Jews. In Engel's view, Baron developed rather early in life a set of perspectives on Jewish political circumstances that very much influenced his subsequent history writing.Footnote ¹³ Thus, in his 1928 essay Salo Baron emerged as the opposite of a detached historian. According to Engel, Baron was deeply concerned with modern Jewish political circumstances and the dangers inherent in some of these circumstances and built much of his analysis of post-Emancipation Jewish life on these convictions. In a symbiotic way, his political views impacted his history writing, and his historical findings influenced his ongoing political thinking.Footnote ¹⁴

As David Engel argued, in 1928 Baron did not issue a call for rethinking the lachrymose approach to all of Jewish history. In fact, for polemical purposes, he conducted his analysis of the premodern Jewish experience in terms of three centuries only—the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, which he designated as the “period of their deepest decline [the deepest decline in the conditions of the Jews].” Thus the question is raised as to how far back in time Baron's 1928 call for battle against the lachrymose theory of pre-Emancipation Jewish history was to be carried.

In his polemical 1928 essay, Baron focused on what he called the Jewish Middle Ages. In the only footnote in the popularly oriented essay, he clarified the meaning assigned to the notion of the Jewish Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁵ Using the terms “Middle Ages” and “Dark Ages” interchangeably, Baron began by noting, in accord with an observation by Leopold Zunz, that the Jewish Middle Ages were not at all identical with the general European Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁶ While he did not define the parameters of the European Middle/Dark Ages, he did make important observations on the Jewish Middle/Dark Ages, noting that, “until the Crusades a majority of Jews lived under Islamic rule under relatively good circumstances.” Thus, the Jewish Middle/Dark Ages as a period of intense disabilities and suffering did not, according to Baron, begin before the twelfth century.

Baron further suggested that during this period of Islamic domination, which can be dated from the seventh through the twelfth centuries, “even Western Jewry [which seems to mean the Jews in Christian Europe] was far superior to its Christian neighbors in culture and status.” This leads to the following somewhat unclear statement: “Only in the last centuries of the European Middle Ages did the Jewish Middle Ages set in.” This suggests that during the closing centuries of the European Middle Ages, which are not defined but obviously postdate the twelfth century, Jewish life declined, with the decline reaching its nadir in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, usually viewed in European history as postmedieval. Thus, Baron proposed that European Jewish life began to decline sometime in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries and reached its depths in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Baron's utilization of these latter centuries in his discussion of pre- and post-Emancipation Jewish life is thus largely a polemical device, through which he intended to show that medieval Jewish life at its very worst was not as harsh as commonly assumed.

Baron proceeded in the first segment of his analysis to identify the key elements in negative Jewish legal and theoretical circumstances during this purportedly most dismal period and to temper the portrayal of these negatives. The initial item in the prevailing depiction of medieval Jewish life that Baron adduced is the claim that during this period “Jews did not have ‘equal rights.’”Footnote ¹⁷ Baron's rejoinder to this claim reveals immediately one of the major methodological underpinnings of his eventual oeuvre—the need for a thorough grasp of the majority culture of all periods of the Jewish past. To the claim that Jews lacked equal rights, Baron responded brusquely: “The simple fact is that there was no such thing then as ‘equal rights.’”Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, Jewish lack of equal rights can hardly be advanced as an index of desperate Jewish circumstances.

To be sure, more was called for than the simple observation that there was no such thing as equal rights, and Baron proceeded further. He addressed the basic structure of the medieval and early modern European state and noted its essentially corporate organizational pattern. The state was composed not of discrete individuals, but of clearly defined corporations, including prominently the nobility, the clergy, the urban populace, and the peasant masses. Thus, the crucial question in judging Jewish legal and theoretical circumstances is not the equal standing of Jews as individuals, but rather the comparative standing of the Jewish corporation. Baron argued that this comparative standing—even in the most dismal period of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries—was hardly as desperate as generally depicted.

With respect to the nobility and clergy, Baron noted that while Jews had fewer rights than nobles and clergymen, they also bore fewer responsibilities. Medieval Jews were, Baron asserted vigorously, incomparably better off than the peasant masses. The element in the majority population that was closest to the Jews in status was the urban populace. While Jewish rights relative to this group declined during the second half of the Middle Ages and into the early modern centuries, Jews were by no means devoid of rights. Thus, the notion of lack of equality must—according to Baron—be radically reformulated. As a group, Jews were hardly unique with respect to their rights. In fact, as a group they enjoyed far greater rights than the vast majority of the inhabitants of medieval and early modern Europe.

