EVERY social, cultural, and political trend that has developed in modern Jewish history has been accompanied by a distinctive sense of the past, which supports the collective identity, ideology, and activity of its advocates and justifies them to themselves, contemporary Jewish society, and history. Nearly every new ideology seems to have been formulated as a historical schema, combing the past in order to select figures worthy of serving as heroes and to construct a range of supportive historical myths. However, each movement's picture of history attests less to the past per se than to the character, aspirations, and wishes of those who created and employed it. The test case chosen for this book is the Jewish Haskalah of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the first modern ideology in Jewish history, which appeared at the threshold of the modern era and was promulgated by the maskilim—the first Jews who were conscious of being modern, and who concluded that the modern age called for a comprehensive programme of change in both the cultural and the practical life of Jewish society. What was the nature of the ‘history’ that the maskilim created, what tactics did they use, and what were the objectives for which they recruited this ‘history’? These are a few of the questions that emerge from this encounter between ‘Haskalah’ and ‘history’.

The modernization of Europe was accompanied by an upsurge of interest in the past and an ideological and scholarly preoccupation with history. Signs of the modern sense of history include changes in the attitude towards the past and its re-evaluation; a critical approach to the sources, which had hitherto been regarded as incontrovertibly authoritative; the secularization of history; the break with traditional theological modes of historical thought; and the use of history to serve modern social and political ideologies.