Magda Teter, who grew up in Communist Poland, now holds the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. Among her books are Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism and Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, which won a National Jewish Book Award. Her thoughts on national identity are taken from her interview with the New York Review of Books.
Scholars have always been shaped by the present, despite claims to objectivity and the “purely scholarly” or even “scientific” approach. . . .
Working in an era of nation-building, many of these [nineteenth century] historians sought to delineate national and ethnic identity, and they looked for materials from the past that affirmed and perpetuated contemporary divides while also ignoring where boundaries between identities in the premodern period were blurred or even nonexistent.
In my research, I found that Jews were an integral part of premodern society. But modern historians told us that Jews were a people apart who needed to be reformed in order to “integrate.” . . .
German, Polish, and other national histories thus tended to exclude groups that were not part of a given ethnonational conception of the nation. They invented a new “we” and cast others outside.
For example, in 1991 the president of Poland, Lech Wałęsa, addressed the Israeli Knesset with a conciliatory speech seeking a rapprochement. He said, “Jews from all over the world would arrive in Poland. They found in our country hospitality and an atmosphere of tolerance. They found in our country a sense of security and the conditions to develop their great culture.”
For Wałęsa, Jews were outsiders, even after over a thousand years of living together in the land, they were not part of the “we.” This is a product of the way the story of Poland has been told. . . .
This early period of modern historiography shapes the way we think about history and social relations even today. Jews, by then, had been racialized as “Oriental Asiatics,” and thus had no place in the national, or even European, story. Their history was confined to “Jewish history.”
But the archives tell a different story. . . . Some fifteen years ago my colleague Debra Kaplan and I coauthored the article “Out of the (Historiographical) Ghetto,” in which we urged scholars not to relegate Jews and their archival documents to “Jewish” history, but to see them as integral parts of a shared past.
This is also true for other marginalized groups or minorities. As in the case of Jews in Europe or Black Americans here, their social, cultural, and political influence has been much greater than one might surmise just from their numbers or their social position.
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