Moving on from this general perspective, Baron then addressed a number of specific features of medieval Jewish life often introduced as evidence of negative legal and theoretical circumstances. The first of these is the technical Jewish status of serfdom. Baron acknowledged this reality, but argued immediately that Jewish serfdom was not the same as the general status of serfdom that afflicted the bulk of the population of medieval Europe. While he acknowledged that this Jewish status—immeasurably better than that of the Christian serfs—could sometimes be problematic, he insisted that the same status could often be quite useful. “But in general it was a profitable theory [the theory of Jewish serfdom under the German Emperor], for the Emperor often did provide the protection for which Jewry paid, as when he used his considerable power on their behalf in several of the German free cities.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, Baron further contended that Jewish serfdom involved important privileges, which included “full internal authority,” a boon that was extremely important to Baron and that he found lacking in post-Revolutionary Europe, to the detriment of post-Emancipation Jews. Thus for Baron, Jewish serfdom did not bespeak massive Jewish disabilities and suffering.

Baron moved next to the reality of ghettoization, yet another index in the prevailing view of the pain of pre-Emancipation Jewish life. Baron noted that the European ghetto was initially introduced at the request of Jews, suggesting that it was viewed positively by medieval Jews themselves.Footnote ²⁰ Only with the eventual decline of Jewish circumstances was it imposed upon Jews as a legal requirement.

For Baron, the ghetto represented the implementation of the Jewish status as a corporation. Medieval towns were regularly divided into areas of corporate settlement, and the Jews were no exception to this general pattern. Jewish neighborhoods bore a number of salutary effects for the Jews of premodern Europe. In his closing comments on the ghetto, Baron once again noted the advantages conferred on Jews by their medieval circumstances—advantages lost through emancipation. “The Jew, indeed, had in effect a kind of territory and State of his own throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. The advantages of this autonomy, lost through the Emancipation, were certainly considerable; they must have contributed in large part toward the preservation of Jewry as a distinct nationality.”Footnote ²¹

Baron concluded his discussion of the purported legal and theoretical disabilities of medieval Jewry with the Inquisition. Like serfdom and the ghetto, the Inquisition figured heavily in the negative depictions of pre-Revolutionary Jewish life. It was depicted as a ubiquitous danger, a frightful intrusion into Jewish affairs, and a constant reminder of Jewish vulnerability. Here, unlike in his discussion of serfdom and ghetto, Baron simply denied the significance of the phenomenon.Footnote ²² On the one hand, the Inquisition was by no means ubiquitous in medieval Europe—it was instituted in only a few European states. More important, the Inquisition exercised almost no jurisdiction over professing Jews. Its specific task, as a Christian ecclesiastical court, was identification and punishment of heresy. In the course of its efforts, it ensnared many former Jews, individuals who had converted from Judaism to Christianity and were accused of backsliding to their ancestral faith. Such reversion to Judaism put these individuals in the category of Christian heretics and exposed them to the procedures and cruelties of the Inquisition.

Baron's discussion of the legal and theoretical circumstances of medieval European Jewry constituted a sharp revision of prevailing views of Jewish life in pre-Revolutionary Europe. Baron examined emotional symbols like inequality, serfdom, ghetto, and Inquisition dispassionately and stripped them of much of their significance. Noteworthy in light of his subsequent writings, Baron insisted on moving from the theoretical to the practical. “Legally and in theory, we have seen, the status of the Jew was by means an inferior one. But did actual events—persecutions, riots, pogroms, monetary extortions—reduce their theoretical legal privileges to fictions in practice? Even here the traditional answers of Jewish historians do not square with the facts.”Footnote ²³ This insistence on the practical and the real became one of the hallmarks of Baron's historical writings.

