What Happened

In our December 5 issue, Magda Teter reviews a new book ostensibly about the last decades of the Regency of Algiers and “the ties between the land and the sea and between the sea and the history of events, money, and power.” But behind that history, Teter writes, is “a story of the perception of Mediterranean Jewish traders by European and American actors, who projected their sense of superiority over and disdain for both Jews and Muslims.” Teter scrutinizes what more conventional histories take for granted, pointing out, for example, how “speeches the consuls claim to have delivered are taken at face value, without considering that they might be, as Natalie Zemon Davis put it, ‘fiction in the archives.’”

This particular care with archives and interpretation is the mark of Teter’s career as a historian. At Fordham, where she is the chair of Judaic studies, she concentrates on premodern relations between Jewish and Christian peoples and how that lineage informs the present. Her books include Blood Libel: On the Trail of Antisemitism, which won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, and Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism. For The New York Review, Teter has written about the translation history of a medieval Jewish midrash, exhibitions in Italy and Poland about the history of the blood libel, pogroms in Europe after World War I that prefigured the Holocaust, and the history of poverty and charity in Jewish societies.

Teter took time over the holidays to correspond with us about the historical method, premodernity, and that slippery concept “fiction in the archives.”

Lauren Kane and Dahlia Krutkovich: Your academic specialization is religious and cultural history, especially the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. How did you first become interested in this field, and why did you choose to focus on it?

Magda Teter: Growing up in Poland under communism, when Jewish subjects were taboo, I was intrigued by Jewish culture. The absence of the historic community of Jews was very palpable in cities and towns as well as in the Polish language and Polish literature. So I entered my exploration of Jewish life through material and topographical remnants, such as former synagogues, street names, and cemeteries, and then through literature—and a critical interpretation of the New Testament! History was not something I thought I was interested in or particularly liked, but I soon realized that my questions were historical and not literary. Still, when I arrived at Columbia University as a graduate student, Jewish–Christian relations was not a subject that captivated me. It wasn’t until a graduate seminar about Jewish historiography that I noticed how strong scholarly opinion was about the attitudes of the Catholic Church toward Jews in spite of how little research there was about the topic. Even what research existed was rarely grounded in archival sources. I wanted to see what was in the archives.

What I found, or rather what I did not find, surprised me. Earlier historians of east European Jewish history, such as Salo Baron and Bernard Weinryb in the twentieth century and Simon Dubnow in the nineteenth, had based their conclusions on a few, sometimes quite virulent anti-Jewish works printed between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries and on anti-Jewish legislation from the medieval and early modern periods. They surmised that Jews and Christians lived apart, interacting with hostility or only on an economic plane. But the lived reality was much more interesting, much more complicated, much more difficult to define in simple terms.

Historians seem to enjoy beginning their “minority histories” with the advent of the nation-state—perhaps the promise of civic equality is too seductive a narrative premise. Have you noticed this tendency in scholarship, and if so, what do you make of it? What does a history of religious or ethnic minorities that begins before the nineteenth century offer modern readers that those beginning later do not?

The modern period—dating from the American and French Revolutions—has shaped our language and ways of thinking about many things. Phrases like “second-class citizenship” to denote unjust inequality and discrimination emerge from this postrevolutionary era, which set ideals and expectations around equality before the law. Although we know all too well that these ideals have been applied selectively in the West—to white, propertied men—they nonetheless shaped the way we think about modern societies and the way we set out demands for equality and justice.

The concepts of “minority” and “majority” are also modern social constructs, imbued with meaning far exceeding that of their implicit numerical value. In the premodern period, society had different power structures. There was no concept of equality—people were not citizens but subjects. Each estate operated within a different legal framework. There was no shared identity that could easily translate into concepts of “majority” and “minority.” For example, in religious hierarchy, Jews were considered “slaves” to Christians, but in the legal framework of premodern Europe, they had more rights and protections than Christian serfs. It does not mean Jews were not subjugated and vulnerable, but it does mean that the social dynamics of exclusion that developed in the nation states of the modern period were different.

Studying the premodern period, especially through the archives, can offer a check on modern ideas or scholarly presentism, an approach that refracts the past through the values of the present, thus distorting it. This approach can be traced back to the advent of modern historiography, which emerged in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century historians laid the foundations for national historiographies, set the contours of scholarly research, and defined questions that have reverberated in the decades, if not the centuries, since. Working in an era of nation-building, many of these historians sought to delineate national and ethnic identity, and they looked for materials from the past that affirmed and perpetuated contemporary divides while also ignoring where boundaries between identities in the premodern period were blurred or even nonexistent. In my research, I found that Jews were an integral part of premodern society. But modern historians told us that Jews were a people apart who needed to be reformed in order to “integrate.”

How much responsibility do you believe a historian has to what’s happening in the present? To what extent does the world today—politically, culturally—guide your research interests?

