This series of articles inspired by a tenure controversy in Middle East Studies at Columbia raises important questions not only about the tenure process but also about the intellectual emptiness of much current anti-historical scholarship.
One of the essays is by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a truly excellent person whom I met while giving a paper in the SBL Annual Meeting Paleography section. He provides only the barest outline of the “minimalist” debate, and it is significant that this is all it takes to dismantle the anti-historical arguments such as those of El-Haj. These arguments make selective use of historical data within a tendentious, ideological framework. In fact, it’s quite the same thing I see from students who want to argue for the historicity of Abraham on the basis of the Ebla tablets or who support creationist interpretations of Genesis. Whether fundamentalist or nihilist, these extremes are intellectually dishonest.