The point at which Baron chose to begin his examination of the practicalities and realities of Jewish life is characteristic. He commenced with demographic statistics. The question he posed involved the rate of growth or decline of Europe's Jewish population during the purportedly bleak sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Not only did Baron claim rapid growth of the Jewish population throughout this allegedly dismal period, he noted that Jewish population growth far outstripped the population growth of the non-Jewish majority during these centuries. Indeed, the Jewish population, Baron contended, grew at four times the rate of general population growth from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. While anti-Jewish violence was widely documented for this period and was usually highlighted by historians of the Jews, the impact of this violence could hardly have been devastating, given the overall Jewish population growth. For Baron, this was a decisive indication that the lachrymose view of this period was misguided and should be tempered.

The second major index of the realities of Jewish circumstances lay in the area of economics. The picture that Baron painted was one of Jewish economic achievement, indeed achievement far beyond the median level of Christian economic success. “Paradoxical as it may seem,” Baron noted,

Little wonder that Baron's polemical 1928 essay made such a striking impression. It leveled a potent challenge to the findings of the reigning authorities on pre- and post-Revolutionary Jewish life in Europe, to the thinking of the bulk of the contemporary Jewish community about both these periods, and to political positions that flowed from these findings and this thinking. In the process, the essay also established a number of methodological guidelines for the burgeoning field of Jewish history. These included: the need for comprehension of the broad contours and organizational patterns of the majority societies in which Jews found themselves; constant comparison of the Jewish minority to elements in the non-Jewish majority; attention to the quantitative realities of population and economics; and resolute resistance to the emotional impact of compelling slogans and dramatic events.

Finally, the 1928 essay reflects a certain cast of mind in the young Salo Baron—a recoiling from simplistic absolutes and an embrace of complexity and nuance. For Baron, comparisons were acceptable, indeed useful. The situation of Jews in medieval Christian Europe was better than that of the serfs and inferior to that of the nobility; the circumstances of these Jews was inferior to that of their brethren in the earlier Islamic world. What was not useful or acceptable was what Baron identified as the “complete contrast between the black of the Jewish Middle Ages and the white of the post-Emancipation period.” Human life—in his mind—did not admit of such stark contrasts; human life was too complex for such oversimplifications. Viewed retrospectively, this essay signaled the onset of a new view of the Jewish past, although this was hardly its raison d’être or its central thrust.

* * * * *

At about the same time that the 1928 essay appeared, Columbia University accepted an endowment from Linda Miller for the creation of a chair in Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions in memory of her late husband. The search for the appropriate first occupant of the chair was complex and difficult, but it eventuated in an invitation to Salo Baron to fill the new chair and his move to Columbia in 1930.Footnote ²⁵ Baron's move from the Jewish Institute of Religion to the Department of History at Columbia University radically altered the course of his academic career and arguably the future of Jewish studies on American university campuses.

Shortly after his arrival at Columbia, in 1931, the newly appointed Miller Professor gave ten Schermerhorn Lectures under the title “Jewish Society and Religion in Their Historical Interrelation.” The title of these lectures reflects nicely the shift from the parochial setting of the Jewish Institute of Religion to the non-denominational Columbia setting. In these lectures, Baron addressed the important methodological issue of the relationship between societies and their patterns of religious expression through a case study of the Jews. In this way, he sought to establish the academic and nonparochial character of the Jewish history that he would teach in the Columbia setting. Baron subsequently utilized these lectures as the foundation for his three-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews, published by Columbia University Press in 1937. The published volumes absorbed the Schermerhorn Lectures’ methodological focus in its combination of the social and the religious. However, these volumes were presented unabashedly as moving beyond the methodological to a substantive history of the Jews.

In 1937, Salo Baron—ensconced in the Columbia University Department of History—was still a rather young forty-two, and the range, erudition, and innovativeness of his three-volume history are truly remarkable. The three volumes of the 1937 Social and Religious History actually consist of two volumes of text and a third volume of extensive notes, bibliography, and index. The two volumes of text, divided into twelve chapters, take the reader through the entirety of Jewish history, from the origins of the Israelites down through the twentieth century. The notes are voluminous—vintage Baron. Yet, despite the relative compactness of the two-volume treatment of the lengthy trajectory of Jewish history, Baron was able to present clearly his narrative sense of the Jewish past, thus allowing a wide range of readers to follow his structuring of the history of the Jews, its major developments, and its central themes. In the process, Baron launched a full-scale assault on the dominant lachrymose perspective on Jewish history, challenged the reigning periodization of Jewish history, and established a neutral and descriptive, rather than teleological and programmatic, framework for treating the Jewish past.

