case study european history

European History And ‘Eurocentrism’ – A Conversation Between Dina Gusejnova (LSE) And Charles West (Sheffield)

Charles West | 12 May 2021

◇ Doing History / Empire / Europe / Historiography / Imperialism / Medieval  Methodology / Modern History / Transnational History / World History

Over the past few weeks, Dina Gusejnova and Charles West have been discussing over email what ‘Eurocentrism’ means for historians studying and teaching European history. What follows is an edited version of their conversation.

There’s lots of conversations going on at the moment about ‘eurocentrism’, and how it relates to the study and teaching of European history, both in schools and in universities (see for instance the project Why Europe, Which Europe?). I take eurocentrism to mean the conceptual privileging of Europe over the rest of the world, as if this part of the world’s history were intrinsically more important than anywhere else’s, and can serve as a universal benchmark for measuring progress.

But it’s increasingly common to hear people saying ‘eurocentric’ when they just mean ‘focusing on the geographical region of Europe’. This seems to me to be an unhelpful slippage. Studying the history of the geographical region of Europe is not in itself eurocentric. It depends how you do it. This might be a point that hardly needs to be made, but still: there are lots of good, non-eurocentric reasons to study, and ways of studying, European history.

And that’s all the more self-evident for people living in Europe. Place matters in history writing, because the world necessarily looks different depending on where one looks at it from: none of us has a God’s eye view of the world, and we need to remember our own positionality. So I see it as neither surprising nor intrinsically problematic if European history features more strongly in European countries’ school and university curricula than elsewhere, for example in India or Kenya or the United States (though of course other geographies and scales of history are and must be studied and taught in Europe too, for all kinds of important reasons: indeed I’ve contributed to this in a small way myself). I wondered what you thought about this as an historian of modern Europe?

First I’d like to say it’s really great to be able to return to a subject which, I recall, we last talked about on a work trip to India. The purpose of this trip was to foster institutional connections with universities in India, which provided a relevant context for the discussion.

Colloquially, overcoming ‘eurocentrism’ often means reducing the study of European history as such. The use of the term is often linked to demands for decolonisation, but in some sense, all historians need to think self-critically about their practice, whether they are historians of Europe or any other part of the world.

If the critique of eurocentrism has any constructive meaning for historical research and teaching, it is as a critique of a certain petrified view of modernity. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in Provincializing Europe in 2000, eurocentrism is a philosophy of history which ‘goes to the heart of the question of political modernity in non-Western societies’ by imposing a ‘“first in Europe, then elsewhere”’ mode of thinking about historical time. This mode of thinking was pernicious not only because it placed Europe at the centre, but also because it affected approaches to the non-western world, where those under its spell were prone to ‘replacing “Europe” by some locally constructed center.’

Histories of modern political economy have always been linked to the study of the moral sciences, looking at issues such as agency, complicity, and the eternal question of who benefits. Depending on the epoch of study, ‘European hegemony’ emerged through the expansion of a limited set of European powers and transnational actors, including the Catholic Church or such corporations as the Jesuits, business ventures like the East India Company, the Hanseatic League, etc.. It could also be seen as a product of the globalisation of the trade in people and commodities, the exploitation of labour and many other dimensions of the story.

It is worth pointing out that Europeans were neither the sole beneficiaries of imperialism, colonialism, and associated forms of hegemony, nor were they always the main agents of this process. Like other groups of populations in the world, Europeans today are in some respects products of these processes. In fact, according to Marx, the agent of modernisation is capitalism itself – an abstract force with destructive power. Whichever story about modernity one takes on board, what matters for historians of modernity is that the very idea of Europe as a subject has been one of the by-products of modernisation, and this explains how the charge of ‘eurocentrism’ has been deployed rhetorically in the past.

At the time of Chakrabarty’s book, around the year 2000, many American historians were beginning to think of themselves as the ‘last Eurocentric generation’. Others who were working on areas outside Europe at the time still felt ‘stranded at the discipline’s periphery’. At one level, a lot has changed in the intervening twenty years when it comes to the geographical ‘provincialisation’ of Europe. The study of non-European history has been valorised more than before and uncoupled from European centres (though perhaps not enough) at European and American history departments, journals and institutions.

In the early 2000s as an undergraduate in Cambridge, I witnessed this even in the physical transformation of intellectual spaces around me, as I cycled past a building where the words ‘Oriental Studies’ were quietly erased and replaced with ‘Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies’ – though of course the very assemblage of such large geographical areas in one subject group still bear the structural traces of empire. Faculties such as History and Classics may not have been visibly affected to the same degree, but in these disciplines, too, the changes of the past twenty years have been profound.

Many grands récits of modern history now have a tone of greater humility when it comes to Europe’s place in the world. Such specialists in non-European history as Kenneth Pomeranz or Jürgen Osterhammel, who have both established their intellectual authority by working on China rather than Europe, have argued influentially that the ‘great divergence’ between Europe and other parts of the world in terms of wealth and growth was due to fortuitous factors such as the geographical distribution of coal; they used comparative and partly counterfactual arguments which have opened up a range of new approaches which contextualise Europe within modernisation processes in global history.

In 2004, Chris Bayly, the preeminent historian of the British empire, famously announced that ‘all local, national or regional histories must, in important ways, therefore, be global histories. It is no longer really possible to write “European” or “American” history in a narrow sense’. One historian has recently described ‘area studies’, which was one domain of research where non-European histories emerged in the twentieth century, as a European-dominated ‘struggle for world knowledge’ (in a quip to Fritz Fischer’s critique of Germany in WWI, “The Struggle for World Supremacy”). In short, in the discipline of history, recent historiography has been correcting the representation of Europe in its domain in ways similar to the revisions which geographers have introduced to a Mercator map: Europe has been recontextualised, adjusted proportionally to its significance, moved out of focus, indeed, provincialised, if you like.

I find it remarkable that the critique of ‘eurocentrism’ is not only still prominent in meta-historiographical discourse twenty years after its latest emergence in history, but that the critical meaning of the term has become reduced. It now usually implies the idea of valuing European history over that of other geographical areas or populations, not, as in Chakrabrarty’s interpretation, for instance, teleological thinking as such. To name only one example, in 2020, in a recent Opinion piece for the New York Times, the historian and theorist of postcolonial political thought Adom Getachew insisted that ‘a Eurocentrism that valorised European civilisation as the apex of human achievement’ has been a mainstay in academic culture, adding that elements of nineteenth-century imperialism continue to resonate in the anti-immigrant politics in the EU.

This kind of critique of eurocentrism has a three-fold direction: it is first, directed against academic and public history which has marginalised or exoticised research on geographical areas outside Europe; secondly, it is a critique of historical pedagogy and practice, which affects the ideas and self-valorisation of a much larger circle of people; finally, it is an institutional critique of inequalities in the modern world.

Generally, I think it is a welcome phenomenon that we Europeanists have to think more self-critically about our subject. But I also think that the concept of eurocentrism, if it is to be productive in critical pedagogy and research, cannot be projected outward on an imaginary discrete ‘eurocentric’ other. There is still a lot of work to be done within the historiography of Europe itself in unpacking the emergence of different ideas of Europeanness, and there is also a need for greater contextual and comparative work on a global as well as a local scale. The continent has its own Mercator-like distortions, which make some nations appear larger or more sharply than others. This is also true of urban versus rural histories, etc.

Let me give some more practical examples of the way I use critiques of eurocentrism in my teaching experience in my undergraduate course on interwar cultural history (Interwar worlds: the cultural consequences of the First World War). By contrast to the political history of the First World War, which has become more global in orientation, the historiography of interwar culture remains profoundly tied to a few familiar themes in European or North American history, such as British anti-war poetry, Weimar or Soviet culture, or the jazz age in France and the US.

Between 1919 and 1935 thinkers such as Oswald Spengler and Edmund Husserl acknowledged that the war had caused to think about European civilisation as finite (Spengler) and have admitted that the classic teleology of Philosophy itself culminating in the creation of a ‘European humanity’ at its summit was, in the interwar period, in a profound crisis (Husserl). Yet in the work of historians, for a long time, the master narratives of such cultural transformations remained – well, not only Eurocentric, but centred around the classic European empire-nations, France, Germany, or Russia (the Soviet Union). This is nowhere more palpable than in studies of war memory, where figures like the doyen of French national historiography, Pierre Nora, loom large.

When it comes to designing research areas for students, one response to the charge of ‘eurocentrism’ might call upon historians to dismiss eurocentric studies such as Pierre Nora’s influential conception of ‘lieux de mémoire’ altogether – like the Algerian postcolonial thinker Seloua Luste Boulbina has done in an open letter to Pierre Nora. An alternative option is to reinterpret the whole idea of universalism that is inherent in French national and European history at large, and to examine it as a mode of claiming power that is available to different groups in history. This is something the Senegalese philosopher Souleyman Bachir Diagne has described as ‘horizontal’ or ‘lateral universalism’, a work in progress, with its eurocentric sting taken out.

