Benjamin Kerstein: The Assassination of Memory
From Substack: In a world determined to forget, to remember is a revolutionary act.
The Assassination of Memory
Benjamin Kerstein
Substack, July 24, 2026. Read the full essay here.
The historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is perhaps best known for his book Zakhor, titled after the Hebrew command “remember.” In it, Yerushalmi posited that, for centuries, the Jewish people had, in a sense, no history, in that they abandoned history in favor of memory.
Yerushalmi pointed out that the Jews of the Diaspora did not write history, as they had in the ancient world, and relied for knowledge of the past through memory reinforced by ritual, such as the Passover seder. It was only after the trauma of the expulsion from Spain that history again emerged as a Jewish literary genre. For centuries, the Jewish past was a presence, not a text.
This was, in a sense, ancient in and of itself. Memory has always coexisted alongside history in Jewish thought, as proven by passages throughout the Bible that use the term zakhor or variations thereof, such as Deuteronomy 32:7: “Remember the days of old. Consider the years of every generation. Ask your father, he will tell you, and your elders, they will say to you.”
The priority given to memory continues today, with, for example, sites like Yad Vashem and rituals like the sounding of sirens on Israel’s Yom HaShoah emphasizing the collective memory of the Holocaust over the exacting contemplation of specific statistics of the dead and the locations of death camps—though that is common as well. “The six million,” after all, is the measure of the victims for Jews, not the precise digits themselves. One must admit that, in this case, memory may be more accurate, at least emotionally and symbolically, than history, whose detached perspective cannot possibly capture the immensity and impact of the slaughter.
Even the most exacting intellectuals have acknowledged this, with French scholar Pierre Vidal-Naquet, for example, entitling his book on Holocaust denial Assassins of Memory. In the present as in the past, the Jews have chosen the accuracy of memory over the precision of history. Jewish history is, in effect, Jewish memory, and vice versa.
However, Jews have always known that memory is extremely fragile. Perhaps, ironically, this particular fragility was described best by a non-Jew: the ancient Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of the early years of the emperors, “There were few indeed who remembered the republic.”.…
Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is an associate fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto (Wicked Son, 2025).