Throughout his 1928 essay, Baron focused on the period immediately prior to Emancipation and on the geographic area in which Emancipation eventually took place, that is to say late medieval and early modern Christian Europe. We have noted his brief effort at specifying the temporal limits of the Jewish Middle Ages, which were roughly the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries. However, the prevailing lachrymose view of Jewish history was hardly limited to the Jewish Middle Ages as defined by Baron. The time frame for most lachrymose presentations of Jewish history—both traditional and modern—was far more inclusive. For traditional and modern Jewish thinkers, most of Jewish history was a sequence of suffering that began with Roman suppression of the Jewish rebellion in the year 70 and would end with one or another form of redemption. While in the 1928 essay Baron's polemical purposes led him to limit his assault on lachrymosity to what he called the Jewish Middle Ages, he altered his definition of the lachrymose to cover a far broader span of Jewish history in his 1937 Social and Religious History.

Baron explicitly addressed lachrymosity in chapter 9 of his 1937 history. (The placement is significant.) He discussed it in a brief but important section entitled “Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History.”Footnote ²⁶ This terminology constitutes a departure from that of 1928, and the changes are significant. “Theory” of the 1928 essay was replaced with “conception,” which projects a stronger sense of the views that Baron found problematic and was determined to combat. “Pre-Revolutionary woes” was replaced with “Jewish history,” reflecting Baron's sense that his predecessors—both premodern and modern—created a view of Jewish history that encompassed far more extensive portions of the Jewish past than merely the immediate pre-Emancipation period. As Baron's stature rose and as his call for abandonment of lachrymosity exerted more authority, the revised 1937 formulation came to dominate.

In his comments on what he now labeled the lachrymose conception of Jewish history, Baron made a number of telling points beyond his brief exhortation in the 1928 essay. He immediately defined this conception more fully. He identified the lachrymose conception of Jewish history as “viewing the destinies of the Jews in the Diaspora as a sheer succession of miseries and persecutions,”Footnote ²⁷ indicating explicitly his awareness of the broad temporal extent of the lachrymose conception. If for the polemical purposes of the 1928 essay, Baron focused only on the lachrymose approach to pre-Revolutionary Jewish experience in Europe, in the broader context of the Social and Religious History, he identified the comprehensive lachrymose approach that portrayed all of post-70 Jewish life as steeped in suffering.

Equally important, Baron in 1937 overtly associated lachymosity with the exilic experience of the Jews. He defined the lachrymose conception as “viewing the destinies of the Jews in the Diaspora as a sheer succession of miseries and persecutions” (emphasis added). Baron challenged this conception, suggesting that both pre-70 and post-70 Jewry in the Land of Israel experienced severe persecutions, including for example the bloody suppression of the second revolt against Rome and decrees against key Jewish practices in the wake of the second uprising and its suppression. Moreover, Baron notes that exilic experience did not begin in the year 70 and did not always involve Jewish suffering. In the wake of Babylonian suppression of an earlier Jewish uprising, for example, an exilic community was created in Mesopotamia that exhibited a low level of suffering and a high level of religious creativity. The focus on exilic suffering among lachrymose historians of the Jewish past was not the result of immersion in the available data; like much else in the lachrymose conception, it was deeply rooted in a theological construct, even among thinkers and historians who had abandoned traditional religious beliefs in divine control of history.

Baron's 1937 clarifications concerning the lachrymose conception are highly significant and identify aspects of Jewish historiography that he insisted required revision. But how did Baron himself carry out this mandate in the 1937 Social and Religious History? In his preface, Baron indicated that his twelve chapters fell into four broad periods: “After an introductory chapter, Chapters II-IV deal with the history of ancient Israel down to the Restoration; Chapters V-VII treat the period between Alexander and Mohammed; Chapters VIII-X discuss the medieval period from the rise of Islam to the seventeenth century; while Chapters XI, XII, and the Epilogue are devoted to modern Jewish history.”Footnote ²⁸

This four-part periodization is noteworthy from a number of perspectives. First of all, it reflects Baron's insistence on linking Jewish history to broader developments. Periodization of the Jewish past in the 1937 Social and Religious History is organized largely around developments from without rather than from within—the restoration under the Persians; Alexander; Muhammad; the rise of Islam; and the seventeenth century, that is the changes in European society during the seventeenth century. As already indicated in his 1928 essay, Baron was adamant about projecting the history of the Jews against the broader canvas of majority history. This was in and of itself a major—albeit insufficiently appreciated—advance in the conceptualization of Jewish history.