In that interwar cultural history course, I am closer to Diagne’s view of things. For instance, I tend to encourage students to use this Francophone literature to explore the memorialisation of the war in contexts such as the British Mandates in Africa and the Middle East, emphasising the circulation of memorial designs between different regime types and their different uptake in society; or they can engage with established studies of Soviet or Weimar culture and concepts such as ‘cultural revolution’ (which was itself originally taken from its Chinese context to examine Soviet history) to look at new vernacular movements or modern media in interwar Turkey, China, or Japan. In other words, I don´t think it is productive to start entirely from scratch or ‘write out’ the specific biases that have come to exist. Each research question requires thinking on one´s own feet and reinventing one´s methodological toolkit. The course is intentionally designed around an open question about the war´s cultural consequences, and any historiography is examined in a critical light and used in a modular fashion to expand our horizons.

I agree that the charge of ‘eurocentrism’ might have special implications for historians of modern Europe, as you suggest, since the concept is so tied to that of modernity. But I also think it’s something that medieval specialists need to think about too. And of course they have, for instance by expanding their geographical horizons to think about the wider world, and by collaborating with experts on other parts of that world, including scholars institutionally located in the contemporary global south. And the debates continue as to whether ‘medieval’ is a category which only applies to European history, or whether it can and should be applied elsewhere too (both options can be labelled as ‘eurocentric’, after all). These developments are positive and valuable. Yet as I suggested at the beginning, I would argue that there’s a lot that can be done (and has been done) to tackle eurocentrism within the study of ‘medieval’ Europe as well.

The teaching dimension you highlight is really important: after all, this is how we communicate the priorities and shape of the discipline we work in to the next generation. Eurocentrism is something I’ve thought about (and discussed with students) in the context of in my third-year special subject course. The course is focused on 9th-c. Francia, so on lands now divided between half a dozen modern European countries (France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Spain). In a geographical sense it’s obviously a European history course. And there was a concept of Europe in the Middle Ages too, as Klaus Oschema has recently emphasised. The Franks had an idea of Europa.

However, with a few interesting exceptions, they chose not to use it as a frame of reference or context; it wasn’t very important to them. Still, its very existence is significant in all kinds of ways, not least in that it means we shouldn’t blindly impose our concept of Europe upon a period which had its own. That’s an important nuance. We need to avoid seeing the Carolingian empire as a proto-EU, as Marie-Celine Isaïa has pointed out, as if the idea of Europe is unchanging or timeless, but nor should we imagine this idea just popped into existence in the 19th century. Neither is accurate. Historicising the concept of Europe, showing how the concept has meant different things at different times, is a key step in battling eurocentrism, and this is something which medieval history courses can contribute towards.

At the same time, the history of Europe doesn’t have to be only a history of the concept. It’s legitimate also to think about the history of the geographical region we now think of as Europe. In particular I’d suggest it’s important to include perspectives from al-Andalus, and to ensure these are included in the study of Europe as a region. I’ve worked them into my teaching for this very reason – not simply for the sake of it, but because this is relevant history. Al-Andalus is often tacitly sidelined by earlier medieval historians who aren’t specialists, not least for linguistic reasons since its textual records are mostly in Arabic not Latin.

Plus, it was more culturally integrated with the Islamicate world than with the Christian lands to the north, and Amira Bennison has showed that Andalusians didn’t usually think of themselves as ‘European’ (though contemporaries to the north occasionally did). But then, as I’ve just said, the same is true of the Franks. This emphatically doesn’t mean Al-Andalus isn’t part of European history, and there’s a responsibility to make that clear. If we don’t point things like this out, which we can only do by teaching European history, then old framings will be left untouched and unchallenged. And it’s interesting and important, to come to your point about not quietly removing but critically interrogating the European historiographical legacy, for students to consider why Al-Andalus, and for that matter Muslim Sicily and even Christian Byzantium, has often been tacitly excluded from histories of Europe – and how putting them back in changes the picture.

The topic of tacit exclusion highlights an important aspect of the problem we are discussing, namely, that the slogan of ‘provincialising’ Europe and terms such as ‘eurocentrism’ have been used out of context as tools for choosing what to study (or rather, what not to study any longer). This selective appropriation of terminology obscured the fact that these critiques were mostly focused on the question of how one studies phenomena, how things are contextualised and narrated.

The real problem which limits historical research is the adherence to any kind of ‘centrism’ or ‘teleology’, which is often the consequence of an intuitive attempt to relate all unfamiliar phenomena to certain familiar brands of historical events, or assume that by covering the history of, say, urban environments, one has already subsumed the rural, and so on. Such systemic oversights, sometimes modelled around potted national histories of different European states, can be as damaging to a historian as it might be to a political campaigner who never leaves the remits of her home district.

It is tempting to stick to path-dependent accounts of special national histories, particularly of European states, such as the history of National Socialism and the rise of the Third Reich, or Soviet History, where ‘centrism’ has led historians to explain the history of the Third Reich only by looking at Germany (thus missing, for instance, the fact that more than five of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust came from Nazi-Occupied Europe) or looking at the Russian Revolution and Civil War without paying attention to the history of, say, the fortunes of social or liberal democracy in the Muslim Caucasus.

I doubt that manifestos in themselves actually have a decisive impact on historical research. They may be nothing more than flags which blow according to the winds of change caused by other factors around them. For instance, to pick a few examples from a range of subjects in modern European history, one of the most illuminating accounts of the Russian revolution from the point of view of Russia’s non-Slavic peoples was published in 1972; it is Ronald Suny’s study of the Baku Commune.

Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which emphasises the common genealogies of modern extermination policies in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia in colonial violence, dates back to 1951. Aby Warburg’s art historical studies of the ‘afterlife of antiquity’ and his provocative Memory Atlas, in their own day, provoked the European establishment by giving equal weighting to ancient and contemporary expressions of feeling, to European and non-European cultures, was a profound challenge to many disciplines – in the 1920s. Simon Dubnow’s Jewish histories, produced in the years between the end of the Russian empire and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact dividing eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, could be seen as examples of early subaltern studies.

All this was produced years before the terms eurocentrism or such like were coined. Dubnow’s work could be seen as a way of valorising the history of a marginal people inhabiting so-called Pale of Settlement, the underdeveloped and impoverished western hinterland to which the European Jews were confined under the Russian empire and where many Jews still lived until the extermination of Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust – including Dubnow himself, who was killed by a Gestapo agent in 1941. Looking at this aspect of European history, the term ‘hegemony’ hardly applies. In short, overcoming ‘centrism’ might look different for histories of modern racism or histories of modern nationalism and dictatorship, and it is certainly not something where one generation of historians can necessarily pat itself on the back for being more historically engaged. Others in the past have taken far greater existential risks in doing this kind of work.

I think this ‘centrism’ of various kinds is a problem in medieval history too. There’s a rich tradition of social, and Marxist, historiography, but I wonder how many medieval European survey courses explicitly make space for the peasantry, who formed the overwhelming majority of the population, and whose production structured the economy, and thus funded all the more glamorous things? Of course there is the added problem that it’s the centres which are not only best documented, but most accessible to students too through translation of the narrative sources, which tend to privilege rulers and elites (with the great exception of Icelandic saga evidence). Thankfully the ‘special national histories’ is less of a problem for the early medievalist these days, though nationalists do often turn to the distant past for the most deeply-rooted authentication of their projects (and I fear we may see more of this in an English context).

But these sorts of problems aren’t pedagogically insuperable, and historians of Europe have some experience in engaging with them. I’d suggest that an anti-eurocentric European history pedagogy might involve explicitly demonstrating how European history can be read as undermining the triumphalist 19th– and 20th-century teleological narratives of European modernity which positioned that history as the universal benchmark, for instance by underscoring the relatively peripheral nature of the western Eurasian peninsula for most of recorded history.

It might involve showing that Europe has always been entangled with the wider world, both when it seemed in a dominant position but also before and after; and crucially, that it has moreover been fundamentally shaped through that entanglement (here I think of Saba Mahmood’s brilliant critique of Charles Taylor’s account of secularism, highlighting its assumption of an ideologically hermetically sealed Europe). Those entanglements need to be understood as forming part of European history too.

Take for instance monasticism, a key social movement and intellectual matrix in Europe, which was initially appropriated from an Egyptian set of ascetic practices, and whose western variant remained strongly influenced by eastern Mediterranean culture. An anti-eurocentric European history needs to have very porous boundaries, because flows over those boundaries have often been of fundamental importance. As I’ve already suggested, it might further involve demonstrating that the idea of Europe was itself historically produced, has never been simply just ‘there’, and has changed its connotations over time. As has often been pointed out, for instance, Europe was not a place or a context that mattered much to the ancient Romans. It might involve revealing and underscoring the human diversities that in different ways have always characterised Europe’s history, putting the lie to any idea of a homogenous ‘white’ European past, whilst doing justice to the processes of exclusion which have often been directed, often cruelly, at these diversities, as set out in R.I. Moore’s concept of the persecuting society, in which the centre defined itself through and against the margins.

