The assassination of memory

In a world determined to forget, to remember is a revolutionary act.

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“There will be no remembrance of former things.” — Ecclesiastes 1:11

“There were few indeed who remembered the republic.” — Tacitus

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.

The fragility of memory

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.”

Tacitus’s insight was, in its way, remarkable. He realized that the Roman republic had been destroyed by forgetting. After the upheavals of the civil wars and the mass assassinations of Octavian and Antony’s proscriptions, almost everyone who remembered how the republic actually worked, who understood Rome’s unwritten constitution, was dead. With the living memory of the old system murdered, the Romans could never reconstruct the republic. They were trapped forever by the tyranny of the emperors, even though this violated what had been the republic’s most sacred value: that no one man should rule in Rome. Chillingly, this had occurred with extraordinary speed. Within a generation, the republic was dead because memory was dead.

The Torah notes the fragility of memory as well, with the famous observation that, even though the Hebrews had been prosperous and influential in Egypt for some time, a pharaoh suddenly arose who “did not know Joseph” and, in an instant, the Hebrews became slaves, an oppressed people, with the memory of all they had given Egypt forgotten and erased.

The unsparing Ecclesiastes summed up this terrible inevitability with the observation, “There will be no remembrance of former things, nor will there be a remembrance of things to come among those to come.” In effect, time itself effaces memory. It is a certainty. Memory is everything, but it is mortal.

This may be why the Sages chose ritual over history to mark the past. Perhaps only the ritualization of memory can prevent its inevitable decay. But this is not the way of most of the world, with the consequences Ecclesiastes poetically laments.

Memory’s assassins

Ecclesiastes and Tacitus’s insights remain as topical as ever, because memory today is not just a victim of time; it is also under attack, both deliberately and by broader social trends.

Regarding the latter, many have noted the relentless currency of today’s media landscape, particularly the social media landscape. Everything and everyone is obsessed with what is going on right now. The landscape shifts with such speed that the past cannot possibly keep up. As such, forgetting has become the norm, and memory does not die but is killed by simple indifference or, indeed, assassination.

It is no shock, then, that as Niall Ferguson and John-Clark Levin have noted, social media has become the most powerful force behind the resurrection of Holocaust denial. As they wrote, “As the algorithmic age takes Holocaust denial mainstream, historians must admit a bitter defeat.”

This defeat may have been inevitable in the algorithmic age. Driven by social media and a 24-hour news cycle, people are now obsessed with the present, with the passing instant, and the emotional sympathies and accompanying political and social conclusions induced by this relentless present are far more satisfying than the burden of remembering what might disturb exciting and comfortable sureties. Thus, memory, which brings with it the weight and consequences of the past, becomes an enemy.

This has terrible consequences, because people now live in those algorithms Ferguson and Levin lament, and people think this is enough. They do not ask their fathers, because they have been taught by the hyperactive forward thrust of today’s media landscape that they do not need to ask.

There is a darker and more insidious force at work in this, however, which is the corruption of one of the few remaining guardians of memory: education. With a totalitarian movement having seized control of primary and higher education systems—and not only in the United States—the purpose of institutions of education has become the disestablishment of memory.

This movement, through works like the 1619 Project, seeks to transform the past into nothing but a vale of tears to be overcome by the institutionalization of its own ideology, whose constitution is left vague but always promised to be redemptive. That it uses selective history to do this is no defense. It does not mean that the movement remembers. It means only that it uses the tools of history to assassinate memory, which will, with terrible logic, destroy both memory and history together.

It does this because the method is essential to totalitarianism itself. To function at all, totalitarianism must not only control but also destroy history and memory, much as Stalin erased his purged colleagues from photographs. For the totalitarian, there can be only today, because if people think of yesterday, of former things, other possibilities may occur to them. There may be those who remember the republic, and thus the exhaustion and resignation that enable tyranny might dissipate. If people can remember, they can remember freedom.

A convenient amnesia

In this sense, memory itself is an act of rebellion, a weapon against tyranny. Perhaps this is why totalitarianism, left- or right-wing, tends to hate the Jews: the Jews always remember. This may also explain why antisemitism, which is fundamentally a totalitarian ideology, must be committed to erasing memory, especially Jewish memory.

For example, Jews today are frequently told that younger generations are turning against Israel because they have grown up only knowing an Israel that is strong and powerful, while the memory of the Holocaust has faded. They “do not know Joseph.” Thus, they see nothing but the latest ostensible atrocity and judge Israel accordingly.

It should be clear that this is caused by something far more powerful than the Holocaust passing out of living memory. It is a case of forgetting what one wishes to forget, of forgetting what seems too onerous to bear. It is a convenient and willful amnesia.

To see Israel as an all-powerful villain does not just demand forgetting the Holocaust, which is horrific enough in itself. It is to forget October 7 and the century of genocidal Arab terrorism that preceded it. It is to forget 2,000 years of exile and oppression. It is even to forget the present, with its howling mobs that have infested the streets for three years, screaming obviously racist slogans and attacking both Jews and non-Jews. Not just history, but what happened yesterday must be assassinated.

This is not just forgetting. It is willful forgetting, forgetting with malice aforethought, forgetting for the sake of self-absolution, forgetting as absolute necessity, because it is the only way the non-Jewish world can forgive itself and thus grant itself the right to repeat its crimes. The antisemite wants, above all, to forget himself, because he has no other means of erasing what he has done.

More sinister, however, is that the antisemites also want to impose this convenient amnesia on us. They want to force us to forget: to forget what was done to us, what they took from us, and what we have regained. To forget what Amalek did to us and how we redeemed ourselves from it. In place of memory, the antisemite wants to impose the present moment, his mad fantasies of Jewish crimes that, in the face of which, he hopes the Jew will forfeit himself.

Memory and rebellion

If there is an answer to all this, it is to hold fast to and defend memory by remembering. Remembering that zakhor is, above all, an admonition to remember who we are and thus, to transform memory into a source of strength and resistance: a rebellion against a world that is determined to forget.

We rebel by remembering what Amalek did to us, because in doing so we understand what he is trying to do to us today. We rebel by remembering our redemption from Egypt, because in doing so we understand the need to redeem ourselves from the Egypts of today.

In doing so, we must remember above all that it is a noble fate to rebel against the world. We rebel, therefore we are. We remember, therefore we are. In doing so, we quietly stand upon a principle that, in a world determined to forget, is a revolutionary one: zakhor.