This highly innovative 1937 periodization also represents significant implementation of the call to abandon the focus on the lachrymose in Jewish history and indicates Baron's awareness of the lachrymose view of traditional Jewish historical thinking, of Enlightenment thinkers like Heinrich Graetz, and of nationalist and Zionist historians. For all these perspectives—the traditional, the Enlightenment, the nationalist, and the Zionist, the disaster of the year 70 marked the beginning of a new, lengthy, and painful period of Jewish history; the disaster of 70 played no such role in the periodization established by Salo Baron.

The defeat at the hands of the Romans in the year 70, which dominated prior Jewish historical thinking, both traditional and modern, was simply absorbed by Baron within the lengthy time frame that stretches from Alexander to the rise of Islam. The war of 66–70, identified by Baron as the Great War, is accorded less than four pages in chapter 6 of the 1937 Social and Religious History. In contrast, the same chapter has five pages on “The Rise of Christianity” and six pages on the “Pauline Schism.”Footnote ²⁹ Baron's attack on lachrymosity now extended well back in time, and he was determined in his own history to overcome this tendency, to a significant extent by diminishing the importance of the defeat of the year 70 at the hands of the Romans, the razing of the Second Temple, and the destruction of the city of Jerusalem.

The negation of lachrymosity also characterizes the medieval section of the 1937 Social and Religious History, which begins with a chapter on Jewish life in the Islamic world entitled “The Infidel.” While this might be considered an evocation of negative features of Jewish life under Islam, in fact both Jews and Christians were identified as infidels. Moreover, these two sets of infidels enjoyed considerable protections in the Islamic world. The positive perspectives of this chapter are established at the outset. Baron depicted the closing centuries of late antiquity in both the Roman Empire and the Mesopotamian world as a period of decline, which entailed diminution of Jewish fortunes as well (once again Baron insisted on the impact of the larger environment on the Jewish minority). Baron portrayed the rise of Islam, the Islamic conquests, and the reconstruction of life throughout the vast Islamic empire as rejuvenation, and it is no surprise that he depicted the Jews of the Islamic realm as participating in and enjoying the benefits of this remarkable rejuvenation. Thus, the first half of the Middle Ages, as generally defined in European history, is portrayed in positive terms.Footnote ³⁰

The period between the seventh and twelfth centuries in the vast Islamic world is covered in the 1937 Social and Religious History in one chapter; the period between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries in European Christendom is accorded two full chapters. This arrangement is partially a reflection of the growing corpus of sources available for the later period; at the same time, it also reflects the greater interest of Baron and his readers in European Jewry. Indeed, four of the twelve chapters in the 1937 Social and Religious History, which constitute one-third of this overall survey of three thousand years of Jewish history, are concentrated on the most recent seven centuries and the European Jewish experience.

The chapters on medieval and early modern European Jewry, entitled “The Wanderer” and “Within the Ghetto Walls,” reflect central themes discussed already in the 1928 essay, in which Baron showed great sensitivity to the distinction between external forces and their impact on medieval and early modern Jewish life and the internal structures of Jewish life. In Baron's view in 1928, the opportunities afforded by the corporate nature of medieval and early modern society and by the topography of Jewish life, with its separate neighborhoods, created the backdrop for a high level of Jewish independence and creativity, which the Jews exploited fully. Chapter 9 of the Social and Religious History, devoted to the external forces, balances a range of positives and negatives; chapter 10, focused on the internal aspects of Jewish life, is much more consistently positive.