It should be stressed that Europe has always been a culturally plural region, though not always peacefully so, as you mentioned earlier. And this approach might involve using comparative approaches, partly to highlight how European history has never embodied the whole world’s history.

In all these aspects, I believe historians looking at the Middle Ages have a significant contribution to make. After all, Kathleen Davis has shown how representations of the Middle Ages were central to European conceptions of (and thus interventions in) the wider world in the nineteenth century. Rethinking the European Middle Ages critically thus destabilises eurocentric analyses from within, so to speak. Approached this way, the study of European history can perhaps not only escape the trap of eurocentrism, but contribute significantly to springing it. Eurocentrism is fundamentally a problem of historical method, not of content. But historians of Europe, including those looking at its more remote past, may nevertheless have a necessary role to play in dismantling it at source. Ignoring or downplaying European history, especially in European pedagogical contexts, might be done for the right reasons, but, in leaving older narratives intact, have all the wrong results.

So far we have spoken about ‘eurocentrism’ as a timeless concept for interrogating pedagogies, particularly those related to courses in modern and medieval European history. But I think it is worth exploring in historical perspective how and when the critique of eurocentrism itself has emerged. The term ‘eurocentrism’ dates back to a specific moment in European and global history and in some ways remains restricted by it. It actually came into circulation in France, coined by the Egyptian-French political economist Samir Amin in 1988. Related critical terminology emerged around the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and in Britain, coined by Edward Said at Columbia, Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies group at Sussex, Teodor Shanin and his studies of the sociology of the global peasantry at Sheffield, and others. One could also throw books such as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) into this mix.

These critiques of European hegemony emerged at a time of globalisation and also at the height of the Cold War, and reflect the circumstances of this dual moment. What the above-mentioned authors had in common was their critical reflection on the structures of the bipolar world order and its critical shadow, the non-aligned movement, reflected in terminology such as the ‘Third World’, coined in the early 1950s by another French intellectual, Alfred Sauvy. Their use of the term ‘eurocentric’ entailed a critique of capitalism which, however, remained distant from orthodox or Soviet Marxism.

They were influenced by critical readings of Hegel, and of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which, though written in the mid-1920s, were only translated into English in the 1970s, and which focused on the concept of ‘hegemony’ and the question of subaltern subjectivity. They were also observing contemporary events such as the peasant-driven revolutions of the non-western world. Even though these authors used terms such as ‘development’ and ‘Third World’, they also felt trapped by them. Teleologies came under attack not only from scholars like Amin and Said, who sought to draw attention to the significance of non-European and especially non-Christian civilisations, but also Shanin, who engaged critically with more Eurocentric Marxist conceptions of revolution such as those offered by Eric Hobsbawm.

Forty years from the minting of ‘eurocentrism’, it is time to re-evaluate the circulation of this coin in the context of modern political economies. We have discussed how ‘eurocentrism’ is used as a critique of an ideology which justifies Europe’s dominant position within the global capitalist world system, and as such coupled with a demand to reduce the proportion of attention given to the history of Europe in the teaching of modern history. But even more problematically, the critique of ‘eurocentrism’ often goes hand in hand with the demand to reduce the history of the pre-modern world altogether. I think both dogmatic interpretations of the critique can be very damaging to the discipline.

As a modernist, I am very aware that it is historians of pre-modern periods who have pioneered a variety of methods designed to help bring to live the past lives of those not recorded in institutionalised or written histories, including intellectual history sensitive to marginal voices, oral history, discourse analysis, studies of material culture; they have examined plural ideas of development, contradictory beliefs, forgotten ideologies. There has been an expansion of valid sources for historians together with an expansion of methods to pursue questions about the past (hence the various ‘turns’ since the 1970s). Knowing how to draw on records such as inquisition protocols to tell the history of its victims comes in handy when dealing with modern histories of oppression and persecution, whether it is by the KGB, the Stasi, or Pinochet’s regime. It would be foolish to, say, diminish the place of French historiography by following a zealous attempt to remove European components because in this context. In using ‘eurocentrism’ too fanatically as a tool, one risks throwing out many methodological riches which have accumulated in this domain. The same goes for other peculiarities of European historiographies.

The 20th-century critiques of eurocentrism were not absolutely new, but rather, updated versions of a range of critical positions towards the West which themselves go back much further. They appear in the European Enlightenment, in Russian discourses of anti-westernism from the 19th century, in German mid-twentieth century anti-Westernism, in the anti-westernism of the Ottoman Muslim world, as well as in the political thought of much of South East Asia. In the two intervening centuries, this question as such has often faded from view due to a range of factors, including the rise of nationalism as well as new forms of imperialism which were coupled with the rise of racial science that justified past colonial interventions by drawing up systems of difference. In this context, in Europe itself, history became entrenched as an academic discipline at leading universities, many of which served not only universal but also national purposes – most prominently, in France, with a new, more meritocratic system of higher education promoted by Napoleon.

By the mid-19th century, one answer to the original Enlightenment question regarding the cosmopolitan purposes of history writing was given by Hegel, who could be described as a liberal ideologue for the Prussian state. His answer in the Philosophy of History essentially pitted European history as the focus of universal history, because, as he saw it, it was in and through European history that the ‘world spirit’ manifested itself. It was only in the aftermath of the Second World War that the original Enlightenment preoccupation with cosmopolitan purposes returned to the agenda of public discourse, shaped not least by institutions such as UNESCO but also from within the universities. Here is where ‘eurocentrism’ came into view. It is undeniable that Europe – and I mean in the first instance, western Europe – acquired a dominant position as an object of historical enquiry not only due to the role of some European powers and groups in the political and economic history of the world but also, more narrowly, because of the historical dominance of Germany, France, Britain and the European influence on the US within the modern university system. Unsurprisingly, the critique of this hegemony first emerged in the very institutions which have been shaped by it.

What neither the Enlightenment cosmopolitans nor the present-day critical thinkers like to discuss is the complicity of the elites of colonised countries in processes of colonisation, and the sheer varieties of racism, internal colonialism and slavery within Europe itself. This is a point forcefully made by Frantz Fanon in his critique of the ‘national bourgeosie’ in his 1961 classic Wretched of the Earth.  Terms such as slavery, racism, and Orientalism, have their place within the relationship of Europeans with other Europeans as well, and I see it as one of my tasks as an historian of Europe to remind students about this.

To explore this in a more multi-directional way, there is now a formidable Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (2018), with a chapter on China ‘from Manchu to Mao’ by our Sheffield colleague Tehyun Ma, work by Joya Chatterji on decolonisation in South Asia, decolonisation in Eastern Europe by James Mark and Quinn Slobodian, my LSE colleague David Motadel on transnational aspects of Islamic movements against empire, and many others. For Eastern Europe, there is much to learn here at the level of theory and research design from historians such as Alexander Etkind and his students. I wonder how these themes of empire, imperialism, and internal colonisation play out in the context of medieval history, with the shadow of the Roman empire and its diverse legacies lingering on.

While 19th-century empires were different from preceding forms of empire, empire itself was obviously not a modern or indeed a European invention. Parts of early medieval Europe can in some ways be considered a post-imperial set of societies (though not of course Byzantium), and medieval historians have extensively studied colonisation processes within Europe. And there’s a huge and exciting body of work about ethnicity and, more recently, race in the Middle Ages, often led by medievalists of colour. This latter body of work isn’t without its critics – Vanita Seth’s recent piece in History and Theory is important here – but the point that many of the analytical tools often used to describe European involvement with the wider world have purchase on Europe itself is crucial. Treating Europe and the wider world differently from a methodological point of view can be just another, more subtle form of eurocentrism.

To wrap up: the question how historians of Europe should somehow change their practice of research and writing in the light of such critiques does not have a self-evident answer. What does it mean to provincialise Europe in historiographical practice, and in what sense does revalorising the non-European world depend on devalorising the idea of European civilisation? As soon as you start thinking in these terms, you will find the implications of ‘eurocentrism’ as a term to be very prescriptive and the historical accounts they are based on misleadingly reductive.

Many history departments in the UK have recently ‘globalised’ their modern history courses. But even here you have many possible paths for implementing such an agenda. In designing course readings and supporting students´ independent research projects, I see broadly two options. Either I simply remove or reduce readings focusing on Europe. Or I let students work through them and deal with their various imperfections and shortcomings before starting their own explorations. My sense is that students generally are susceptible to manifestos of progress, they want to land on the right side of history, and any promise of shortcuts in this direction is therefore highly appealing. I’ve already written elsewhere about a tendency lately to divide up past thinkers into ‘purely’ progressive or ‘purely’ reactionary figures, by the standards of our day, which, in my view, can only lead to a shallow and self-serving celebration of the ideas of one’s own generation.

