Rachel Greenblatt's gracefully written, carefully researched, and cogently argued monograph on Jewish communal memory in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Prague transforms the way we think about Jewish historical writing in early modern Central Europe. Until now, scholars of Jewish historiography have focused almost exclusively on David Gans' Zemah David (The Sprout of David), a two-part Hebrew chronicle—combining Jewish history and world history—that was printed in Prague in 1592. For historians such as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, this chronicle is noteworthy for its exceptionality. As one of the only contemporary works of Jewish historical writing to emerge out of a non-Sephardic milieu, Zemah David confirmed Yerushalmi's argument that the Spanish Expulsion served as the primary stimulus for the flowering of Jewish historiography in the sixteenth century. Greenblatt, however, shifts the focus away from traditional “historiography,” broadening the definition of historical writing to include Yiddish historical songs, familial rescue tales, memorial books, special synagogue liturgies, gravestone inscriptions, and other sources that were not intended to record Prague's communal memory, but did just that. By doing so, she introduces the reader to this rich and highly variegated corpus, showing the ways in which Jewish memory was shaped and transmitted in a single locale.

Rather than inquiring about the emergence of a general “historical consciousness,” To Tell Their Children explores a much more original topic—namely the formation and transmission of a “historically based local consciousness” among the Jews of Prague (199). As Greenblatt shows, Prague's Jews preserved familial and local memories by integrating them into the larger sweep of Jewish history and into the hallowed spaces and sacred rhythms of Jewish Prague. For example, the memory of a 1389 massacre has been perpetuated, thanks in part to liturgical poems that were composed in its aftermath and then recited annually in Prague's synagogues. The details of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller's imprisonment in 1629 for alleged anti-imperial and anti-Christian writings have been preserved thanks to a scroll (megillah) he wrote narrating the details of his arrest and his eventual release. In order to commemorate his rescue, Heller also established an annual “familial Purim,” which—like its biblical antecedent—involved a day of fasting and a day of celebration (for his family and his descendants). As Greenblatt argues, such family rituals, so tightly interwoven into the Jewish liturgical year, ensured the survival of historical memories that would have otherwise disappeared into oblivion.

Greenblatt does close readings of a wide range of genres, shedding important light not only on historical calamities, but also on social hierarchies and gender roles in Prague's Jewish Town. She shows how inscriptions on gravestones, on ritual objects, and in memorial books helped shape and perpetuate the memories of loved ones, and how autobiographical introductions to manuscripts and printed books helped place family legacies in a public context. Baer and Beila Perlhefter's heart-wrenching story is preserved in Beila's introduction to Sefer be'er sheva, a Yiddish ethical treatise that the couple published in memory of their seven dead children. As Greenblatt shows, Beila was one of many women in Prague's “republic of Jewish letters” (185) at the turn of the eighteenth century, a development that went hand in hand with the market-driven growth in Yiddish printing. Women were also among the “bringers to press” of cheaply printed popular works like Ayn sheyn mayse (A Fine Tale), which traces the origins of Prague's Jewish community back to a mythical Jew who came to the emperor's aid “before Jews lived in Prague” (136). Ayn Sheyn mayse is not a work of history, but it does show how Prague's Jews made historical claims to affirm their deep sense of belonging.

The Jews of early modern Prague did not write history in a Rankean sense, but as Greenblatt convincingly argues in her lucid and original book, Prague's Jewish men and women recorded local events with posterity in mind, in an effort to perpetuate the memories of their loved ones and to commemorate their values and virtues. These historical writings took many forms, and Greenblatt has deftly employed them to reconstruct the social, religious, and psychological world of Prague Jewry and to explore the literary and liturgical channels through which cultural creativity and communal memory are transmitted. This work is a case study of a single locale, but the conclusions will certainly inform our understanding of communal memory in Frankfurt, Kraków, and other important Jewish centers in early modern Central Europe.