About Zmanim

Zmanim

Zmanim, in full "Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly," is a Hebrew-language quarterly journal of history published in Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District of Israel. It was founded in 1979 at the School of Historical Studies of Tel Aviv University, at the initiative of the historians Zvi Yavetz, Shaul Friedlander and Haim Shaked, with the stated aim of publishing articles in Hebrew, on the history of all periods and geographical regions, to the highest academic standards, yet in a form accessible not only to specialists but also to a lay readership. The clean batch record for this rollout lists its city as Tel Aviv and its publishers as Tel Aviv University, the Open University of Israel and the Historical Society of Israel. Zmanim is today published in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, the Department of History, Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the Open University and the Historical Society of Israel, and issued by Balmada, the publishing house of the Open University. For more than four decades it has been one of the principal Hebrew meeting places between professional historiography and the educated reading public.

Founded at Tel Aviv University in 1979

Zmanim was founded in 1979 in the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, at the initiative of three historians of that school: Professor Zvi Yavetz, Professor Shaul Friedlander and Professor Haim Shaked. Its first issue appeared in the autumn of 1979, and it was originally published through the Zmora Bitan publishing house. The choice of founders was itself a programme. Yavetz was a historian of the ancient world, Friedlander a historian of modern Europe and the Holocaust, and Shaked a historian of the modern Middle East; between them they spanned antiquity, Europe and the region, and the journal they created was correspondingly unconfined. In its bibliographic identity the journal is registered with the print ISSN 1565-5261, and its profile in the JSTOR archive summarises its founding formula: established in 1979 at the School of History of Tel Aviv University, to publish articles in Hebrew on the history of all periods and geographical regions, of the highest academic standards, yet accessible to specialists and lay readers alike. Few journals announce so demanding a double loyalty at birth, to the academy and to the public, and fewer still sustain it; Zmanim has done so since the end of the 1970s.

The founders' opening statement and the idea of a meeting point

The first issue opened with an address "To the Readers," quoted in Yossi Mali's study of the journal's cultural revolution in modern historiography, published by Tel Aviv University. The editors began from the polemic over the meaning of history itself: on one side, a call to ignore history and turn one's back on the past; on the other, an intensified search for roots, foundations and national or group identity, as ancient and newer peoples re-examined their pasts, developing peoples raised up histories overshadowed by the white man's dominance, and ethnic groups discovered identities from before the levelling efforts of the nation state. Within the profession, they observed, the ferment was just as great: political and intellectual history had expanded beyond recognition; social and economic history had taken a central place; histories of mentalities, demography, climate, disease and eating habits promised new horizons; schools and approaches fought and fed one another, methods developed and research tools improved, and the historian's craft had changed more in a few years than since the beginning of modern historiography. Between the educated public's general interest in history and the innovations of professional research, the editors concluded, as many meeting points as possible were needed, and Zmanim, a quarterly for history, aspired to create such a meeting point. That sentence is the journal's charter, and its contents ever since can be read as attempts to honour it.

A quarterly without borders: scope and contributors

Zmanim does not restrict itself to any particular aspect of the study of the past, thematic, geographical, periodical or otherwise, and although its concern is history, not only historians write in it. The Hebrew reference description of the journal stresses both points: its range covers world and Jewish history alike, across all periods and regions, and its contributors are drawn from the different disciplines that study the past. Its German bibliographic description adds that it publishes contributions by Israeli historians and also contributions by foreign scholars in translation, giving Hebrew readers access to international historiography they might not otherwise read. The journal contains articles, book reviews, and documents together with their analysis, and frequently an issue is devoted to a particular subject, or carries a thematic cluster of entries alongside other articles. Documented examples of the thematic habit include the special edition devoted to classical studies, co-edited in 2012 by Jonathan Price with Benjamin Isaac, and the issue numbered 114, of spring 2011, on the year 1989 and intersecting narratives of German and European unification, guest-edited by Jose Brunner with an introduction on the double unification. Individual articles recorded in scholars' bibliographies range equally widely: Brunner's study of the Eichmann trial between history and genealogy appeared in issue 98 in 2007, and his essay on Freud's Jewishness in issue 88 in 2004, evidence that the journal's pages carry the contested memory of the twentieth century beside the ancient and medieval worlds of its founders' own fields.

Accessible without surrendering standards

The journal's accessibility, its Hebrew description notes, is achieved by a specific editorial technology: the combination of many pictures and the waiving of footnotes, attained without academic compromise, since this is a professional journal in which the best researchers from the various disciplines publish their articles. The point deserves emphasis, because it distinguishes Zmanim from both of its neighbouring genres. Against the scholarly journal proper, it removes the apparatus that signals rigour to specialists, the dense footnote, and replaces it with illustration and narrative clarity. Against popular history magazines, it refuses to lower the standard of authorship: the same leading researchers who write for peer-reviewed venues write here, and the journal's institutional sponsors are universities and the national historical society. The Historical Society of Israel's own description places the title among its family of journals, alongside Zion, the flagship Hebrew journal of Jewish history published since 1935, and Historia, the biannual founded in 1998 to give world history a Hebrew platform, whose editors' names and peer-review procedures the society sets out in detail. Within that family, Zmanim's assigned role is the broadest and the most public-facing: the quarterly in which the historical profession, as a whole, speaks Hebrew to the reading public.

