The three papers by Elisheva Carlebach, David Sorkin, and Adam Teller refreshingly do not merely invoke the name of Salo Baron as a sacred authority but actually reflect critically upon significant pieces of his scholarly corpus. As Adam Teller has pointed out correctly, academic historians of the Jews have sought for decades to align themselves with what they have taken to be the fundamental thrust of Baron's approach to his subject and have warned their students against too great a deviation from it. In the discourse of the field, to claim Baron's mantel is altogether bon ton, while “lachrymose” has long served as a term of severe reproach. Yet, many more people appear to have claimed to be Baron's acolytes in abjuring lachrymosity than have actually read a significant portion of Baron's corpus, much less seriously engaged with what he had to say in those writings. The three contributors are, happily, not among them: in their papers they all have entered into a genuine conversation with certain key propositions in Baron's work, with a mind to refining his insights and building upon them. Baron has served them not as an icon but as an interlocutor in the continuing discussion of significant problems to which he devoted much thought and study. That is a salutary development. Baron's contribution to the study of Jewish history was hardly exhausted by his articulation of a particular conceptual approach to it. As anyone who takes the multiple volumes of A Social and Religious History of the Jews or The Jewish Community in hand becomes aware immediately, Baron was a prodigious researcher whose painstaking mining (and in some cases even discovery) of a vast array of source materials laid the empirical foundations for future scholarship on a broad range of Jewish historical subjects. On that level, as well, reading his work returns significant rewards.

But there is yet another way to think about Baron―as an object of historical study in his own right. Two of the three papers reveal a trace of that approach. David Sorkin has noted Baron's Galician origins and later professional training in Vienna, and Elisheva Carlebach has hinted in passing at a possible contextual-biographical explanation for a curious lacuna that she has observed in one of Baron's major studies. Still, for the most part all three papers appear to concern themselves more with a particular piece or pieces of Baron's writings than with Baron himself. On one level, of course, that is precisely what they should do. If Baron is to be taken off his pedestal and treated as a colleague among colleagues working together to solve historical problems (an attitude that does him far more honor than does remembering him for a single phrase), then Baron's ideas themselves must be placed front and center, with his possible reasons for adducing them relegated to the background. But on another level, dehistoricizing one's interlocutors entirely can lead to misconstrual of their argument. Engaging any argument productively requires apprehending the argument's content, which is in the final analysis a function of the words in which the argument is expressed. And since words have no meaning of their own beyond the social contexts in which they are employed, relegating those contexts to the margins is liable to generate misunderstanding.

When reading Baron, the possibilities for loss in a decontextualized reading are great. After all, he wrote over a colossal span of time. His first published piece appeared in 1912, when he was 17 years old,Footnote ¹ his last in 1986, when he was 91.Footnote ² That 74-year interval was one of extraordinarily rapid change and turbulence throughout the world, the Jewish world included. In the political sphere alone Baron witnessed, inter alia, the Balkan Wars; the First World War and the attendant collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires; the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration; the Paris Peace Conference and the reconfiguration of east central Europe on the basis of national states; the establishment of the League of Nations and its system of minorities protection; the great depression; the rise of Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, along with Japanese power in the Far East; the Second World War and the destruction of European Jewry; the creation of the State of Israel and the emergence of American Jewry as a central actor on the world Jewish stage; the Cold War; the formation of the European Community; the civil rights movement in the United States; the Six-Day War; the revolutionary fervor of 1968 in its west European, east European, and American variants; Israel's political upheaval of 1977; the Iranian revolution of 1979; and the beginnings of perestroika (which led, a few months before his death on 25 November 1989, to the fall of the communist regimes in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany and the breaching of the Berlin Wall). He confronted similarly sweeping changes in the economic, social, and cultural realms. Moreover, Baron produced his work in multiple places, cultural environments, and languages. He started out writing in Hebrew as a resident of Habsburg West Galicia. His first two books and several major research articles were published in German in independent Austria. The first edition of the Social and Religious History appeared in English in the United States, but much of it was written in Europe; the introduction, which outlined what he would later call “the socio-religious approach to history,” appears in fact to have been initially composed and published in Polish.Footnote ³ Following the Second World War Baron was no longer able to spend significant time in the places in Europe that interested him most, with the result that he became increasingly attached to the American environment. Consequently, in engaging Baron's work one has to wonder to what degree the Baron of 1920 can really be read in the same way as the Baron of 1940, 1960, or 1980.

Additionally, Baron published in a wide range of venues—not only in Jewish scholarly journals and Festschriften but also in “general” academic fora like the Journal of Modern History, the Political Science Quarterly, and Diogenes, as well as in more popular Jewish public affairs platforms like the Menorah Journal and Midstream.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, much of Baron's output, especially from the late 1920s through the late 1950s, was directed at a popular, mostly Jewish audience. Consequently, in attempting to determine what Baron may have meant by a particular word, phrase, or narrative strategy, it seems important to ascertain with whom he was trying to communicate in a given text.

