Unknown Flemish artist, Triumph of Fortitude, ca. 1535 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

In explaining how his practice of writing history operates, historian Carlo Ginzburg turns to architect Mies van der Rohe’s adage: “Less is more.”^[1] He explains his method using the metaphor of the dilation of a camera lens: “By knowing less, by narrowing the scope of our inquiry, we hope to understand more.”^[2] The statement deserves consideration in the practice of history as defined within the overbearing German Judeo-Christian^[3] tradition that continues to influence the study of Biblical Israel. In the following passages, I will detail some etymological and conceptual bases for the critique of both the large scale operation of historical writing and its converse, Biblical minimalism. In its place, I will set the ground for arguing for the need for dilation rather than restriction (of religious texts among others), in the scope of historical studies and the admission of material evidence.

The Hebrew language does not have a specific term for history. The concept is described with the words dābar (pl. dəbārîm) “thing/word/event”, Po’al and ma’ǎśæh “work”, tôledôt “genders/generations”, dærækh “path/change”, miqræh “fate”, qædæm “prehistoric times/prehistoric times”, ‘et “time/point in time”, ‘ôlām “most distant time/eternity” or zikkārôn “memory”.^[4] It is worth recalling that the word Geschichte (Old High German gishciht, Middle High German schiht) initially referred only to the event, but since the 15th century also came to mean the story and a report about what transpired. The etymology allows us a peek into how history was originally practiced in miniature. From the 17th to 19th centuries the term gained philosophical traction. The term Histoire, which is common in English and French, comes from the Greek and Latin historia, which means a message conveyed by eyewitnesses (“witnessed”), but also inquiry, the act of seeking knowledge, as well as the knowledge that results from inquiry.^[5]

In the absence of an encompassing word in the Hebrew language, a historical study of Israel will have to get by with the borrowed theoretical underpinnings of historical philosophy. Quite ironically, the linguistic lacuna proved to be productive and there is a wealth of ideas where we can draw an understanding of what historical study of Israel or elsewhere entails. While such developments structure the scholarly discipline, it also contaminates it with an originary foreignness, complicated further by the Land of Israel’s significant place in world history. Every aspect of Israel’s history seems unstable; from geographical borders to the authenticity of material evidence. It is this kind of burden that causes an inverse reaction, that resulted in Biblical minimalism, a trend in scholarship that disavows the Bible as a reliable source for what happened in ancient Israel.

Like Ginzburg, Walter Benjamin similarly turns to art, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which is aptly collected in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, to explain the melancholic framework of historical writing. For Benjamin, such writing reckons with the past in a manner reflected from the perspective of the present and driven by an involuntary flight into the future.^[6] The subject of this reflection and construction is the human being who thinks about the origin and goal of his existence and sees it detached from natural conditions and processes and shaped by unique and irreversible actions. The communion of the causes discovered in past events, which Benjamin portrayed as a “chain,” suggests a strong bind but also implies a sense of captivity.^[7] The strength and longevity of the causal relationships ascribed to these events in words, pictures or writing are projected as an individual or collective understanding of history.

Benedict Anderson writes in Imagined Communities that the sense of intersubjectivity produced by modern print culture (synchronic novelty) could arise historically only when substantial groups of people are in a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people; “never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same trajectory.”^[8] In this case, the people of today’s Israel not only imagine themselves to be descendants of an ancient people but living among them as the inheritors of an originary Hebrew culture. The essential function of remembering past events and the associated construction of history thus expands into the establishment and preservation of an essential and unchanging Israeli identity. History is tasked to legitimize such an identity insofar as it is intended to justify the existence of a Hebrew nation that sees itself as older than it actually is. Models for current actions are sought for in a paradigmatic normative past. This aspect of historical thinking and writing leads to two challenges. First, the elusive framing of events as either a rise and fall of an era or the search for a golden age and the revival of that age (Make Israel Great Again?). The second can be characterized as philosophical because it concerns the status of historical knowledge and its relationship to power, and the nature of its acts of interpretation. These challenges are woven into the conditions and possibilities of history as a discipline, which is then applied to the study of a culture that thinks inherently of its own past in terms of linguistic and conceptual fragments. In other words, we should think of Biblical Israel in the frame of dābar or zikkārôn. Such a history is able to capture more within its pinhole by dilating conceptual fragments to capture ideas that may speak more universally.

