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Autobiography and Memoir

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The general scholarly consensus has, until recently, held that autobiography is essentially foreign to the communal orientation of traditional Jewish literature and mentality. According to this school of thought, Jewish autobiography is viewed as an exclusively modern phenomenon deriving from those whose attachments to Jewish tradition have been attenuated or severed. The great majority of Jewish autobiographies of pre-Rousseauian origin are indeed best viewed as texts that include autobiographical elements, rather than as autobiography proper. A discussion of Jewish autobiographies must focus largely upon Hebrew and Yiddish texts because those written by East European Jews in German and the Slavic languages belong, with rare exceptions, more comfortably to the literary environment of those languages, rather than to the sphere of Jewish literature. The great exception is the first Rousseau-style autobiography of an East European Jew, Salomon Maimon, which was written in German. Maimon, however, was a trailblazer and, in his day, egregious in almost every respect; moreover, at the time in which he composed his autobiography, any form of secular literature in Hebrew, let alone Yiddish, was virtually nonexistent.

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