Salo Baron, Columbia University and the Remaking of Jewish Studies in the United States ed. by Rebecca Kobrin (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Salo Baron, Columbia University and the Remaking of Jewish Studies in the United States ed. by Rebecca Kobrin
• Michael Brenner (bio)

Rebecca Kobrin, ed. Salo Baron, Columbia University and the Remaking of Jewish Studies in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 266 pp.

No other individual shaped the institutional landscape of Jewish Studies and its academic institutions in twentieth-century America as much as Salo Wittmayer Baron. Appointed as the first professor of Jewish history at a western university in 1930 at the age of 35, he molded such institutions as the American Academy of Social Research and Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, he appeared as the only historian at the Eichmann Trial, and he educated many of the next generation's leading Jewish historians. As Rebecca Kobrin writes in her very informative introduction to this volume, his arrival at Columbia was a "transformational moment" in American Jewish scholarship, which had been long relegated to rabbinical seminaries and teachers colleges (2).

Baron was neither a natural choice for the committee nor the first choice when Columbia University searched for the inaugural Miller Chair in Jewish History. The most prominent scholar initially offered the position, German-Jewish historian Ismar Elbogen, turned it down, citing his responsibilities towards his students at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Liberal rabbinical seminary in Berlin. Little did he expect that only a few years later he would have to run under quite different conditions to find asylum at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. In the end, the young Galician-born Baron, who had earned three doctorates and a rabbinical ordination in Vienna, was selected for the new position.

Baron's work has been the object of various studies. A generation after Robert Liberles's 1995 full-fledged biography, this is the first systematic collection of essays on Baron's scholarship. Former students such as Robert Chazan and Jane Gerber contribute to this volume. Francesca Trivellato assesses Baron's contribution to economic history, and David Sorkin examines Baron's relationship to the Enlightenment. Bernard Cooperman takes a fresh look at Baron's oeuvre, noting that writing a world history of the Jews which includes areas that were not his specialty forced him to "overgeneralize with simplistic characterizations of entire societies over many eras and in many lands" (63). The real treasure, as Cooperman reminds us, is found in the long footnotes that characterize Baron's writings. Jason Lustig analyzes Baron's legacy, stating that despite the fact that "Baron's specific scholarly findings have been largely surpassed," his "general outlook still sets the terms of debate at the heart of Jewish Studies" (28). [End Page 697]

It is somewhat ironic that Baron, who wrote and edited a total of 85 books and 502 articles and reviews, among them the unfinished eighteen-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews, is mostly remembered for a ten page essay published before he arrived at Columbia. His 1928 "Ghetto and Emancipation" is one of the most frequently quoted articles in modern Jewish historiography, famous especially for its attack on the so-called "lachrymose" conception of Jewish history. As David Engel, who contributes to this volume on Baron's positions on antisemitism, has pointed out, Baron's classical article has often been misinterpreted as a rosy version of modern Jewish history, which of course it is not. Baron's eighteen-volume history, on the other hand, is hardly read today. He might have come just too late as a single author to write a multivolume Jewish history in the vein of Graetz and Dubnov.

Baron was a more public figure than most academics then and today. Together with Hannah Arendt he ran Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an organization responsible for the distribution of over 100,00 Jewish objects the Nazis had looted throughout Europe. It was a profound sign of recognition for his scholarship that he—and not an Israeli historian—was chosen to tell the story of European Jewry during the Eichmann Trial. In a fascinating chapter, Deborah Lipstadt points out what Israeli politicians and prosecutors expected from Baron. They insisted on an account without too many "boring" details and also free from...