Unlike the works of the “old masters” in the fine arts, often seen as the apotheosis of the creative spirit of their and all time, works of historiography have a much briefer shelf life. It is in the nature of scholarship to subject forebears to critical scrutiny; few works hold up beyond a generation or so. We are charged in this forum with reconsidering one of the “old masters” of Jewish historiography, Salo Wittmayer Baron, whose formidable mastery of languages and sources and his prolific output position him as one of the preeminent twentieth-century historians of the Jewish people. Has Baron's three-volume The Jewish Community, a masterpiece of historical synthesis first published in 1942,Footnote ¹ still retained its scholarly relevance? What is striking about this work is how much ahead of his time it was in certain respects, and how, in this work on a subject so central to understanding pre-modern Jewish life, Baron's construction was ahistorical in crucial dimensions. Baron's Jewish Community has fallen into disuse, so much so that in the Hebrew collection, Kehal Yisrael (2004), intended to portray specific Jewries and their communal lives, the latter two volumes, comprising dozens of essays and over 800 pages, written by leading Israeli scholars, contain only two references to Baron, in the notes.Footnote ² This blatant example of ignoring Baron's treasure trove is true not only of Israeli scholarship: most recent studies of Jewish communities make scarcely any use of it. Is the neglect deserved?

Baron wrote his work in response to the many ways the ground had shifted in the twentieth century, both in regard to the concept of community and the definition of “Jewish.”Footnote ³ Could American Jewry form a “community”? Was Tel Aviv considered a “Jewish community”? How should historians respond to Nazi insistence on the racial definition of Jewishness? Should the Jews of Europe be considered a national or a religious minority? Baron's most significant predecessor in considering the Jewish community was Simon Dubnow, the first to begin collecting records of Jewish communities as evidence for Jewish political life. Dubnow wrote a hugely influential ten volume World History of the Jewish People in which the communities played a central role as the embodiment of Jewish national existence in the diaspora.Footnote ⁴ Baron saw them as central as well, but his presentation was far more inclusive of the role of religion and far more sensitive to the context in which the communities were set.

In the introduction to his history of Jewish communal life, Baron cautioned against viewing manifestations of Jewish community either as the exclusive expression of a unique, immanent, authentic, quasi-religious imperative; or as the fulfillment of “external” mandates of cities, states, and empires. Neither view should be privileged as the preeminent factor in shaping the remarkable communal history of the Jews. Baron's work begins and ends with a caution: “Our systematic analysis of the Jewish community organization in the pre-emancipation era … should not evoke the impression that we are confronted here by a single, homogeneous unit.”Footnote ⁵ Baron emphasized diversity, difference, and the role of local conditions, and cautioned against a widespread assumption that Jews conducted their communal life in like fashion wherever they settled. This argument, which no serious historian would dispute today, was rather progressive for the period in which Baron wrote. He called for a careful balance of both common (there was no universal) and particular forces, and his history aimed to achieve that balance. “Between the two extremes of mystic inner urge and outward political pressure, one must find one's road, recognizing the importance of both factors in varying degrees throughout the history of the dispersion.”Footnote ⁶ His approach to Jewish history emphasized the importance of context and local texture, and in this he was a pioneer. His approach, in that regard, would become the dominant direction in which so much historical research about Jewish communities of the past is headed today. Baron's mastery of languages and materials in many relevant disciplines gives his work breathtaking scope. Baron was far more correct than he could have known about the deep integration of Jews into the legal and political cultures of their societies, just to note one aspect of his analysis. From the shari'a courts in early Islamic society to Habsburg imperial courts of the early modern period, Jews took their “internal” disputes and business to non Jewish courts far more than rabbinic literature would have allowed us to imagine.Footnote ⁷ In virtually every respect that counted—from religious ritual to social and political life, and daily economic transactions, Jews formed part of the fabric of the larger societies even as they preserved their religious distinctiveness.Footnote ⁸

Yet, despite his careful warnings about specific contexts and the importance of drawing distinctions, Baron ignored temporal boundaries throughout The Jewish Community. The assumption of a strong thread of vertical continuity in the Jewish will to political order, and the contours of that order, form the foundations of the work. This is a departure for Baron: his A Social and Religious History of the Jews is organized according to chronological-cultural units, many with romantic names such as “Dutch Jerusalem”; “Iberian Downgrade”; “French and English Ambiguities,” to take the section titles from volume XV. Although chronology does not tyrannize his opus, the historical development of institutions over time is a dominant motif organizing the entire work. This largely chronological organization provides a strong contrast with The Jewish Community, which is organized thematically and does not follow normative historical order as it pursues its topics.

