Historical Trauma

How do people make meaning out of historical tragedies? How do they sustain their collective identities in the face of serious historical misfortune? This is the question behind Hartley Lachter’s new book Kabbalah and Catastrophe: Historical Memory in Premodern Jewish Mysticism. 

Lachter, associate professor of religion studies, studies Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah, a radical form of Jewish discourse that developed in the Middle Ages. Jewish mystics claimed to have secretly revealed knowledge imparted directly from God that unveiled the true meaning of Jewish identity and the nature of the world. They were particularly interested in the place of Jews in history. Lachter’s project focuses on how these texts described the meaning of catastrophic events in Jewish historical experience, like exile, oppression, and outbreaks of violence against Jewish communities in medieval western Europe.

For Jews during this period, any discussion of the meaning of history and their place in it was part of a conversation about the meaning of their identity in relation to that of other peoples, especially Christians and Muslims. This was unavoidable, since Jews lived as a minority within territories controlled by Christian or Muslim rulers, he notes. 

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 “We have to situate this within the broader context of how pre-modern people talk about history, especially pre-modern people living in the European Christian West. When they talked about the meaning of the course of human world events, they thought about it in terms of a divine master plan for history as evidence of who is favored, and who is not, by God. It was always inherently a kind of theological conversation they were having, and thinking about history meant thinking about the relationship between different peoples and nations and religious identities.”

Jews had to find some way of accounting for and telling themselves a story about the meaning of how they understand their own history in light of how badly it had gone, he says. They understood themselves to be living in galut, or exile, and recognized that they were disempowered politically. So, they argued that really the meaning of this history is the opposite of what it appears. God, they claimed, had a secret plan, and the present moment of disruption was only part of a much broader scheme for the unfolding of world events.

“They had to endure the pain of exile for some kind of reason, so medieval Jewish mystics claimed Christian and Muslim peoples were part of how God accomplishes this. And they claimed that the secret divine plan for history was only revealed to the Jewish people. They believed that Jews were secretly playing an important role to help move time forward and that at the end of history when the messiah arrives, everything will revert back, or invert back, to God’s original intention, with Jews enjoying the status of God’s chosen people.”