At the ‘Scales of Suffering: Neo-Lachrymosity and the Writing of Jewish History’ conference, historians and other scholars gathered to unpack and reimagine the place of suffering in Jewish history.
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Between colleagues in Penn’s Jewish Studies Program, conversations began to surface about two years ago concerning an age-old question of any society: How do we write history?
With an aim to consider narratives of Jewish life through the lens of ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern eras, associate professor and Meyerhoff Chair of Modern Jewish History Joshua Teplitsky and assistant professor of Rabbinics Simcha Gross of Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures convened a conference that took place in March to understand the role of suffering in Jewish narratives over time. “The Scales of Suffering: Neo-Lachrymosity and the Writing of Jewish History” gathered historians and scholars of literature and religious studies from around the world to engage in critical conversation.
(Left) Natalie B. Dohrmann, associate director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies; (right) Joshua Teplitsky, the Joseph Meyerhoff Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Penn.
Though the idea pre-dated the formation of Penn’s Task Force on Antisemitism, Teplitsky, a member of the Task Force, says that conversations that took place through that process “confirmed the relevance of such a discussion.”
“And maybe I’ll go even further and say, it confirmed the need for us to anchor the way we think about the present in a deep appreciation of the past,” he adds.
Throughout the daylong conference, Teplitsky says scholars recognized the fulsomeness of Jewish history, offered a balanced view of thinking about moments of crisis and sadness in its history, and simultaneously began to see how moments of suffering coexist with ones of joy and active agency. In fact, the group began to think about how to emphasize “sadness”—a word Teplitsky says turned out to be more apt than “suffering.”
“One major throughline [of our discussions] came from people emphasizing how important it is to focus on the local, and not to offer grand, sweeping theories of history,” says Teplitsky.
(Left) Ishay Rozen-Zvi of Tel Aviv University and a visiting professor at Harvard; (right) The attendees at the “Scales of Suffering: Neo-Lachrymosity and the Writing of Jewish History” conference on March 31.
“It’s actually a starting point to tell stories about overcoming and resilience, and responses and ways of coping and grappling,” he says. “So, I actually think that was my major takeaway and was reinforced by a bunch of others that even a story that focuses on sadness is not only a sad story alone; rather, it’s a story about triumphs of spirit, cooperation, overcoming, and the things people do to make their lives normal after a sad or difficult event.”
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