Thus for example, a sentence about Jewish education spanned long centuries and many lands: “Talmudic sources being somewhat contradictory [reference to R. Joshua b. Gamla] it became common to send boys to school at the age of five or earlier …. Many parents, indeed entire communities, believed that bright children could attend school at the age of three and Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi, for example, sent his rather sickly son Jacob Emden to school at that age. As far back as 1250 ….”Footnote ⁹ The examples cited from the past, as broad ranging as they are, seem to be arranged in a deliberately a-chronological fashion. A similar lack of chronological discipline can be seen in Baron's treatment of synagogue and other religious institutions, which according to Baron, “resisted the inroads of Graeco-Roman syncretism and Arabian nationalism and would in their essence withstand the even severer storms of the emancipation era. This very permanence and unbroken continuity, however, carried with it the germs of petrifaction.”Footnote ¹⁰ Baron's approach may have helped shape that of Baer, whose view that Jews derived the corporate structure of their communities from the Greek politeuma in antiquity and changed very little in their essence over time.Footnote ¹¹ Even when not reaching back to distant antiquity, Baron made few chronological distinctions within the history of the kehillot, viewing them as integral until civil emancipation was granted. And in contrast to his Social and Religious History of the Jews he certainly treated here the medieval and early modern period as one continuous unit.

Baron was a scholar of such keen historical instinct that the absence of a place for development over time in his account of Jewish community and society is striking. Long before the Emancipation changed the status of the formal community irreversibly, there were other important disruptions, significant changes in the central subjects of his inquiry: communal organization, structure, framework, social welfare, legal status and judicial autonomy. Yet Baron's treatment in The Jewish Community is reminiscent of a different order of thinking, perhaps closer to that of the rabbinic world in which the generations remained in dialogue with one another without regard to chronology, ’ein mukdam u-me’uḥar. Perhaps it was his legal training, a field in which cases could be adduced across a broad chronological and cultural distance in the service of an argument. What Baron and other historians have failed to note is the fact that Jewish communities used Talmudic vocabulary does not demonstrate that there was historical continuity.

Recent research on Jewish communities has emphasized the shifting political understanding of the place of Jews within the many types of societies in which they lived, their own changing perceptions of their status, and their accommodations to these changes. There are several key turning points in which the old forms of governance and authority give way to new. The architects of European Jewish communities beginning in the late tenth century, in both Ashkenaz and Sepharad, routinely expressed their sense of standing at a threshold, a frontier, in that they faced unprecedented conditions and would need to construct entirely new communal structures and legal justifications to accommodate them.Footnote ¹² The shift of Jews away from Babylonia and the Mediterranean, and toward northern Europe mean that the old structures, notably the exilarchate/patriarchate and the gaonate could no longer serve their communal needs. Moreover, when states began to consolidate and centralize their power in the sixteenth century, hundreds of jurisdictions issued privileges to Jews, inviting them to settle under certain conditions, with a far greater state oversight and interest in internal Jewish affairs than had been seen in the medieval period. This too necessitated a rethinking of many institutions and assumptions that had prevailed among medieval Jews. The momentous redistribution of Jewish populations in the wake of the expulsions from Spain and the imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire and the shift to eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire resulted in a reconfiguration of many aspects of Jewish communal life. The Emancipation of Jews of Europe, in different times, locations, and at different paces, was an obvious and foundational rupture, but it was not the first.

Baron had of course been giving much thought to what constituted Jewish community particularly in its, and his, new environment, the United States. His subtitle for the work—“from antiquity through the American Revolution,” certainly reveals a somewhat teleological celebration of the American Jewish community. Despite the lack of any external mandate, Jews in the United States had a thriving religious and cultural life, with philanthropic, educational, cultural and religious institutions. They had achieved community with no external pressure. For Baron, community was the vessel that had preserved the Jews; it provided an ever changing, shape shifting medium by which Jewish life could continue to grow and adapt to different settings.

I note as a sorrowful coda, that some two decades after he completed The Jewish Community, Baron was called to testify at the Eichmann trial in 1961, to present an historical picture of Jewish civilization. Drawing directly from his work on Jewish community, Baron sought to impress upon the world that this crime was not simply that of the murder of countless souls. It was also the murder of the Jewish community in Europe, one that had persisted since antiquity. He spoke of the vitality, creativity, and refusal to despair that characterized Jewish life, even after eastern Europe already plunged into economic crisis. Discussing Jewish education in his report, he wrote that

The monumental loss of Jewish life and civilization was incalculable and overwhelming, because it was not only about individual lives, like those of Baron's immediate family, but about a unique life form, the Jewish community, a living organism in its own right.

To return to the original question, Baron's Jewish Community contains much material that scholars today will find fresh and useful, particularly as new evidence of profound acculturation of Jews to the structures of even the most overtly hostile majority societies continues to emerge. However, its approach to community as an entity that transcends historical time stands in contrast to much of Baron's other historical work and to contemporary scholarship with its emphasis on change over time.