Keith Whitelam implicitly spots the incongruity of the historical study of Biblical Israel by pointing to the close relationship between academic research and political narratives, asserting that ancient Israel is an imagined geopolitical entity that has origins in imperialistic European representations and projections.^[9] This means that in order to understand what ancient Israel is, we must inhabit the ambitions of the European settler colonial. Flowing from fertile fabrications, the study and “recovery” of ancient Israel through archaeological and biblical research reinforced political claims to Palestine. In this sense, the historian is not merely a scavenger who looks for remains, but is also a ‘scientist’ who uses technical models and concepts tasked to put to rest definite questions.

Whitelam’s rejection of the primary place of Biblical scholarship has probably more to do with archaeology becoming a tool of Christian supersessionism and proselytization. “The discourse of biblical studies cloaks the cultural and political factors which shape it by divorcing the production of knowledge from the context in which it is produced.”^[10] Whitelam suggests that the solution lies not in rejecting the Bible as material evidence but in recognizing its consequential political role. For example, the case of Palestine being the homeland of the Bible and also the Orient par excellence in Edward Said’s seminal study which troubles the view that the Bible is the defining document of the West. The Orient is regarded as the “Mother as much as the Other” by Orientalists in the nineteenth century, which saw the spectacular rise of Biblical philology.^[11]

According to Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, however, Edward Said’s exploration of the origins of Orientalism might inadvertently obscure this Mothering relationship and strengthen the essentialistic divide between categories of “Orient” and “Occident,” which he ultimately aimed to deconstruct. By tracing a continuous history of Orientalism back to ancient figures like Homer, Said may appear to give credibility to the linear idea that East and West are inherently distinct. This could undermine his goal of challenging such essentialist distinctions, often rooted in notions of racial superiority and inferiority.^[12]

This precarious debate around Orientalism shows us how attitudes of the West towards the East fluctuate between attraction and disgust. The Orient is portrayed as foreign, static, without history, backwards and wild; but at the same time, it also symbolizes the fantastic, mysterious, romantic and erotic. A document, a piece of land, or an entire nation can be caught up in the shifting perceptions of this great divide.

For Michel de Certeau, there is always an unavoidable paradox in the historiographical operation: history makes the disappeared visible and “these ghosts find welcome in writing on the condition of remaining silent forever”.^[13] The men of the past remain there as if absent, it is on this condition that they become “the object of the poem”,^[14] that is to say of the story or the historical novel. Lacking a presence and a voice, all these disappeared are perceived as the other; the fantasy of historiography. Saidiya Hartmann’s critical fabulation aligns with De Certeau’s notion of poetic writing as an integral part of the discipline. To give existence to the past as writing, both de Certeau and Hartmann affirm that the historian resorts to art and poetic writing, without which history has the capacity neither to represent the past nor to deal with the principle of otherness.^[15] Due to the complexity of these propositions, especially those presented in The Writing of History, I propose a reflection on the way in which de Certeau and Hartmann understand the anchors of history and how the historian uses poetry, a technique of dilating the historical document, to give existence to the other in the historiographical narrative.^[16]

The idea of ​​“making history” is a concept according to which writing and thinking about the past constitute a single operation. The historiographic operation is taken by de Certeau as the starting point in articulating historical meaning. History is always ambivalent: on the one hand, historiographical discourse must be authorized by a certain scientific procedure; on the other, the method is not sufficient for history to be understood as a valid discourse because meaning is added as a bracketing support. History is thus manufactured as a tool for representing reality or, thanks to the ambiguity of the word historiography, as the reality implied by the scientific operation.^[17]

