Antiquitopia

Ô souvenir, Tes arbres sont en fleur devant le ciel, On peut croire qu'il neige, Mais la foudre s'éloigne sur le chemin, Le vent du soir répand son trop de graines. (Yves Bonnefoy, "Une Pierre," Les Planches Courbes ) Memory. It is something that fascinates so many ancient and modern thinkers. It is the basis of epistemology for Socrates/Plato: all knowledge is remembrance. It is the basis of the Self and where one finds God in Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions . The Bible constantly enjoins one to remember: zakhor , as the famous book by that name by Yosef Yerushalmi examines. It is the recollection of God's actions with Israel. Augustine depicts memory as a vast cavern with nooks and crannies in which some memories are easily accessed and others are hidden and only elicited with great difficulty. Bonnefoy's image, however, is not of the space of stone that can be filled, but organic. It is not empty space to be filled, but the spring flowering...

The New York Times has a nice obituary on Yosef Yerushalmi, who passed away earlier this week: Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan. .... An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his generation’s foremost Jewish historians by plumbing eclectic subjects like the history of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, messianism, the intellectual history of modern German Jewry and Freud’s relationship with his religion. In 1982, Dr. Yerushalmi, then the Salo Wittmayer Baron professor of Jewish history, culture and society at Columbia University, published perhaps his most influential work, “Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” a slim volume whose title bore the...

I just received news that the esteemed and highly influential Columbia Professor of Jewish Studies, Yosef Yerushalmi, passed away yesterday. I particularly enjoyed his book on history and memory, Zakhor .