Scholars have always been shaped by the present, despite claims to objectivity and the “purely scholarly” or even “scientific” approach. A more recent version of this tendency has emerged in the last century, when historians responded to contemporary developments by asking of the past questions that animated their present. Women’s history began to thrive in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, alongside the women’s liberation movement. The pandemic spurred new scholarship on disease and epidemics in history. Our environmental crisis has created a whole field of environmental history. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot said in his influential work Silencing the Past, the past is what happened and history—shaped by both historical sources and historians’ narration—is “what is said to have happened.” Still, even as our own lives may inform our scholarly pursuits, we must be careful to avoid presentism. We must allow the past to speak on its own terms, even when asking questions that are pertinent to the present.

We are living through turbulent times. Disinformation and the resurgence of flagrant, violent antisemitism and racism from the beginning of the Trump era have certainly influenced the questions my students and I have been grappling with. When I started working on Blood Libel, I was asking different questions—it’s fascinating how my proposals for the book changed over time—but my sources began to take me in an unintended and surprising direction just as Trump was elected the first time. My book turned into a study of the dissemination of knowledge and helped me to understand, from a long historical perspective, what we witnessed during the 2016 presidential campaign and what analysts saw as “confirmation bias,” “echo chambers,” and disinformation.

Much of your argument in your latest essay seems to spring from a claim about your field as a whole, that Jews “have generally not been integrated into modern histories of the states and lands in which they had been a marginalized minority.” How do you approach this historiographical slant in your own work? What challenges does this exclusion pose to your research?

In 1824, in the preface to Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples, the German historian Leopold von Ranke famously wrote, “To history has been given the function of judging the past, of instructing men for the profit of future years. The present attempt does not aspire to such a lofty undertaking. It merely wants to show how it essentially was [wie es eigentlich gewesen].” Von Ranke is considered the father of modern historiography—for taking us to the archives and for the ostensible desire to describe the past “as it essentially was.” But a few lines above this statement, he acknowledged that “the intention of a historian depends on his viewpoint.” His history excluded many peoples and concepts: “the concept of universal Christendom,” because that would force him to “embrace even the Armenians”; that of “the unity of Europe,” because “since the Turks are Asiatics and since the Russian Empire comprises the whole north of Asia, their situations could not be thoroughly understood without penetrating and drawing in the total Asian situation.” Von Ranke also rejected the concept “of a Latin Christendom,” because that would include “Slavic, Latvian, and Magyar tribes,” which had “a peculiar and special nature.” If in his histories he rejected even other Christians who were “tribally” not his “people,” he certainly did not think to include Jews, though they may have lived in the same towns and villages as his “Germanic and Latin” peoples.

Other national historians and scholars of national literatures and languages did the same. German, Polish, and other national histories thus tended to exclude groups that were not part of a given ethnonational conception of the nation. They invented a new “we” and cast others outside. For example, in 1991 the president of Poland, Lech Wałęsa, addressed the Israeli Knesset with a conciliatory speech seeking a rapprochement. He said, “Jews from all over the world would arrive in Poland. They found in our country hospitality and an atmosphere of tolerance. They found in our country a sense of security and the conditions to develop their great culture.” For Wałęsa, Jews were outsiders, even after over a thousand years of living together in the land, they were not part of the “we.” This is a product of the way the story of Poland has been told.

Sebastian Conrad has argued in his book What Is Global History? that this exclusion from historiographies of groups not seen as part of a given nation was a “birth defect” of “modern academic disciplines.” This early period of modern historiography shapes the way we think about history and social relations even today. Jews, by then, had been racialized as “Oriental Asiatics,” and thus had no place in the national, or even European, story. Their history was confined to “Jewish history.”

But the archives tell a different story. That’s what surprised me when I was still a graduate student, and that’s what always excites me when I work on a project. Archival sources—as problematic as they are—are full of surprises. They challenge our preconceptions because they do not conform to our values but to the values of the past. Some fifteen years ago my colleague Debra Kaplan and I coauthored the article “Out of the (Historiographical) Ghetto),” in which we urged scholars not to relegate Jews and their archival documents to “Jewish” history, but to see them as integral parts of a shared past. This is also true for other marginalized groups or minorities. As in the case of Jews in Europe or Black Americans here, their social, cultural, and political influence has been much greater than one might surmise just from their numbers or their social position.

What advice would you give to an early career historian?

The present certainly informs our scholarship, but it should not predetermine the conclusions of our research. There are also topics worth exploring regardless of their relevance to the present. I would urge early career historians to let the historical sources drive their research and conclusions and not be afraid of having to rethink everything and change directions. This brings an element of surprise to the work and raises new questions and puzzles. It also results in a better history. New scholarship should surprise us, not necessarily affirm our beliefs. I worry about the return to tendentious, agenda- and conclusion-driven scholarship. I certainly believe that there is a place for scholarship engaged with questions of our times, and scholars have to be part of social change. But we can push for a better future without distorting the past. In fact, the messy past that does not map well onto modern schemata might help us get out of our own morass.