Or take another example. What should students from China learn when they study the history of European racial science and its ties to colonial governance? The easier path is to dismiss this history as a problem of the West, to embed it in a political language of anti-westernism. It is far more arduous to think of the ways in which similar processes might be, or might have been, occurring in China itself. Yet, in my view, it is the arduous path that has more potential to lead to new critical histories of modernity, precisely because it does not culminate in the certainty of what it means to be on the right side of history. Students can be selective in exposing ‘eurocentrism’, but in fact they are as unfamiliar with the geography and politics of Eastern and Southern Europe as they are with the distinction between socialist and capitalist-aligned African states during the Cold War. Pitting the study of one against the other because one is supposedly more European than the other misses the point: what is needed is contextual knowledge of modern history, the ability to pinpoint the relevance of one’s local case study in a global framework.

Another way to think about this is that genuine historical inquiry itself rarely starts from narrative. Rather, the story comes at the end. Often the questions take root when you read a text or a document from the past and enter into a dialogue with it. Take, for instance, a historical text such as Max Weber’s (unfinished) study of music as a case study of rationalisation, supposedly a linchpin of western modernity. An intellectual historian who studies this text today will rightly see it as a work of political thought on Europe and the West – but in the 1950s the text would have been contextualised as a case study in sociology as such. In this sense it would be beneficial to ‘provincialize’ Max Weber, but certainly not excise him from the canon.

For all its shortcomings, it was Weber’s status and later, the canonical status of his works, which gave recognition and visibility to non-western musical systems. Moreover, one could look at Weber’s intellectual encounters with W.E.B. DuBois, for instance, in the light of which a re-examination of such a European and decidedly eurocentric text could lead to a productive investigation around the use of musical notation and oral tradition as a source of political thought. This also brings me to related concern raised by many critics of ‘eurocentrism’, which is the demand to reduce the study of canonical thinkers and approaches. Yet some canonical histories have historically been a great bridge introducing underrepresented topics and people to the academy.

I’m sure that the term ‘eurocentrism’ has produced a lot of constructive debates in the past, and the term has become a natural part of our vocabulary, but the sort of disciplinary self-criticism that is needed today should transcend a narrow use of such terminology. It could instead take into account a question that has been debated since at least the Enlightenment, and some landmark interventions by authors such as Kant and Herder (1784), namely: What does it mean [for historians of Europe] to write history with a cosmopolitan purpose? I have tried examining these sorts of questions myself in conversation with colleagues in a volume I edited, called Cosmopolitanism in Conflict.

It is all the more important given that the decades of globalisation have redistributed power geographically – not in the sense of an actual social redistribution of wealth, but in the sense of co-opting more geographical areas as sites of power. This means that the holders of financial capital or power and their locations are no longer as visibly ‘European’ as in the 1980s. Secondly, the globalisation of the university sector, particularly in Britain and the United States, has created a mixed global population of students and academics. But the financial structure particularly of British universities is such that they are only accountable to make provisions for socially inclusive teaching (ie support for students who cannot fund themselves) on a national level, which means that students from places such as the ‘Global South’ or what is now called the ‘Global Majority’ tend to come from much wealthier social backgrounds. The problem of the asymmetry of class in the representation of students outside Britain in my view is often being overlooked. All this has implications for the way in which historians might self-critically reflect on the future of their discipline in research and teaching.

I would like to go back to the Herderian terms of asking the question what it might mean to practise history in a cosmopolitan sense, ie in the interests of all humanity, but also add the dimension of social diversity to this agenda. Historical research is among other things also a process of communication. What is needed is a framework which enables scholars and researchers to form a dialogue with multiple local, national, and global communities – the opening up of universities for this kind of conversation beyond their competitive market relations and rankings. Interestingly, one of the few positives of the pandemic has been the provision of exciting opportunities for just that.

Whatever the problems of modern history are, using the term ‘eurocentrism’ to impose modes of thinking on others strikes me as an unnecessary kind of puppeteering. It is productive when used as an invitation for a conversation, but good historical research comes from thinking about things for yourself, and from open encounters with other minds, including unsavoury characters. Historical research as I see it is not particularly suited for resolving problems, it is there to involve us in them, however uncomfortable the insights.

Charles West is a Reader in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, where he’s taught since 2008. Current research projects include a collaborative Anglo-German study of local priests in tenth-century Europe, and a general history of eleventh-century Europe, under contract with OUP. His most recent publication is on early medieval ideas of the secular . 

Dina Gusejnova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International History at LSE, having previously taught Modern History at the University of Sheffield from 2015 to 2019. Her current research explores the circulation of ideas of citizenship and nationality in Europe during the Second World War, most recently, in this article on German ideas of Englishness in the context of wartime internment . 

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The Future of European History

John R. Gillis | Apr 1, 1996

For some time now attendance at the annual meetings of the AHA's Modern European Section has been declining. Sensing a shift, the organizing committee of the section asked me to conduct an informal survey of colleagues in preparation for a general discussion of the future of the field at the 1996 AHA annual meeting in Atlanta. In the course of nine months I talked to more than two dozen seasoned scholars. 1 The survey was in no way systematic, but it did identify a set of concerns and speculations that were presented at the section breakfast in Atlanta this past January.

This was not the first time that Europeanists in this country have paused to reflect on the state of the field. The first survey was conducted by Chester P. Higby in the mid-1920s. What he found was not exactly encouraging. Practitioners of European history on this side of the Atlantic were few, overworked, underpaid, and often unpublished. Many had never been to Europe, and few had done serious work there. "There are still professors of European history in the United States, however, who shy at anything written in a foreign language," he reported. To make matters worse, students were interested only in the recent European past, threatening to "reduce the modern European history curriculum to courses in recent politics and current events." The only really promising developments Higby could find were the advent of the Journal of Modern History , the creation of new university presses, and the founding of the Guggenheim and Commonwealth Foundations. 2

Seventy years later the condition of the field is vastly different. Higby could not have anticipated the spectacular growth in numbers of Europeanists and their intellectual influence that began in the 1940s and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. But, among those I have spoken with, there is a sense that European history may well have reached its apogee in this country. Several noted that it can no longer be assumed that European history will be Americans' second history. As our national demographics change, so does our sense of origins. British history has been particularly affected by this, but so too has the rest of European history. While, to date, few European history positions seem to have been lost, there is the feeling that departments are much more likely to look to non-Western fields in defining future hires. European history is no longer the surrogate for world history, and, while many Europeanists are now involved in teaching a variety of global history courses, we may anticipate further displacement.

Several colleagues also expressed the belief that Europe was no longer the source of inspiration it once was. It has been a very long time now since the Annales and Past & Present moved large numbers of American historians. And now even the well of poststructuralist theory appears to have gone dry for those who only a decade ago would have eagerly awaited the latest French ideas. There is some feeling that Europe's intellectual capital has moved east to Berlin, but there is as yet little evidence of an intellectual Drang nach Osten.

Yet, even those most concerned by these trends are generally optimistic. Several of my interlocutors pointed out that whether or not one believes European history is in eclipse is really a function of where one looks. The gathering of the European Section at the AHA annual meeting may have lost its constituency, but the proliferation of nationally oriented journals and organizations with frequent regional meetings more than makes up for this. The emergence of strong regional interest goes back at least to the 1940s, when the Slavic Review and the Journal of Central European History were founded. By the late 1950s, the French and Italian fields had their own journals. British historians were the last to join the party, but by the 1960s they too had their own journal and organization. Furthermore, European history is now being practiced under a number of rubrics—gender, social, cultural, family, labor, comparative, and economic history—that have their own meetings, journals, and constituencies. Taken together, there is probably more activity in the European field today than any one scholar can ever comprehend, much less participate in.

As for teaching, those I have spoken with agree that while the quantity of students has dropped, the quality remains remarkably high. The current crop of graduate students and younger faculty is precociously sophisticated and remarkably productive. They cross disciplinary boundaries with admirable ease, and take on subjects previously beyond the range of their elders. If the job market were not so sour, we would have every reason to celebrate these developments.

When it comes to the definition of the field, however, there is general uncertainty. Everyone is aware that the political and economic geography of Europe is changing and that the definition of European history, previously largely Western, is bound to expand to embrace eastern and central Europe. Whether events in the former Soviet Union will make that region a subject of greater or lesser importance is not yet clear, but when we speak of Europe today, we mean something both larger and more complex than the area we studied a decade ago.

Everyone also stressed Europe's changing relationship to the rest of the world. Fifty years after the end of World War II and beyond the Cold War, Europe looks very different. Most agree that it has lost its spatial and temporal centrality, partly because both Marxism and modernization theory are less attractive than they once were. Consequently, Europe—the case both theories used to make their universal claims—can no longer provide a model or a telos. The history that once served as the measure of progress now functions, as one colleague remarked, as the world's laboratory of human error.

