Persistence of Collective Memory over 3,000 Years: The Case of Ancient Versus Modern Israel

Collective memory is a set of historical narratives, beliefs, and customs shared by a social group, such as a community, culture, or nation, over generations. This chapter presents observations concerning the collective memory of the Jewish culture from the vantage point of the science of memory. Evidence for what later came to be regarded as Jewish culture can be traced back more than 3,200 years (i.e., more than 130 generations) ago. The early history of the culture amalgamated fact with fiction over scores of generations in orally reliant communities before being put in writing more than 2,300 years ago in a textual epitome, or credo, of only 63 Hebrew words. The long-term cultural persistence of this foundation core of the collective memory was set at the outset to rely on procedures to ensure regular semantic recitation combined with episodic re-enactment. Since then and up to the present time, memories of a number of major collective traumas have been added to the repertoire of Jewish collective memory. In recent centuries, the ancient credo has contributed to the revitalization and realization of a national movement; yet in doing so, it has also contributed to a rather fast evolution of Jewish collective memory, manifested in its ongoing differentiation into subnarratives that differ, inter alia, in their attitudes toward nationalism and in geographical distribution, religious hue, and populist flavor.