The title of chapter 9—“The Wanderer”—is noteworthy, for it breaks the prior pattern of chapter titles. The prior eight chapter titles were essentially neutral, bearing no overtones of Jewish suffering or degradation; “The Wanderer” points unmistakably to negative developments in Jewish circumstances.Footnote ³¹ Always in search of balance, Baron began the chapter by connecting Jewish fortunes in Europe to the positive Jewish circumstances in the medieval Islamic world, indicating that Jewish achievements in the East under medieval Islam were carried over into the West as well, especially on the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, where the Muslims controlled most of the peninsula from the early eighth century on, Jews prospered, and Jewish creativity flourished.Footnote ³²

After this brief exposition of the positive aspects of Jewish experience, the tone of the chapter changes markedly. The section headings that follow this brief opening are: “Economic Decline”; “Elimination from Agriculture”; “Money Trade”; “Few Periods of Affluence”; “New Legal Status”; “Jewish ‘Serfdom’”; “The Wandering Jew”; “Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History”; “Religious and Economic Intolerance”; and “Latent Nationalism.” The negativity of these section headings is patent. Something clearly took place in Christian Europe that diminished the circumstances of the Jews considerably. To be sure, Baron had labored to ameliorate this sense in his polemical 1928 essay. Once again, the broader thrust of the 1937 Social and Religious History dispelled the polemical argumentation and allowed Baron fuller latitude in depicting the historical realities. Baron opened his portrayal of Jewish life in medieval and early modern Europe by pointing in a positive direction to Jewish circumstances in Spain; he closed it in similarly positive fashion with sections entitled “Close Judeo-Christian Relations” and “The Church and the Jews.” Despite the opening and closing positives, the decline of Jewish circumstances in medieval Europe was not disguised by Baron in his 1937 history.

Between 1928 and 1937, the elements in declining Jewish fortunes in western Christendom identified by Baron shifted somewhat. In 1928, Baron had highlighted purportedly negative developments in medieval European Jewish life as inequality, serfdom, ghettoization, and Inquisition, and had moderated or denied each. In addition, when proceeding from theoretical and legal circumstances to the realities of Jewish life, he had pointed to violence and monetary extortion. While acknowledging these negatives, Baron had argued that the growth in Jewish population meant that these harmful developments were hardly overwhelming.

In his 1937 treatment of medieval and early modern European Jewish life, Baron continued to identify serfdom as a modest disability and continued to insist on the benefits of ghettoization, devoting an entire chapter to the rich internal life of the medieval European Jews in their ghettos. Interestingly, anti-Jewish violence is not highlighted, but two new negative developments make an appearance—economic decline and expulsions. In the 1937 Social and Religious History, Baron began his depiction of Jewish life in medieval Europe with what he portrayed as the economic decline suffered by these Jews. In fact, he made economic decline the basis for the emergence of new and increasingly negative Jewish status. “Economic developments helped to shape the political destinies of the people. The more limited their function in society, the more restricted were their numbers and their rights.”Footnote ³³

The second new theme in 1937 is Jewish wandering, the importance of which is reflected in the title of chapter 9. The opening sentences of the section entitled “The ‘Wandering Jew’” indicate the weight that Baron placed on this development.

The lachrymose conception of Jewish history, according to Baron's newer definition, involved the projection of post-70 diaspora Jewish life as an undifferentiated sequence of disasters. Baron's approach in 1937 represented clear rejection of this approach. The previous citation reflects full awareness and presentation of the disabilities of Jewish life in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. These disabilities, as portrayed by Baron, are viewed comparatively, balanced by sensitivity to the disabilities suffered by others in society and by portrayal of the positive and creative aspects of Jewish life. To indicate that the negative aspects of Jewish life intensified in medieval Europe by no means signals re-embrace of the lachrymose conception.

Baron's awareness and presentation of the difficulties of Jewish life in medieval western Christendom led him to a striking conclusion. He argued that these difficulties were in fact responsible for the creation of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. “The lachrymose conception of Jewish history, viewing the destinies of the Jews in the Diaspora as a sheer succession of miseries and persecutions, a conception from which Jewish historiography has not been able to free itself to this day, took hold of the imagination of the people.”Footnote ³⁵

Baron thus asserted that the lachrymose conception was not a legacy of the classical periods of the Jewish past, during which the guiding principles of Jewish life were adumbrated. Rather, it was formulated during the Jewish Middle Ages, ostensibly as a result of some of the debilitating characteristics of that period. Baron pointed to two important sixteenth-century Jewish authors—Samuel Usque and Joseph ha-Kohen—as examples of Jewish thinkers who embraced the lachrymose perspective.Footnote ³⁶ This clarification of the genesis of lachrymosity has important implications. On the one hand, the lachrymose conception by no means constitutes essential Jewish doctrine, which means that abandoning it does no damage to essential Jewish views.Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, the modern historians, whose emphasis on the lachrymose Baron challenged, did not create the paradigm themselves. They simply absorbed and extended a medieval Jewish perception. Thus, abandoning this medieval Jewish perception offers no real offense. The medieval lachrymose conception, like so much else bequeathed from the Middle Ages, could and should be left behind.