It is doubtful that infamy by itself can sustain a field of study, yet it is also true that no other regional history has stepped in to take Europe's place as a historical touchstone. The conditions of the late 20th century give us few clues to the future and thus even fewer guidelines to what we might usefully investigate in the past. But even when divested of its universality and seen as but one of a number of interdependent entities in world history, Europe has gained something. In what some would call its "postcolonial" moment, it is enjoying the luxury of self-assessment, which, in turn, has stimulated great interest in modes of historical consciousness, if not in the actual history itself. In no other place is so much attention being paid to memory. Some may think that this trend signals the end of history as we have known it, but it seems clear that reflexivity need be no threat to the historical profession, unless, of course, the profession refuses the invitation to rethink itself.

But how are changes in Europe affecting America's relationship to Europe and the practice of European history on this side of the Atlantic? The American perspective on Europe has gone through several stages during this century. As Leonard Krieger described it, America's relationship to the world has alternated between detachment and engagement, with European history acting as the "intermediary between America and world history." 3 Until our involvements with Europe in World Wars I and II, Americans treated European history largely as background. Interest centered on the distant past, and it was not until the 1920s that modern European history claimed our attention. As one might have expected, the first to engage with Europe were diplomatic and military historians concerned to understand the origins of the Great War and America's involvement. But beginning with the flight of scholars from fascist Europe in the 1930s, a whole new dimension was added. For the first time, the American practice of European history was Europeanized. A generation of distinguished ÈmigrÈ scholars directed attention to social, cultural, and economic matters, encouraging the kind of archival research that had been rare in earlier generations. The European field deepened but at the same time specialized along national lines. With the great expansion of the American university system in the 1960s and 1970s, departments grew so that it became possible to have specialists in France, Britain, Germany, and Russia—even, in some instances, historians of Spain or Italy. The emergence of social and women's history added still further depth without at all displacing the national focuses.

Today, American scholarship on European subjects is recognized as equal to that produced in Europe itself. While American scholars often feel unappreciated, invitations to prestigious European institutes continue to flow, and the number of American works in translation increases. Now it is European scholars who complain of the difficulties of reaching American audiences. (See "Non-American Historians and the Difficulties of Reaching a U.S. Scholarly Public," Perspectives, February 1996).

However, colleagues are concerned that American scholarship, organized as it is around national histories, may now be out of sync with European tendencies. Over the past decade, Europeans have been frantically Europeanizing, reeducating themselves to national histories other than their own. This has been partly in response to the imperatives of European union and the end of the Cold War, but it is also a product of globalization, which has made Europeans more conscious of their own peculiarities. Just as European anthropologists have "come home," examining European cultures as if they were unfamiliar "others," so European historians are beginning to reexamine their national pasts from the outside in, attempting to discover what is particular, even exotic, about European civilization.

To be sure, the Europeanization of European history is still more idea than reality. Most of the work to date has been comparative, an exchange among national specialists rather than a movement across borders. But however rooted senior European scholars remain, the younger generation now circulating among European universities is bound to bring a different perspective. Perhaps this perspective will be closer to the way European history has been taught, if not researched, in this country. After all, the European survey, often taught under the rubric of Western civilization, is an American invention. American familiarity with the survey format could perhaps allow Americans interested in Europe to take the lead in the reconceptualization and reworking of European history. It is quite possible that major contributions to the Europeanization of European history will come from outside the continent itself, a useful antidote to the "Fortress Europe" mentality that seems to be emerging.

I would be more optimistic about this prospect if it were not that the imperatives of our teaching and scholarship were not so at odds with one another. As we all know, it is monographs that count for tenure and promotion. General history, even the most innovative textbooks, rarely get more than honorable mention when professional awards are handed out. Thus, even as the Europeans steer toward transnational history, we seem bent on holding to the national course. I have come to envision this situation as two ships passing in the night, neither fully aware of the other.

American research and teaching are, however, bound to alter as America's relationship with the world changes. Since World War II we have seen Europe as the eastern frontier of what came to be called Western civilization. The study of Europe's failures became a way of confirming America's special destiny and legitimating its claims as a superpower. As Joyce Appleby has observed, "Exceptionalism is America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism." 4 Now, however, a process of mutual disengagement is occurring, with the result that Europe is ceasing to be the intermediary between America and world history. As Europe Europeanizes and America's sense of unique destiny wanes, historiography on both sides of the Atlantic is turning in new directions.

When Eric Wolf published Europe and the People without History in 1982, his intention was to restore to non-Western peoples some rightful measure of historical agency, to remove them from the category of "other" to which they had been previously assigned. Today, Europeans are the people in search of a history, and non-European historians have a good deal to offer them. Europe needs to borrow non-European methods and perspectives, but to do so, it must lower its traditional intellectual tariffs and rethink itself in unfamiliar terms such as diasporas, borderlands, and peripheries.

One would hope to see a renewed interest in Europe's multicultural and multiethnic heritages. This is already reflected in the growing interest in groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities, once considered marginal despite their numbers. We are just beginning to understand the historical presence of "blacks" in Britain, Arabs in France, Turks in Germany, and so on. In this respect, Americans and non-Western scholars should be in a very good position to contribute to an understanding of hybridities. Indeed, Europeans' recent discovery of race as a relevant category should be an important bridge for global exchange.

From the perspective of the late 20th century, Europe no longer seems as much the product of its own internal dynamics as it once did. Its interdependence with other world regions stands revealed, a condition that is bound to prompt exploration of the history of relations with Asia, Africa, and the Americas, which have tended to be understood largely from a Eurocentric perspective until quite recently. The work that has been done on the Atlantic World of the 17th and 18th centuries has revealed the existence of multiracial, transnational working classes; this work needs to be extended into later periods. Cooperation between historians of colonial America and early modern Europe could provide a model for closing the gap between modern American historians and their European counterparts more generally. Until now, most of the emphasis has been on the Europeanization of the globe. Recent developments suggest that an equally profitable area of research is the globalization of Europe. This process has been going on for hundreds of years, but it has never gotten the attention it deserves. And here the driving forces of the global economy are bound to revive an interest in both the history of cultural exchange and in political economy more generally.

The globalization of European history will surely be an occasion for rethinking the relationship between western and eastern Europe, but it should also give rise to a reconsideration of the place of Europe's northern and southern regions. The privileging of western European nations in the narrative of Europe no longer seems as justified as it once did. The histories of the Scandinavian countries, so marginalized up to now, will no doubt gain greater prominence as interest in the fate of the welfare state grows. Spain's democratization and Italy's economic revival may also turn attention to those countries.

Europeanizing European history will undoubtedly involve a shift from national to transnational subjects. The very concept of nation is much more problematic than it once was and no longer provides a self-evident frame for historical investigation. The proliferation of microhistorical studies is one reflection of this change, but so too is the new interest in regional and even transcontinental histories that defy the old geographies. As one colleague suggested to me, there is a global crisis of territoriality in which "decision space" is separating from "identity space." I suspect that we will see more historical activity at both ends of the geographical scale, reflecting the dialectic of the global and the local that is occurring everywhere in the late 20th century.

It also seems reasonable to predict that the distinction between political and social history will blur as the lines between the public and private spheres become increasingly clouded. The rise of new social movements and the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations in recent decades calls into question boundaries between social and political history. The definition of "The Family" and of private life is no longer so self-evident as it once was. New interest in civil society, or what some have begun to call the third sector, will no doubt be reflected in historical interest in realms like voluntary organizations that do not fit neatly into the old categories of private and public.

The work that has been done by medievalists and early modernists may provide a useful guide for modern European historians. Our colleagues working in earlier periods have been less burdened by the legacies of nationalism, the gendered separation of spheres, and the various secular culture-building projects that began in the 19th century and shaped our agendas until quite recently. I sense that right now early modern history is the more innovative field, perhaps because it has been less constrained by what Habermas has called the "project of modernity," more open to the complexity and diversity that has been there all along but which has become more obvious only in the last couple of decades. One need only to point to religion—an area largely neglected by modern historians—to see what benefits the abandonment of a priori notions of modernity might hold. It is now apparent that there are several modernities that need to be taken into account. This recognition offers us the opportunity to explore aspects of European history that have been treated condescendingly as mere survivals. It may be that we will end up questioning the distinction between the premodern and the modern that defines the way Europe has been approached on both sides of the Atlantic. In any case, our task will surely involve challenging both the periodicities and the geographies that currently prevail.

This is already apparent in the revisionism surrounding the French Revolution. And now that 50 years have passed since the end of World War II, it also seems time to reclaim contemporary history from the political scientists, making it something more than just a coda to modern European history.

