Jewish History Must Be Defended.

This essay stages an encounter between Michel Foucault and Franz Rosenzweig by juxtaposing their parallel observations on the continuity between history and war. While Foucault analyzes the strategies organizing seventeenth-century historical writing about the Norman conquest of England and the Frankish invasion of Gaul, Rosenzweig opposes the warlike progress of Christian history to the eternal peace of Jewish time. Through this comparison, the essay reevaluates the terms governing well-known debates about Jewish history and Jewish memory. It asks what role the concept of "war" has played in the emergence of modern Jewish historicism and the so-called Jewish return to history. The essay concludes by submitting the Israelite conquest of Canaan as a supplement to Foucault's examples and as a critical index of the bellicose grammar underwriting the representation of Jewish history as a field of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]