In this brief but important section on the lachrymose conception, Baron made one more telling point: He claimed that the lachrymose conception of Jewish history was absorbed by medieval Christians as well. Baron's formulation is striking: “The more frequently Jews were seen abandoning their homes, bundles on their backs, for unknown destinations, the more deeply was the conception stamped on the mind of the masses that these ‘aliens’ by race and religion were merely temporary sojourners.”Footnote ³⁸ This Christian absorption of the lachrymose conception of Jewish history reinforces the significance of “The Wandering Jew” as the core feature of Jewish life in medieval and early modern Christian Europe and thus the title Baron chose for chapter 9 of the 1937 Social and Religious History. Footnote ³⁹

The assault on the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” constituted a major thrust of the 1937 Social and Religious History, but it challenged other and equally important staples of traditional and prior modern Jewish history writing. Baron in 1937 sought to leave behind the prevailing teleological and programmatic judgments on Jewish experience. The teleological judgments were grounded in the traditional tripartite division of Jewish history. Jews, like so many other peoples, divided their history into three qualitatively distinct segments—a distinguished early period, a diminished middle period, and a resplendent final period.Footnote ⁴⁰

For traditional Jews, this meant a period of greatness in the Land of Israel in antiquity, the painful exile initiated in the year 70, and the divine redemption that had been promised and would certainly eventuate. With the onset of the Enlightenment and one or another form of Jewish acceptance of modern perspectives on historical process, the same tripartite scheme was nonetheless maintained. In many ways, the Zionist thinkers and historians remained closest to the traditional lines. For them, there was a period of dignified independent Jewish living and flourishing Jewish creativity in the Land of Israel prior to the year 70, the deformities of exile from 70 onward, and the future reconstruction of independence and creativity in the Land of Israel. For Enlightenment thinkers and historians and for Diaspora nationalists, the same two initial periods remained firmly in place. The third and eventually brilliant phase of Jewish history would take place outside the Land of Israel and would involve for the former group full acceptance of Jews into the emergent European states and for the latter group the establishment of Jewish political and cultural independence somewhere in the Diaspora. In all four cases, there was simplistic presentation of three diverse phases of Jewish history, two highly positive and one unrelievedly negative.

Salo Baron led the way in replacing these simplistic presentations of the assumed phases of the Jewish past with a more rigorously and consistently descriptive portrayal of the varied experiences of the Jews. To an extent, this was an offshoot of his assault on lachrymosity. At the same time, however, it was a separate innovation, one that reflects Baron's independence of mind and the influence of the Columbia environment and its non-parochial character. For Baron in 1937 and subsequently, the diverse periods of the Jewish past were to be portrayed in nuanced fashion, without attributing overall well-being or suffering to them. Discerning movement from well-being to suffering and then eventually from suffering back to well-being is not—in Baron's view—an element of the historian's craft. It is appropriate for the historian to discern improvement or deterioration in Jewish life, as Baron himself did on occasion, associating, for example, the onset of Islamic rule with improvement of Jewish circumstances and identifying Jewish life in medieval western Christendom as a period of decline. These do not, however, constitute the simplistic assessments of well-being and suffering imposed by traditional Jewish thinking, emancipationist Jewish thinking, and nationalist/Zionist Jewish thinking.

In the process of dissociating himself from these simplistic and teleological assessments of phases of the Jewish past in traditional and modern Jewish historical thinking, Baron also eschewed the programmatic stances associated with such broad assessments of Jewish fortunes. For the traditionalists, their analysis of the post-70 suffering of Jews leads to a prescriptive stance for the improvement of Jewish circumstances, which is acceptance and fulfillment of the obligations of the covenant. For the emancipationists, the trajectory of Jewish suffering and well-being requires fullest possible immersion in the life of Western societies in order to bring historic Jewish suffering to an end. For the nationalists/Zionists, Jewish well-being will derive from realization of the dream of Jewish political independence. Baron's nuanced descriptive approach to the complexities of the Jewish past precludes such prescriptive stances for improving Jewish life.