As Michael Geyer and Charles Bright have recently pointed out, "we arrive at the end of the 20th century in a global age, losing our capacity for narrating our histories in conventional ways, outward from region, but gaining the ability to think world history pragmatically and realistically, at the interstices of integrating circuits of globalizing networks of power and proliferating sites of localizing politics." 5 Clearly, the boundaries are shifting and Europe is no longer the eastern frontier of what we used to call Western civilization. It is no longer our window on the world or our mirror of ourselves. As America's orientation shifts from west to east, from north to south, Europe can no longer serve as America's intermediary to world history. However, this is not a time for disengagement from European history, but rather the moment to find ways to reintegrate it within a new global history whose temporal and spatial boundaries are just becoming visible. The future of European history is now inseparable from the future of historical studies more generally. It is time to abandon the practices of enclosure that define history as a series of separate "fields," jealously guarded by overspecialized proprietors. Only when we accept our responsibility for our common history will we be prepared to take on the awesome tasks that a global age has assigned us.

1. This report could not have been written without the generosity of William Bouwsma, Susanna Barrows, Thomas Metcalf, Reginald Zelnik, Martin Jay, James Sheehan, Thomas Laqueur, Bonnie Smith, Harvey Kaye, Lawrence Stone, Carl Schorske, Jay Winter, Robert Darnton, Margaret Jacob, Arno Mayer, Joan Scott, Lynn Hunt, Jerrold Seigel, Leonardo Paggi, Philip Nord, Kent Worcester, Louise Tilly, Jim Cronin, Charles Maier, Yani Sinanoglou, Michael Geyer, and Victoria de Grazia. I am only sorry that I cannot acknowledge each for his or her contribution to what is really a collective effort.

2. Chester P. Higby, "The Present Status of Modern European History in the United States," The Journal of Modern History 1 (1929): 3-8.

3. Leonard Krieger, "European History in America," in History, edited by John Higham with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert (1965), p. 236.

4. Joyce Appleby, "Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism," Journal of American History 79, no. 2 (September 1992): 420.

5. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, "World History in a Global Age," American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1058.

John Gillis is professor of history at Rutgers University. His interests have ranged widely since he took his doctoral degree at Stanford University. His most recent book, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values, will be published by Basic Books this summer.

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The Role And Value Of Diaries In Teaching History - Case Study

This article discusses how diaries can broaden the scope of understanding of what history is and what invaluable insight they are for the future historian. The focus will be on what those testimonies say about the concept of history and how this information would be useful for raising awareness about the nature of the subject matter of history. The future historian must be aware that for both the diary writer as well as the historian, the message engulfed in the story is the main concern; it's an interest in itself. While striving to provide accurate information, both are equally preoccupied by the message that is transmitted through what is recorded which eventually forms what is remembered. By using diaries one is able to portray the significance as well as the limitation of the discipline of history. After all, the essence of history is the relationship between the facts or the events so to speak, and grasping that information. Diarists tend to voice their concern about transferring the information into the realm of recording and the significance of the action of recording. The historical awareness of the diary writer should be a concern for the historian as this perpetually questions the value of the information that is gathered to reconstruct an accurate and reliable image of the past. This idea will be discussed using two diaries that were written during the Holocaust: Emanuel Ringelblum's diary – a historical document and Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem)'s diary - a personal intimate diary. Keywords: Diaries Holocaust history teaching objectivity

Introduction

This article seeks to discuss the importance of personal testimonies, more specifically, diaries, to the subject matter of history in general. The major argument here is that diaries are an essential source in order to create a reliable and complete image of the past. Now more than ever, historians are well conscious that historiography is an interpretation conducted in the present and as such, the recreation of the past is influenced by the present ( Drayton, 2011, p 672 ).

As the relative nature of historical narratives is something that cannot be overlooked, the arguments and reasoning against the use of diaries to recreate the image of the past loses its grounds. Diaries, renowned for their subjectivity, may do just the opposite to the historical narrative – they can effectively contribute to history by adding to the non-biased character of the historical account of the present because they bring us the authentic voice of the era discussed ( Garbarini, 2014, p.92 ). This study suggests that the individual's point of view and the local contents of a diary constitute the strength of the historical narrative in mainly two areas: understanding the conceptual-cultural values of the time and the meaning behind phenomena and events discussed ( Goldberg, 2009, p. 227 ).

In this article, the case studies have to do with two WWII diaries which were both written in the Warsaw ghetto. One such diary was intentionally designed to be a historical account under the form of a diary. It was written by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944). The other diary is private, written by Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem) (1900-1980), a psychologist. Despite their differences, both diaries exemplify how we can learn about history in general and in particular using the unique and personal perspectives of both writers. By examining for example, issues of violence or hunger, we may get a better understanding of what lies behind such abstract notions. By looking at the case of the Jewish deportees from Danzig, it may be possible to penetrate their conceptual world and as a result understand their mental difficulties. By focusing on language peculiarities, an additional hidden message about concepts may be revealed.

A glimpse into the diaries

Emanuel Ringelblum was a historian who in 1926 joined YIVO and became head of the Historical Commission where he formulated the distinct methodology for historical research which was to be used also in the Oneg Shabbat Archive. One unique feature of Ringelblum's methodology was using personal accounts written by individuals of different capabilities and qualifications. As mentioned before, in Warsaw he took it upon himself to write a diary which was to record life in the ghetto ( Nizan, 2016, p.30 ). The diary was originally written in Yiddish. The series of monographs which were written in hiding were also in Yiddish except one part, the relationships between Jews and Poles, which was written in Polish. On March 7th,1944 Ringelblum's hideout was discovered. All its inmates including Ringelblum, his son Uri (aged 12) and wife Judith (Józia), were executed at the beginning of March (probably on the 10th) 1944 ( Haska, 2014 ).

Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem) was one of the leaders of the Zionist Right in interwar Poland. One of the unique features of his diary is the fact that it was originally written in Hebrew. Feldschu succeeded in rescuing more than 800 pages of his diary which was never published (Yad-Vashem Archive, Record Group 0.33). The contents of the diary are a remarkable example of an acute power of observation, compassion and poetic capacities. Feldschu's diary (the deciphered part) ends in April 1943, about two weeks before the tragic death of his daughter Josima on 21 April 1943 and death of his grieving wife shortly after her daughter's death ( Weinbaum, 2010, p.24 ).

One last biographical particularity has to do with the biography of both writers. Both were born in the same year, 1900, the same shtetl, Buczacz, east Galicia, and both have kept a diary in the Warsaw ghetto. Rachel Auerbach, Feldschu's cousin was a prominent figure among Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbat co-workers and she too had documented her experiences in the ghetto. During the war, she lived with the Feldschu's family. Ringelblum and Feldschu paths crossed each other many times but their relationship remained estranged (p. 14, 16).

Problems of Writing Holocaust Histories

One very important feature of the Holocaust historical accounts is the fact that they were all written from the point of view of the aftermath. Therefore, for historians, students and the public in general, the shadow of the death dominates the discussion and whether we like it or not, it is also a judgmental reference. Thus, research of "during the Holocaust" or what lies behind the term of Holocaust is overshadowed because the end is known. In his book, David Engel ( 2009 ) discusses the separation of the field of Holocaust research from that of Jewish history to which he opposes. According to Engel, historians of our era should adopt the same attitude that was adopted by earlier Jewish historians when discussing other disasters. For example, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, was indeed place in a central position but it didn't become an obstacle in researching Jewish history in contrast to the manner the holocaust has become. In other words, after the expulsion, historians relating to previous events refrained from weighing them in light of the expulsion. Engel believes that historians of our era should do the same with the holocaust and it mustn't cast its shadow backwards. (p.46, p.258). Furthermore, the aftermath of the Holocaust left no "room for recovery", no possibility for rehabilitation and therefore the void and its implications makes it very difficult to recreate an accurate image of the past.

In fact, part of the problem in researching the Holocaust is being able to understand the reasoning of perpetrators as well as victims at the time it happened. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust victims, it is crucial because part of the "success" in torturing and annihilating the Jews has to do with the manner they conceived what was happening to them. The conceptual world and reasoning which was based on the past which didn't include such experiences, made it almost impossible to grasp the present. In an entry from June 30, 1942, which Ringelblum ( 1989 ) writes after the broadcast on London Radio about the annihilation of Jews, he keeps asking why the world is silent. At times he answers: they didn't know but then he contradicts himself as he understands they knew about other events that were less conspicuous. Yet, further on he chooses to stick to the belief that the information transmitted to London was new to them and that was the reason nothing was done. (p.297). Ringelblum, a secular scholar and a Communist, begins his interpretation of events at the ghetto according to patterns he is familiar with, that is that to every effect there is a cause. Only later on he realizes that what he was witnessing was radically different and did not match familiar patterns of thinking ( Simon, 2015, p.137 ).

