A colleague not a sacred authority: reflections on Salo Baron's scholary opus
The three papers by Elisheva Carlebach, David Sorkin, and Adam Teller refreshingly do not merely invoke the name of Salo Baron as a sacred authority but actually reflect critically upon significant pieces of his scholarly corpus. As Adam Teller has pointed out correctly, academic historians of the J...
| Subtitles: | Symposium: Rethinking Salo W. Baron in the Twenty-First Century |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
[2014]
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2014, Volume: 38, Issue: 2, Pages: 441-445 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Baron, Salo W. 1895-1989
/ Science
/ Work
/ Reflection (Philosophy)
B Judaism / Culture / Emancipation B USA / History B World Wars / Bibliography |
| RelBib Classification: | BH Judaism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The three papers by Elisheva Carlebach, David Sorkin, and Adam Teller refreshingly do not merely invoke the name of Salo Baron as a sacred authority but actually reflect critically upon significant pieces of his scholarly corpus. As Adam Teller has pointed out correctly, academic historians of the Jews have sought for decades to align themselves with what they have taken to be the fundamental thrust of Baron's approach to his subject and have warned their students against too great a deviation from it. In the discourse of the field, to claim Baron's mantel is altogether bon ton, while “lachrymose” has long served as a term of severe reproach. Yet, many more people appear to have claimed to be Baron's acolytes in abjuring lachrymosity than have actually read a significant portion of Baron's corpus, much less seriously engaged with what he had to say in those writings. The three contributors are, happily, not among them: in their papers they all have entered into a genuine conversation with certain key propositions in Baron's work, with a mind to refining his insights and building upon them. Baron has served them not as an icon but as an interlocutor in the continuing discussion of significant problems to which he devoted much thought and study. That is a salutary development. Baron's contribution to the study of Jewish history was hardly exhausted by his articulation of a particular conceptual approach to it. As anyone who takes the multiple volumes of A Social and Religious History of the Jews or The Jewish Community in hand becomes aware immediately, Baron was a prodigious researcher whose painstaking mining (and in some cases even discovery) of a vast array of source materials laid the empirical foundations for future scholarship on a broad range of Jewish historical subjects. On that level, as well, reading his work returns significant rewards. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009414000361 |