In my biography of the Zionist intellectual Ahad Ha’am, I knew the book had to provide, if successful, a clear sense of what it felt like for him to sit at his desk and think and write — the focal point, indeed the central drama of his life. The tools I had at my disposal, as a historian, were different from those of a novelist who could imagine dialogue or situations not documented by those primary sources (letters, memoirs, etc.) that we, as scholars, consider, in varying degrees, indispensable. Still, with the use of these sources I had to reconstruct the rooms he occupied, how he paced them, how he charmed and savaged disciples and enemies, and how he created a body of writing that remains to many still vivid and influential. Once I read the primary sources, I then had to do something quite similar to what a novelist does — to recreate in words the rooms I’d never seen, the lives and thoughts of people I’d never heard, and to move them persuasively through time and space.

The primary sources that bound the limits of my imagination as a scholar provide me and my work with a multitude of obtrusive and also blessed boundaries; they provide clear, emphatic indications as to where my reflections cannot go, as alluring as they might be. A novelist can — and must — traverse these boundaries in order to do good work; if I do, I fail.

Rebecca Goldstein knows, for example, in her novel Mazel — set, in part, in pre-war Warsaw — that the buildings cannot be skyscrapers, that the trolleys must be appropriate to their time and place. But the dialogue in the book, the grimaces, the smells of her characters, are the product of her own mind and heart. I cannot make anyone in a book of mine smell in any way unless I’ve seen sources — a letter complaining of a dour odor, for example — that provide me with this information. Still, it is my role to decide whether such data is pertinent or irrelevant, and it is my imagination and intellect that help me with such decisions, sometimes trivial, sometimes fundamental. Flaubert knew, and so does a skilled historian working in the archives today, that an event or, for that matter, a scent is made important or trivial as a result of many different considerations, not the least of which are the workings of a trained, rigorous intuition.

Intuition, imagination, and scholarly acumen are all, of course, individual attributes, not collective activities. They should be part and parcel of what all intelligent people — not only writers — take in to make sense of what they see around them, part of what deepens and unsettles and constitutes the backdrop to our sense of the world. Intuition, imagination, and scholarship can, however, and often do, draw on collective preoccupations. At the moment, much first-rate scholarship and fiction draw on the Jewish interests — often intense and informed — of their authors. The nexus between the imaginings of individuals and the workings of community are mysterious, and mostly untrackable.

Still living, as we are, at a moment in the United States (and elsewhere) of singular achievement by Jews writing about Jewish topics in scholarship, fiction, and other genres, it’s worth pondering what these achievements mean for Jewish life beyond the writing desk, what they mean for Jewish continuity, and the viability of Judaism as a culture. Clearly, many talented people today are persuaded that things Jewish are worth dreaming and thinking about. In a contemporary Jewish culture immersed, as it so often is, in self-doubt, it’s worth pondering why so many talented writers and scholars today feel such intense, abiding preoccupation with things Jewish, and manage to draw much of their inspiration from it.