Feldschu who is a religious man and whose diary is not a historical diary also demonstrates the growing sense of awe and confusion at the events and rumors that keep flowing into the ghetto. He too demonstrates the incapacity to grasp the events but unlike Ringelblum, he is less cautious with his words. Already on December 1940 Feldschu says about himself that he considers himself to be almost proficient in the history of all peoples and the "... the ways of history are clear to me just as the paths of the ghetto… and I found in no nation such brutality … It isn't for nothing that the Huns have settled in the land of Germany and from their guts they gave birth to these jewels." (Yad-Vashem Archive, Record Group 0.33, pic 29) In other words, Feldschu refers to his acquired knowledge of history in order to try and make sense of what is happening around him but in vain. The explanation that he finds is biological, according to him, the Germans behave in this way as they are descendants of the Huns.

Almost from the beginning, it was becoming more and more evident that it was difficult to find words not only to describe what Jews were experiencing, but neither could they decipher a meaning or logic in the occurrences (Kassow, 2007, p. 93-94). Furthermore, the unprecedented events are characterized by being sensed as inconceivable and unpredictable. In any case, the speed of calamities barely allowed reasoning of any sort (p. 352).

In other words, in order to truly grasp a glimpse of what it was like, one needs the point of view of the men who experienced it. We now know that this destruction is possible, but the tortured were unaware of the outcome. That is why what they say represents a crystalized insight into their capacity of interpretation at the time of writing ( Garbarini, 2014, p.92 ). Their point of view is what can help historians produce a more accurate account not only of what it was really like, but also of how events were understood, and what influenced them when making choices.

Historical Awareness

Events and their meaning - violence.

Both Ringelblum and Feldschu report about incidents of deliberate, sporadic and unpredictable violence. On 27 December 1940, about a month after the ghetto was surrounded by a wall and categorially no one was allowed out, Ringelblum reports the following: "… at about 3:30 in the afternoon, a taxicab stopped at the small shop of a merchant selling tailor supplies …. A soldier emerged with Jewish companions. They emptied the shop completely. Having finished this piece of work, they left. Suddenly, with a rare calm, the Gestapo man pulled out his revolver and shot point blank into a crowd of Jews that happened to be standing around. They were all merchants who worked on the other side of the street. The result was that an 11 year old child fell dead; a woman from Dzielna Street lay badly wounded." ( Ringelblum, 1989, p. 114 )

This passage should draw attention first of all because of the date. This incident occurs after a little more than a year of ghettoization and only about a month after it was sealed. Apparently, by then Jews had already become "accustomed" to such occurrences and were no longer surprised to be robbed or beaten up. Equally, a logical reason for such behaviour is not sought, it is clear to everyone that it is abuse for fun. The Germans appear to think that it is acceptable and Jews know there is nothing that can be done against it, not even against the sporadic shooting. Furthermore, it seems that is Warsaw, soldiers were expected, at least by their comrades to be brutal to Jews. In his diary, Ringelblum (1999, p.87) writes about the fear to treat Jews decently. A German soldier was talking politely to a Jew but when he saw another German approaching, he raised his voice and shouted at him to go away quickly adding a curse. This report is preceded by Ringelblum's characterization of Germans being afraid to be civil to Jews.

Four other incidents of a similar nature are described on the same date, but in a fifth Ringelblum writes that at the corner of Chlodna and Zelazna, there was a discussion between a Jewish policeman and a German soldier about Jews. In an answer to the German who said that if he were a Jew he would commit suicide, the Jewish guard who "could contain himself no longer" ( Ringelblum, 1989, p.115 ) replied that the Jews were an antique people that have already "endured a great deal" (p.115) after which Ringelblum says “that did not prevent him from stopping Jews afterward and making them do calisthenics holding a brick in either hand." (p.115) Ringelblum whose report was intended to show the composure of a historian infiltrates his attitude by choosing to interpret the policemen's reaction and say that he could no longer remain quiet and by judging the German through adding “that did not prevent him from stopping Jews…".(p.115)

Between December 1940 – January 1941, Feldschu also writes about sporadic and arbitrary violence. Yet after describing a typological case a paragraph later (Yad-Vashem Archive, Record Group 0.33, pic. 30), Feldschu writes about a case that can be traced to a person. A certain gendarme who was considered to be a good man (as he allowed smuggling) was asked why he shot into the people's houses and he answered that "he really liked the scream of the man before his death." (0.33, pic. 30) This is followed by a very angry, cynical, and frustrated passage that goes from calling the shootings "a private sports that each German … a son of the nation of scholars and poets, who read a lot but who aspires to create that scream of the dying and has found here the opportunity to complete his education…" (0.33, pic. 30)to an infuriated series of frustrated cries of astonishment "is it possible, can you imagine this, that a healthy man, who dominates everything, who is master of his senses, who has but one sparkle of humanity in him, would pick up his rifle and shoot for the sake of sport and kill people?!" (0.33, pic. 30). Apparently, capricious cruelty was a norm in the ghetto and the German high commanders as well as the Gestapo were not in the least concerned with the conduct of their soldiers.

Furthermore, it is visible that Jews were not surprised when it happened but those incidents remained unpredictable and extremely terrorizing. Both Ringelblum's descriptions that at least at that stage, so meticulously try to avoid that which may not sound objective, betrays his own feelings by choosing words like "that did not prevent him from…" ( Ringelblum, 1989, p.115 ) as well as Feldschu's much less "objective" observations reveal how helpless Jews felt and how incomprehensible and for that matter, despite it all, surprising and deeply traumatizing these events were.

Events and Their Meaning - Hunger

Hunger and associated troubles such as disease, beggary, smuggling, degradation, crime, but also decadent lavish parties and depravity, have struck the ghetto right from the beginning. Feldschu recounts about an extraordinary event he had witnessed just before the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, December 1940. He writes about two children that made it a habit of theirs to show up at the committee soup kitchen and "gazed [at the food] with lustful eyes and hunger" (0.33, pic. 25). Despite their evident desire to eat, they run away each time someone approached them and offered them food. Later when Feldschu is able to discover who the mother is, he writes: "In an extremely clean room and dreadfully cold, at the corner there was a woman sitting and it seemed she was probably once really beautiful as even today her eyes were still shining with splendour. Her face features were carved like a statue and in all her bony and scrawny body there were traces of beauty and aristocracy." (0.33, pic. 26). The woman told them that her husband, who was a lawyer, had died six months earlier and that they were chased out of their home. Feldschu and his companion told her that her children refused to taste the soup they were offered and when they finally accepted, they begged Feldschu not to tell their mother about it. “‘They tasted?' She screamed in such a strange voice that we became alarmed. Maybe she lost her mind. She called the children who were by now really trembling. Probably afraid of being hit. … we began, calming her down and asking what was wrong with them tasting a few drops of soup? We couldn't understand her anger. 'You gentlemen from the committee may be soulful but you can’t understand the sorrow of a woman-mother whose whole possession is the children and she aspires only one thing, the death of these children without agonizing for too long. We are close to achieving the goal. Today is the fifth day that we tasted nothing not even water and my greatest hope is that in two days or maybe three we shall be dead. We will die together and you, you are in the way. Giving the children soup to make their suffering longer. you can’t give them enough to eat so why would you torment them and lengthen their sufferings, now that we are close to achieving our goal.' "(0.33, pic. 27)

The Lawyer's wife insight that by eating insufficiently she was extending their torment is shared by Ringelblum only about two and a half years later. On May 26, 1942, Ringelblum writes the following about the inefficient if not futile efforts of the social help in the ghetto to sustain people: "The social help doesn't solve the problem; it sustains people for a short while. People are anyway doomed so it only extends their agony but doesn't bring salvation …. The fact remains that those who eat in kitchens die anyway as the little soup and dry bread cannot sustain them. It should be asked whether it wouldn't be better to assign the money to help a selected group, the socially active, spiritual elite etc. …second, the question remains why should we condemn to death those who are artisans, workers and … the tragic question remains, what to do? Should one small teaspoon be given to each and then no one remains alive or should we give some people abundantly to resuscitate them?" ( Ringelblum, 1989, p.371 )

The two passages obviously demonstrate not only the severe degree of hunger but also the despair that was part of it. The lawyer's wife was obviously among the very poor and that is why she and her family were among the early victims of hunger. Sadly, her story shows how the humiliation and degradation had broken her spirit before her body. Without being judgmental, rather than reacting, she chose to remain passively quiet and inflicted that reasoning on her children too. This may indicate as for her degree of composure but it also shines on the helplessness of the children who were struggling with their healthy instincts of staying alive and getting something to eat instead of starving.

The despair of that woman catches up with Ringelblum, at least in writing, only two and a half years later, on the verge of the massive deportations that was about to begin and of which no one had clear knowledge but everyone sensed approaching. Of the two texts, Ringelblum's whose passage is impersonal and doesn't relate to a particular human being, demonstrates clearly how impossible the situation in the ghetto was and what dreadful daily choices people had to make. At this stage, he too finds it difficult to keep his emotions to himself and rather than keeping the composure of the detached historian, the inner debates that have probably been overwhelming him for some time, surfaces onto the page.