If meaning cannot be reduced to method, it is because it goes beyond it, indicating a limit to historical science. As a designation of “the other of reason or possibility”, the meaning constitutes the story according to a thinkable logic of the historiographical approach.^[18] For Gilles Deleuze, meaning is only the fourth dimension of the proposition; it is “the expression of the proposition ” or the pure event in the proposition.^[19] Historiographical writing therefore becomes an event which gives coherence to the idea of ​​the past. For de Certeau, the expressed does not exist outside of its expression; there must be a marriage of the production of meaning and the intelligibility of the past for history to take place. Likewise, these two aspects are only the “symptom of an activity undergone,” the result of another event related to the structurings of thinkable objects that history changes in order to represent it.^[20]

Bearing this in mind, a study of Israel or any area for that matter, should be approached with a framework stemming more organically from the culture being examined. Such a framework is less concerned with positivist meaning than the production of meaning. It must also deal with the contemporary challenges of Israel on its own terms. Rather than an obsession with authenticity, or what constitutes material evidence, we might need to set aside an established notion of history altogether in favor of an approach that may seem to have a smaller scope but provides a richer picture of the past because it is self-aware of its contingent and perspectival vantage point. In order to illustrate this, I propose to write about a case that employs a method of dilation: a method of taking historical fragments and assembling them with poetic sense so that the picture of the past that is formed appears broader and richer than the sum of its parts.^[21]

By way of concluding this short essay, I would like to echo Edward Said in his response to a question raised in his fireside chat with Salman Rushdie about his book After the Last Sky. Sometimes you must refuse to answer questions imposed externally from the object of your study if it means resorting to “speaking in terms of formulas which I distrust.” Said then points to the linguistic peculiarity among Palestinian Arabs, for whom some ideas “just don’t sit comfortably on the tongue.”^[22] Like Benjamin before Said, we should see history as similarly riddled with causal formulas that are neither in the ambit of our authority to speak nor concern our reality. Indeed, less is more.

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^[1] Carlo Ginzburg, “Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory” Critical Inquiry 2005 31:3, 665-683

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Biblical Minimalism is actually called by its other name, the “Copenhagen School”.

^[4] Lange, Melanie. Ein Meilenstein der Hebraistik: Der “Sefer ha-Bachur” Elia Levitas in Sebastian Münsters Übersetzung und Edition. Germany: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2019. p. 313

^[5] Katy Steinmetz, “This Is Where the Word ‘History’ Comes From,” Time, June 23, 2017. https://time.com/4824551/history-word-origins/

^[6] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Marxist.org.1940. n.p.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, England: Verso Books, 1983, p. 188

^[9] Keith Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 25

^[10] Ibid. p. 26.

^[11] Kalmar, I. (2019). Orientalism and the Bible. In G. Nash (Ed.), Orientalism and Literature (Cambridge Critical Concepts, pp. 133-148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108614672.008  The very concept of an Oriental mind, in fact, owed its modern essence to Biblical philology.”

^[12] Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, “Orientalism and orientalism in reverse,” Libcom.org, January 3, 2014, https://libcom.org/article/orientalism-and-orientalism-reverse-sadik-jalal-al-azm

^[13] Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 2.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (version First edition) First ed. New York NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/1084731046.html., p. 11

^[16] Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, 46-47. In the word historiography, there is history and writing.

^[17] Wim Weymans, “Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation.” History and Theory 43, no. 2 (2004): 161–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590702.

^[18] The Writing of History, p. 56

^[19] Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, Paris, Minuit, p. 88.

^[20] Ibid. p. 57.

^[21] For my Final reflection and narrative history final paper with the specific subject to be determined.

^[22] “Edward Said & Salman Rushdie [1986].” ICA. May 15, 2023. Video, 1:13:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf0J9KlHank.