Professor strives to establish record of Jewish German history

Professor strives to establish record of Jewish German history

BY
DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff

When Eva Haverkamp
was a teenager in Germany, her high school history teacher
asked each member of her class to write about a figure from
German history.

She told him
that she planned to research the life of German philosopher
Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the Jewish Enlightenment.
Her teacher had never heard of him.

Incidents such
as that had an impact on Haverkamp, Rice assistant professor
of history. The German native found that Jewish German history
was almost completely missing from German history books.
One of her central goals as a historian is to help establish
Jewish German history as part of German history.

Currently, only
three German professors are researching the history of Jews
in medieval Germany. Haverkamp is one. The other two are
her father, Alfred Haverkamp, professor of history at the
University of Trier, and her former thesis adviser Alexander
Patschovsky, University of Konstanz.

Of the three,
she is the only one who knows Hebrew.

Haverkamp’s
knowledge of Hebrew has enabled her to compile an authoritative
edition of important text. She is preparing a new edition
of three Hebrew narratives, also know as chronicles, that
document a crucial time in Jewish history: the persecution
of the Jews in various German cities during the First Crusade
in 1096. The new edition of the narratives will include
commentary from Haverkamp.

Ivan Marcus,
professor of history at Yale University, said, “The
Hebrew narratives about Crusader anti-Jewish riots in Germany
the spring of 1096 are the first and most important Hebrew
chronicles of any aspect of the Jewish historical experience
in medieval Northern Europe.

“Eva Haverkamp
is going to produce a long-awaited new edition of these
important texts,” Marcus said, “and her study
will place them for the first time in a comprehensive Jewish-Christian
framework.”

Also for the
first time, Haverkamp will establish the chronicles’ authors and the time in which the narratives were written.

Haverkamp said
that she approached the narratives as literature and aimed
to describe the authors’ intentions.

The book is being
published by the prestigious Monumenta Germaniae Historica
(Munich) and will be a first-in-a-series text for research
on Jewish life in medieval Germany. It is being published
in cooperation with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

It will be the
first time that the most respected center for medieval studies
in Germany will acknowledge Hebrew sources as a part of
German history, Haverkamp says. “In a sense it is a
political statement. It is acknowledging Jewish German history
as part of German history.”

The Hebrew narratives
have been copied over the centuries. In her edition, Haverkamp
attempts to establish an original text.

The year 1096
is a turning point in Jewish persecution in Germany. Before
that year, she said, persecuted Jews were faced with two
choices: expulsion or baptism. But in 1096, the choice became
baptism or death.

The murder of
Jews in 1096 led to a martyrdom movement in which Jews in
several cities killed themselves rather than face conversion
or murder by Germans crusaders. This self-sacrifice is known
as “kiddush hashem” and would become an ideal
over several centuries among Ashkenazi (European) Jews,
Haverkamp said.

Haverkamp finds
that there still is a reluctance to incorporate Jewish community
life into the history of Germany, not necessarily because
of anti-Semitism: A large part of the literature is written
in Hebrew, she explained, and most German scholars can’t
read it. Also, Haverkamp noted, “many historians would
rather not delve into the dark side of German history.”

But it seemed
only natural for Haverkamp to study Jewish German history,
partly because of her father. She said she always has felt
at home in Jewish culture, having grown up in Trier, Germany’s
oldest city, with many Jewish friends.

Haverkamp’s
next project will be to write an interpretation of the chronicles.
For that project she said she will “situate the Hebrew
accounts in the histories of the particular cities and regions
in which the persecutions took place” and offer a historical-literary
analysis.

In her second
academic year at Rice, Haverkamp describes the university
as “my heaven on earth.”