Understanding the Conceptual – Cultural Framework

The degree of gravity of the war against the Jews and how it is conceived can be detected by the choice of vocabulary. One very interesting example has to do with the difference between the English versions to the original (Yiddish) as well as the Hebrew, in the word Ringelblum chooses to describe Germans ( Ringelblum, 1985, p. 203 ). He refers to them as "Yevanim" which means Greeks. Sloan, the English translator, chose to write "soldiers" and in that the feelings behind Ringelblum's chosen term is lost. But Ringelblum's choice is meaningful and reflects the fact that it was not unusual for Jews to refer to enemies of the Jewish people by the name of "Greeks" who have traditionally been considered as one of the nations that have tried to annihilate Jews and Judaism. For a Jew reading the text in the original language, the term "Yevanim" bears a lot of significance.

If Ringelblum's choice at this stage (December 1940) was prophetic and he expressed what he hadn't yet conceived, what both Ringelblum and Feldschu write about the German Jews is insightful and shows that they were unable to grasp the events and decipher much of what was going on. ( Ringelblum, 1999, p.363 ) Feldschu dedicates quite a lot of pages to the Jews of Danzig who arrived to the Warsaw ghetto on March 1941. Feldschu learns that a relative of his is among the deportees. He goes to meet him and once he arrives, he sees more than 500 people standing quietly in the yard not knowing what to do with themselves. However, he writes that he is immediately able to distinguish between the Jews of Polish origin that lived in Danzig to those who were Jews of German origin. The former were already engaged in organizing their "new lives" while the Germans appeared lost, gazing around them with stupefaction. (Yad-Vashem Archive, Record Group 0.33, pics 68-69)

Feldschu continues writing that his relative was nearly out of his mind when for some obscure reason; the Germans had started shooting into the crowd. Given the fact that the relative tells Feldschu afterwards about the deportation and its horrors, one might have expected the relative not to be so surprised at the shooting.

The relative begins by saying that when it all started, they were absolutely certain no one would touch them and the decree was meant against the Jews of the East. But they were wrong and in a few hours they were all chased out of their houses into the ghetto. The local Germans apologized for this but said that the orders came from Berlin. The Jews tried to get out of there, even to Palestine of which they didn't want to hear about previously. Unfortunately, only one ship was able to leave. At first, life became better thanks to the Eastern Jews who were much more resourceful than the German Jews. But all of a sudden they were ordered to pack. They were put on trains which stopped in Tczew where they were robbed again of the little possessions they had been left with, and then out into barracks.

The brutality of the Germans provoked 11 ex-officers of the German army to wear their old uniforms and go and speak to the manager. Even though the others tried to hold them back they went. As soon as the "sadist" (0.33, pic. 72) saw them he asked them to approach and as they did he slapped the first with enormous force. Then, they started hitting them all while shouting, "Bloody Jews, don’t you know that a Jew isn't allowed to wear the uniform of a German officer!" (0.33, pic. 72) They were astonished but did not run away until the young officer started hitting them with the butt of his revolver. "March home, get dressed and come back!” (0.33, pic. 72) He shouted. The two weeks they remained in that camp were hell on earth especially for those 11 whose life was made especially difficult. People found out that they were planning to commit suicide but their relatives and everyone else convinced them to renounce the plan. Only the old man who was slapped first became very ill and died on the way to Warsaw.

The examples given show how complex the recreation of the past is. Those who train the future historians must draw their attention to the fact that without the authentic point of view of the epoch discussed, one might misjudge the past. For it is the contents of diaries that provide the historian with the décor that the abstract term can't convey.

To begin with, Ringelblum's accounts were meant to be historical. For him, history was what related to the majority and not only to the ruling classes (Kassow, 2007, p.38). Ringelblum's accounts try to be as objective and precise as possible but it is the anecdotes themselves that are revealing. Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem) was not a historian but he was a psychologist and his diary certainly proves that he had a very penetrating eye to the individual's sole. Ringelblum's monologue about the problem of hunger is heart breaking just as Feldschu's story of the lawyer's wife and her children is. The dilemmas, decisions, human agonies that are engulfed in both entries can't be conveyed otherwise.

The same goes for what is expressed through the few examples of the conceptual-cultural problems. These are visible also through the language which too mirrors the past. When Feldschu calls the Germans "Huns", (the example doesn’t appear in this article), he relates to the history and the origin of the German people. He uses his own knowledge about them to try and understand them in his present. And Ringelblum calling the Germans "Greeks" shows what a historical meaning the word "Greeks" bears for the Jews. These attempts, of using past experiences to understand the present can't be conveyed without using diaries.

For years Jews have been portrayed as the passive part in this war. How could anyone think otherwise if it hadn't been for the diaries? If one doesn't encounter a passage such as that which describes the Jews of Danzig, how can he understand that they were unable to break with concepts, ideas and a whole world of the mind? But it's not only the German Jews that demonstrate such a level of understanding and deciphering the occurrences. Were the Jews of Poland, France or any other country better at understanding? If one is not exposed to the state of mind of the actors on the scene, how can anyone attempt to write about them?]

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• Engel, D. (2009). Facing the Volcano, The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History,. Group 0.33, Testimonies, Diaries and Memoirs Collection, File Number 959-III Deciphered, Yad-Vashem Archive
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• Goldberg, A. (2009). The Victim's Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,, 41
• Haska, A. (2014). Last Days of Emanuel Ringelblum.. Jewish Historical Institute Blogs. http://www.jhi.pl/en/blog/2014-03-07-last-days-of-emanuel-Ringelblum, viewed January, 41
• Kassow, D S. (2017). Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive,
• Nizan, . (2016). Politics and History in Emanuel Ringelblum’s War Diaries. Emanuel Ringelblum between the Two World Wars',. European Dialogue and Cultural Diplomacy, issue 2, http://journal.centruldedic.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/20162.pdf, Viewed
• Ringelblum, E. (1985). Writings from the Warsaw ghetto, volume I
• Ringelblum, E. (1999). Diary and Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto,, --
• Ringelblum, E. (1989). Notes from The Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emanuel Ringelblum, Edited and translated by Sloan Jacob,
• Simon, A. (2015). The Modern Haman: Ghetto Diary Writers, Understanding of Holocaust Perpetrators,. A Journal of Culture and History, Holocaust Studies, 17:2-3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2011.11087282, accessed October, 41
• Weinbaum, L. (2010). Shaking the Dust off': The Story OF The Warsaw Ghetto's Forgotten Chronicler, Ruben Feldschu (Ben Shem)',, 41, 06-04

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Nizan, V. (2018). The Role And Value Of Diaries In Teaching History - Case Study. In V. Chis, & I. Albulescu (Eds.), Education, Reflection, Development – ERD 2017, vol 41. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 779-787). Future Academy. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2018.06.93

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Turning Points in European History

Early Draft The inexorable passage of human history has been punctuated by events that have radically shaped the development of societies throughout the world. These turning points as defined by historians have profoundly affected people lives through their indelible impact on political, economic, and social landscapes. Two such events, the Crusades and the Bubonic plague were pivotal events in European history that saw the traditional framework of Feudalistic Europe dismantled and the seeds of a renaissance planted. The Crusades were a series of military campaigns sanctioned by the Pope in response to the looming Muslim threat in the East. Exhorted by the Catholic Church and enticed by promises of fortune, power, and redemption, the crusaders rose from Europe and set out to wage holy war.

Though failing to achieve their original purpose, the crusades inadvertent success came from managing to facilitate greater contact between Europe and Asia. This Bridging of East and West resulted in an influx of trade and ideas reaching Europe to revive a stagnant economy and spur intellectual activity. These developments would in part give rise to the commercial revolution which would change the course of Europe and definitively erase the last vestiges of feudalism. The Bubonic plague, also known as the “Black Death” left Europe devastated in its wake. As the pandemic swept across Europe, decimating populations, it consequently weakened its central institutions. As the plague forced survivors to question their own morality and outlook on life, what followed was major social upheaval as people demanded more rights and liberties from their rulers.

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The People’s yearnings to enjoy life lead them to start purchasing goods at an unprecedented scale, this nascent consumerism helped stimulate economic growth and create a burgeoning middle class which enjoyed luxuries that in the past had been available to only the upper echelons of society. With their subjects becoming increasingly self-dependent, Feudal lords suffered a substantial loss of power and social hierarchies that had existed for centuries began to crumble. These were decisive points in history that forever altered the state of Europe. The Crusades and the Bubonic Plague introduced significant changes to Europe and initiated a period of transition from Feudalism. Through these events European society underwent a momentous reformation that has had an enduring influence on its development ever since.

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