Sir Simon Schama on Jewish History, the Essay and His Ideal Dinner Guests
Michel de Montaigne and Francois Rabelais would get dinner invites from the historian whose work has addressed the history of Britain, the power of art, revolutionary politics and more.
On December 1, Sir Simon Schama, university professor and a historian whose specialty is art, delivered the keynote lecture at History and Memory: The Legacy of Yosef H. Yerushalmi, a conference hosted by the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Yerushalmi, an authority on Spanish and Portuguese Jewry, taught at Columbia from 1980 to 2008. His major works introduced students and scholars to groundbreaking ideas about Jewish history, Freud’s relationship to Judaism and the history of conversos, among other subjects.
In this Q&A, Schama discusses how he was influenced by Yerushalmi, which historical figures he would invite to a dinner party and his most recent book, Wordy: Sounding Off on High Art, Low Appetite and the Power of Memory.
Q. How did you get involved with Jewish studies?
A. I've never not been involved with Jewish studies even though I'm a classic instance of what Yerushalmi called "a fallen Jew." At Cambridge as a young academic in the 1960s, I convened an informal seminar on post-biblical Jewish history and literature, precisely because at that time it was difficult or near impossible for undergraduates to immerse themselves in it—neither the history faculty nor the moral science (religion) one catered to it. But I did make a conscious decision not to make Jewish history my specialty; I wanted distance from the culture in which I'd grown up, so off I went to Dutch and French history.
But Jewish studies kept knocking on my door. My second book, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, was about the role of Edmond de Rothschild and his family in Palestine before Israel’s founding in 1948. Jewish history was present in my Dutch books, especially Rembrandt's Eyes. But taking a deep breath and plunging into the subject trilogy-length in The Story of the Jews, as it has turned out, was a complete return to the subject of Jewish history.
Q. Yerushalmi’s book Zakhor is an exploration of Jewish history vs. memory. How do you think memory interacts with history?
A. Zakhor’s great motif is its distinction between ritualized acts of memory (like the Passover Seder) and history, which asks open-ended questions (not the ones the Seder service asks with its ready answers). Yerushalmi characterized this indifference or outright hostility to historical inquiry as peculiar to Judaism and the Jewish tradition. I'm not quite so sure about that, but it's unquestionable that Jewish history proper arrived late and was immediately problematic. The memory/history problem is, in fact, one of the great issues of our own darkened time, and I used the keynote lecture as an opportunity to speculate on what Yerushalmi might have made of this question in the present time.
Q. In your work you use various narrative tools to recount history. Did Yerushalmi also do this?
A. In a startling aside in Zakhor, Yerushalmi lamented the separation of history and literature as a "catastrophe." I couldn't agree more. One of the sorrows he expressed in the last chapter was Jewish history's inability to gain the status and respect that would make it, as it were, the peer of the memory acts at the core of Judaism's continuity. The Torah is story as well as teaching. Yerushalmi wanted those two poles of attentiveness to be reunited, and his own work does exactly that.
Q. What can you tell us about Wordy: Sounding off on High Art, Low Appetite and the Power of Memory, your recent collection of 50 essays written over 40 years?
A. Wordy is a selection of my journalism for the Financial Times, and I have been teaching a seminar on long-form nonfiction for the writing program at the School of the Arts. I believe that the essay is an extraordinarily durable and vital form of argumentative literature. The noted English essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is a special hero of mine and ought to be on every Core curriculum syllabus.
Q. What books are you reading now?
A. Peter Pomerantsev’s This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality is, for me, the best and most startling warning about the era of truthiness and fake facts in which we now find ourselves. Also, Ismail Kadare’s An Elegy for Kosovo (and other of his works). I'm writing a relatively short book about the return of tribal nationalism and have become very engaged in the history of Kosovo and the perpetuation of the romance of defeat embodied in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. Kadare is Albanian, and a beautiful, disturbing and eloquent writer who time-travels with extraordinary power. And, finally, my colleague Eric Foner's magnificent and timely The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.
Q. You’re hosting a dinner party. What historical figures would you invite? And what would you serve?
A. The selectively ascetic Michel de Montaigne and his complementary opposite, Francois Rabelais—Lenten self-interrogation alongside the heroic guzzler. I suspect Montaigne would eat more and Rabelais a little less than one might assume, but the banquet board would have to be on the groaning side—pies, fowl, fish, sweet tarts galore—and with Rabelais there, it's unlikely to be kosher.