Messianists have a strange relationship to history. Where we see current events in the news, messianists are interested in the same events but only in order to furiously gather clues and prophecies for a final end or a final return. There is nothing fundamentally new in the news for a messianist, only the eternal recitation of the same story, but with new characters. The Bible, the Torah, these are the codified narratives. And though there is a history to those books, ie. certain things take place in these books “before” and other things “after,” and certain people and places are actual historical fact but of course also heavily interpreted, those texts occupy a strange no man’s land between history and eternity. And the people who read those books “remember” the events that took place in them, but not in a historiographic sense. Rather, in a ritualistic sense. New events are also not remembered as “events” but in the sense that they portend something momentous, without being momentous in themselves. The new Job, the wars of Gog and Magog, these are archetypes in which new events are consumed into a messianists’s anti-historical work of textual hermeneutics.
New events enter into the consciousness of a people who live according to book time very slowly. In most of Jewish history, historical events rose to the level of having meaning as things in themselves when catastrophe and martyrdom were present. There were many such events, of course. Some of the first events recorded by Jews in Europe after the Hellenistic period were the medieval crusades in the Rhineland, noteworthy for future generations because of the scale of the terror and its subsequent tragedy: the mass-suicide of Jews seeking to escape the marauding hordes in Mainz. But even then the chroniclers cite fathers who turned knives onto their children to kill them in advance of the terror that would likely befall them at the hands of the Crusaders. And in those gruesome references, we see a glimmer of the story of biblical Abraham, and thereby a return to meaning derived from the landscape and time of The Book. Future generations of Jews would perhaps remember events such as these by the dates and the months when they took place, but the years may never have been so important. Even the year of destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, the event which turned Israel from a nation with a religion to a religion with a record of its former nationhood, was not even a common marker of time reckoning, with the notable exception of Italian Jews in Worms and Speyer. And even they were unique because most Jews did not count yearly time from that event.
The chronicle of the Rhineland crusade massacre is a strange mixture of real-time events and a recitation of the Urszene that organizes the lives of a people. A combination of “linear” and “cyclical” time, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi says in his book, Zakhor (1982). In the way the crusades are remembered by people with a messianic frame of mind, there is an excess of recollection and a paucity of historical knowledge. To remember these events on their anniversaries, as Jews did, meant that they were lived again, reanimated through actions in the present. Like the candle I lit tonight for a “miracle that happened there” back in the day – when was that exactly? I had to look it up.