Perhaps at very best, readers of the Baron oeuvre might have come away with a sense of the extreme complexity of the Jewish experience, the need to see the experience of Jewish groupings against the backdrop of the specific environment in which these Jews found themselves, and the necessity of grasping as fully as possible the challenges and opportunities of these specific environments. Baron himself, in his 1928 essay, had advanced a number of suggestions for the improvement of modern Jewish circumstances. These suggestions were grounded in specific aspects of modern Jewish life; they were not overarching programmatic suggestions based on a global and all-encompassing theory of the trajectory of Jewish history.

* * * * *

The objectives of the 1928 essay and the 1937 Social and Religious History diverged markedly. The 1928 essay was a brief and focused polemical piece, involving a limited time frame and clearly defined objectives; the 1937 Social and Religious History was Baron's first magisterial contribution to the construction of Jewish history. The 1928 essay became famous largely for the felicitous phrase with which it ended. Lachrymosity and its discontents became central to the next phase of modern Jewish historiography. To be sure, in the slight 1928 essay Baron did not engage fully the lachrymose tendency in Jewish historical thinking. At the same time, the 1928 essay revealed en passant many of the key assumptions of Baron's historical methodology, which he himself used as the building blocks of his later work, which he carefully conveyed to his students, and which those who did not have the privilege of studying directly with him have adopted as well. It also reflected his aversion to simplistic assessments of the Jewish past and insistence on acknowledging, confronting, and analyzing the daunting complexities of Jewish experience.

Baron's call in 1928 for abandoning limited and carefully defined lachrymosity was transformed considerably in 1937:

• • The definition of the lachrymose view to be attacked was clarified and expanded greatly. It involved the totality of post-70 Jewish history.

• • The venerable and widely accepted tripartite periodization of Jewish history—pre-70; post-70; and redemption of one kind or another—was replaced by a four-part periodization that reflected major developments on the world scene and suggested no dramatic culmination.

• • The year 70 was eliminated altogether as a decisive date in Jewish history.

• • The negative features of Jewish life in medieval and early modern western Christendom were treated more fully, as the polemical context of the 1928 essay was left behind. To be sure, the insistence on balance resulted in presentation of both the negatives and positives of Jewish experience in medieval and early modern Christian Europe.

• • The genesis of the lachrymose conception was placed in medieval Christian Europe, suggesting that abandonment of this perspective does not constitute a break with essential Jewish theological views.

• • Indeed, Christian lachrymose perspectives on Jewish history were portrayed by Baron as originating in medieval western Christendom as well.

• • Baron's insistence on a nuanced approach toward the complexities of Jewish experience were fully manifested. He eschewed simplistic assessments and overarching programmatic solutions to Jewish problems.

Baron's approach to Jewish history came with a price. His insistence on the complexities of Jewish experience made for difficult and tedious reading. Given the choice between reading Graetz or his successors, with vivid casts of heroes and villains and clear-cut appraisals of and solutions for the problems of Jewish life, or Baron, with his taxing analysis of complex issues, most readers would and do opt for the former. The second and far larger edition of Baron's Social and Religious History of the Jews is acknowledged as the definitive recent overview of Jewish history. It is on the shelves of every serious student of the Jewish past. It is, however, rarely read by lay readers and even by professional historians.

Yet, the enduring value of the Baron oeuvre does not lie in the number of its readers. Rather, its enduring value lies in its impact on the study of Jewish history post-1928/1937. In effect, Baron laid to rest the commitment to writing the overall history of the Jewish people from a theological/ideological and programmatic perspective. In its stead, Baron inaugurated more modest, but more productive efforts to reconstruct interesting and revealing phases and aspects of the Jewish past. The genuine and salutary result of Baron's innovative approach is the flourishing contemporary field of Jewish history. Baron's disciples and his disciples’ disciples have taken to heart his call for embrace of the complexities of the Jewish past, have adopted a new and Baron-inspired style of writing of Jewish history, and have fashioned rich new understandings of the Jewish experience.