From Zmora Bitan to the Open University: the partnership of 2004

For its first quarter-century Zmanim was a Tel Aviv University creation published commercially, through Zmora Bitan. From issue number 86, in 2004, the journal has been published within its present partnership of bodies, and it is issued through the Open University. The current structure, as described by the Historical Society of Israel, is publication in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, the Department of History, Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the Open University, and the Historical Society of Israel, published by Balmada, the Open University's publishing house; the journal's Hebrew description adds the Zalman Shazar Center for the history of Israel to the bodies on whose behalf it appears. The change made institutional sense. The Open University, whose mission is distance teaching to a broad adult public, is the natural Israeli partner for a journal defined by accessibility, and its department of history, philosophy and Jewish studies supplied editors as well as a publisher. The partnership also spread the journal's base across the Israeli historical establishment, so that Zmanim after 2004 stands not as one university's house journal but as a shared national platform for Hebrew historical writing, quarter by quarter.

Editors across four decades

The succession of Zmanim's editors maps the Israeli historical profession across two generations. Among those who edited the journal before its present team were Idith Zertal, Naama Sheffi, Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Iris Rachamimov of Tel Aviv University, and Guy Miron of the Open University. As of 2018, its recorded editors were Professor Gadi Algazi and Professor Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, both of Tel Aviv University, and Professor Inbal Ofer of the Open University, a distribution that mirrors the publishing partnership itself, with the two sponsoring universities sharing the editor's desk. The names carry their fields with them: Algazi is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, Shefer-Mossensohn a historian of Ottoman and Middle Eastern medicine and science, Eliav-Feldon a historian of early modern Europe, Rachamimov a historian of gender, war and Central Europe, and Miron a historian of modern Jewish life. A journal whose editors have successively embodied ancient, medieval, early modern, modern European, Ottoman, Jewish and gender history is a journal whose claim to cover the whole of the past is made by personnel as much as by policy. Guest editorships for special issues, such as the 2012 classical studies edition, extended the circle further still.

Zmanim in the scholarly record: JSTOR, citations and translations

Zmanim's standing is visible in the way other scholarship uses it. Its issues are archived and distributed to libraries through JSTOR, where its profile is catalogued under Jewish Studies with its 1979 Tel Aviv founding and its accessibility mission stated in English for international librarians. Articles from its pages are cited in the standard scholarly literature: a 2019 article in the Geography Research Forum on the queer place of Jerusalem, for instance, cites an essay from Zmanim issue 131, Iris Rachamimov's study of the many lives of Karl M. Baer, "In the Folds of a Skirt," published in Zmanim in 2015, as a source on gender and identity in Mandate-era Jerusalem. University curriculum vitae across Israel list Zmanim articles, reviews and guest editorships as part of the scholarly record, and the journal's own alumni of contributors include historians whose Zmanim essays were later absorbed into books. That citability, for a Hebrew quarterly without footnotes, is the practical proof of its founding claim: material written to be read by the public can also be used by the profession, provided the authors and editors hold the line on substance while relaxing the line on form.

A podcast and a continuing public presence

The journal's meeting-point mission has extended beyond print. A podcast of the journal Zmanim presents discussions drawn from its historical world, with episodes recorded in the radio studios of the Open University, the journal's publisher; an episode description preserved on the podcast's site discusses a historian of gender and family in early modern England and the longing for children in that period, the sort of specialised research, on religious command, personal feeling and gender identity, that the journal exists to carry to listeners as well as readers. The podcast matters less as a separate venture than as evidence of continuity: an initiative founded in 1979 to connect new historiography with the educated public adopts, four decades on, the audio form in which much of that public now meets ideas. The institutional frame has likewise remained alive, with the Historical Society of Israel continuing to present Zmanim on its magazines page, between its book series and its other journals, as one of the society's active publications.

Place among Israel's history journals

Zmanim's significance in Israeli culture can be stated simply. Hebrew readers who want Jewish history in a scholarly quarterly have Zion, founded in 1935 by Ben-Zion Dinur and Yitzhak Baer and published in Jerusalem by the Historical Society and the Shazar Center. Those who want world history in a peer-reviewed Hebrew journal have Historia, founded in 1998 because, as the Historical Society puts it, the lack of an appropriate Hebrew platform for world history had distanced the Hebrew reading public from the discipline. Zmanim, older than Historia and younger than Zion, occupies the ground both of the others partly vacate: the whole of history, Jewish and general, written by leading scholars, illustrated, unfootnoted and addressed to any educated reader. Its founders' 1979 wager was that such a journal could change what Hebrew historiography was for, and Yossi Mali's account of the journal, published by its own founding university, is titled accordingly, "The Age of Zmanim: The Cultural Revolution in the New Historiography." A quarterly that can plausibly lend its name to an age of its discipline has earned its place in this directory not as a magazine among magazines, but as one of the institutions through which Israel argues, in Hebrew, about its past and everyone else's.