Creative Historiography Today: Re-enchanting Isaak Heinemann

This essay reinterprets and builds upon Isaak Heinemann's Darkhe Haʾaggadah (The Methods of Aggadah, 1949) as a distinctive framework for thinking about the making of rabbinic pasts. First, it argues against critiques of the work as misled by German romantic notions of history. Second, it presents a different intellectual context in which to situate Heinemann's search for meaning in history: Hegel's Phenomenology and its contemporary reception by Ernst Cassirer. This context illuminates the problem to which Heinemann responded – a binary between subjective and objective history – and the dialectical alternative that he sought in aggadah: »creative historiography.« In conclusion, it outlines how we could expand Heinemann's framework to include Amos Funkenstein's idea of historical consciousness and Hayden White's analytics of historical tropes. This would help us to compare how rabbinic and other ancient representations of the past forge links between interpreted text, author/performer and audience, by analyzing key terms and phrases, rhetorical structures and broader patterns of discourse.