These considerations may well be relevant to some of the issues raised in the three papers here. For example, Elisheva Carlebach has wondered about Baron's seeming lack of concern for periodization and chronology in The Jewish Community. In this regard, it appears worth noting that the work was published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1942, five years after the appearance of the first incarnation of the Social and Religious History. A review of Baron's bibliography shows that during the late 1930s and early 1940s the bulk of his publications dealt with current affairs. In fact, many of them originated largely as lectures given to American Jewish communal organizations.Footnote ⁵ Evidently, then, the subject of the Jewish community in his own time and place of residence appears to have been very much on his mind for several years. Hence there is certainly good reason to believe, as does Carlebach, that The Jewish Community was aimed first of all at Baron's American Jewish contemporaries; it was meant to show them possibilities for carrying on a millennial legacy in what many at the time thought to be the unique circumstances of Jews in the United States.

Pressing farther in the same direction, however, makes the work's lack of chronological sensitivity intelligible. In the inaugural issue of Jewish Social Studies, the journal he founded and launched in 1939 (while composing The Jewish Community),Footnote ⁶ Baron termed history an “applied social science which is of practical significance to statesmen, men of letters, and the intelligent public at large.”Footnote ⁷ The search for such extra-academic applications is evident in The Jewish Community. Already in the introduction Baron stated that the aim of the work was to demonstrate the “intimate linkage [of the European community of the Middle Ages] to Jewish community life ... today.”Footnote ⁸ It should thus not be surprising that the book was replete with examples of diachronic similarity in a range of activities with which Jewish communities had concerned themselves throughout the ages—governance, leadership patterns, social and religious functions, enforcement of communal discipline, and external relations. Baron was evidently less interested in tracing the historical evolution of those activities than he was in drawing upon his vast erudition to offer his contemporaries who were responsible for maintaining and strengthening their own Jewish communities useful precedents or models for their own time. As a result, the primary value of the book for professional historians undoubtedly lies more in the specific incidents it recounts and sources it lists than in the interpretive use that Baron made of those incidents and sources. It is on that close-to-the ground level that engagement with the work is likely to bear the greatest fruit today.

It is precisely on that level of detail that David Sorkin has engaged Baron's writings on emancipation. Sorkin has criticized Baron's use of the term “equality” to represent the legal situation of the Jews of Amsterdam and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because to his mind such usage allegedly flattens a situation that was actually quite variable. Yet in the texts that Sorkin has cited, Baron actually used the word “equality” in a number of discrete senses. In some instances it conveyed the absence of legal disabilities, but in others it conveyed rather the absence of special privileges, such as communal self-government. Sometimes, particularly in Baron's earlier writings, its main referent was the German concept of Gleichberechtigung, whereas in 1960 and in 1963 its referents demonstrably included the concept as employed in the American civil rights movement, which meant something altogether different. For example, the article in Diogenes to which David Sorkin has referred contains the following sentence: “In regard to Jewish emancipation, one need merely reflect on the difference in the position of Jews and that of their fellow citizens of the Negro race in the United States, the same basic provisions of equality notwithstanding.”Footnote ⁹ Accordingly, it makes sense to interrogate Baron's statement in the same article that the Jews of Amsterdam enjoyed “equality minus a few disabilities” and to investigate precisely what he may have intended in the context of 1960s America, when he offered the characterization. Most likely he did not have in mind a situation in which, as Sorkin has put it, “ ‘equality’ presupposed that there was no other charter granting specific privileges.”

Much the same caveat may well apply to Adam Teller's reaction to Baron's injunction against “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” If the injunction is taken to mean only a call to deemphasize the role of violence in Jewish history and to highlight what Baron claimed were the more ordinary features of day-to-day Jewish life, then Teller's comments are apt and to the point. But in fact that is only one of the senses in which Baron talked about lachrymosity. His use of the term between 1928 and the 1970s was actually quite elastic. Space limitations prevent a survey of all the different usages, but two—both comparative—seem particularly relevant to Adam Teller's paper.Footnote ¹⁰ The first involved what Baron thought to be the mistaken notion that loss of life by violence before the emancipation was significantly greater than after emancipation. The second reflected Baron's view that although Jews in the Middle Ages may have been fearful for their physical safety pretty much all the time, they were no different in this regard from the overwhelming majority of the people among whom they lived.Footnote ¹¹ It is not clear from Adam Teller's remarks whether he believes that Baron was right or wrong about these matters. But if he was right, then perhaps the neo-Baronians are more source of the problem Teller has identified than was Baron himself.