© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431973_00� Introduction Making History Jewish: Israel Bartal and the Dialectics of Jewish History in Eastern Europe and the Middle East Paweł Maciejko and Scott Ury On the Autonomy of Jewish History Woe is the scholar who has taken it upon himself to summarize the life’s work of Professor Israel Bartal. With hundreds of published articles in a range of languages, more than twenty edited volumes, and a number of collections and monographs, Israel Bartal’s academic career has covered an incredibly wide range of topics in the history of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the Land of Israel from the mid-eighteenth till the twentieth century. In- deed, one would not only be hard pressed to think of a central topic in Jewish history that Prof. Bartal has not written about, but also about the academic study of modern Jewish history without the widespread influence of his many contributions. From Jewish communal institutions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the seeds of secularization across nineteenth-century Eu- rope and from the first iterations of Jewish nationalism to the very politics of writing Jewish history today, one could easily teach an introductory course on modern Jewish history simply by assigning the variegated and insightful works penned by Israel Bartal. Moreover, in each and every session one could discuss how Bartal’s many works illustrate how both historical actors and authors re- peatedly “made history Jewish.” Time and again, Bartal’s research highlights the dialectical process through which larger social, political or intellectual de- velopments were interpreted, internalized and presented by historical figures and scholars as inherently Jewish phenomena. The following collection of twelve articles by an array of leading scholars from academic institutions in Europe, Israel and North America is dedicated to uncovering, tracing and ana- lyzing various case-studies that highlight Israel Bartal’s understanding of the very process of “making history Jewish.” Born in pre-state Palestine to a family from the Galician town of Delatyn, Bartal quickly established himself as a promising student at The Hebrew Uni- versity of Jerusalem in the late 1960s. Through his work as a research assistant