Judaism to (1800)

Identity is a matter of memory. Selective as both individual and collective memory is, it moves to the center those events and acts that are conceived of as most important. Naturally these change with time. For example, in biblical Judaism the remembrance that the Israelites belong to God, who saved them from Egypt, was a major religious concern. Rituals that celebrate this belonging, like the donning of the phylacteries, the special garments known as tallith, the mezuzah, and circumcision—what I call the "envelope of reminders"—were emphasized and remained part and parcel of later forms of Judaism. Rabbinic literature, however, conceived of the will of God as embedded in the Torah, or inlibrated in the way H. A. Wolfson understood this term, and the memorization of the Torah moved to the center of rabbinic spirituality. To be sure, the biblical ideals did not disappear, but the structures of remembrance and reminders in rabbinic literature became more complex.

These two forms of Judaism envisioned the approach to the divine as involving the entire human personality. The anthropology that inspires these literatures is more integrative, meaning that they take into consideration the importance of both bodily and psychological aspects of man. In medieval forms of Judaism, a third form of memory becomes important, in which remembrance was less mediated by concrete activities—related to the "envelope of reminders" or the study of the canonical book—but was related to thinking and concentrating on God as an intellectual concept, on nature as the manifestation of his attributes, and on God's names.

The biblical, rabbinic, and contemplative/mystical (or speculative) stages of Judaism convey quite a similar picture: remembrance and forgetting represent the two poles of the positive and negative evaluations, which are applied to those values that organize the different types of Judaism surveyed above. In the Hebrew Bible, the will of God is the central religious factor, and it informs the course of history, especially the Jewish one. Therefore, the Israelites see in history, though not in it alone, a manifestation of the divine will; and the remembrance of this will and its linkage to the fate of the Jewish nation is crucial. The change in history, in the form of the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, constitutes a formative moment that should be remembered in order to make the linkage with the redeeming God. Most of the literature created in the biblical period is concerned solely with a sacred history, while the more general events that took place after the destruction of the Second Temple were conceived of as peripheral from the religious point of view, a view shared by rabbinical, philosophical, and kabbalistic authors. Historical writings are scant and played a marginal role in the general economy of Judaism.