'Not what he actually saw but what his age thought it natural to see. . .'

I just finished reading Marc Bloch's famous essay, The Historian's Craft, a meditation on historical method. It's a dense but highly readable piece of finely articulated and incisive observations on the difficulties of objectively studying the past and studying it on its own terms. For example:

"Clouds have not changed their shapes since the Middle Ages, yet we no longer see in them either magical swords or miraculous crosses. The tail of the comet sighted by the great Ambroise Pare was probably very little different from those which occasionally sweep across our skies. yet, he thought he saw in it a full suit of curious armor. Compliance with universal prejudice had bested the habitual accuracy of his gaze; and his testimony, like that of so many others, tells us not what he actually saw but what his age thought it natural to see." (emphasis added)

He delves into the question of historical origins (particularly the tendency of European modernists to locate single origins for phenomenon which have multiple causes stretching over long periods of time); the value judgments and simplifications inherent in periodization (which Bloch was particularly alert to as a historian of the "Middle Ages", the often cast-aside thousand years between the Christian/Roman Era and the Modern Era); the difficulties of analyzing historical evidence and the prejudices of long-dead witnesses; and the temptation to write history in order to justify or criticize the social order of the present.

Reading the essay, its author often peaks through the lines. A French Jew, Bloch wrote the incomplete piece between 1941-42, following the German blitzkrieg, and shortly before he joined the French Resistance. He mentions several times that the Dreyfus Affair (the framing of a French Jewish army officer at the turn of the century), was the formative event of his youth. He also touches on the Protocals of the Elders of Zion (the influential Russian-forged anti-Semitic pamphlet which still refuses to die, aledging that Jews control the world) and the forced confessions and torture of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition.

Considering the overwhelming anxiety of the times, it's remarkable that Bloch wrote this piece in the early '40s. It reminded me of something that Victor Frankl says in Man's Search for Meaning: that counterintuitively, it was, in his experience, often the intellectuals who survived best in Auschwitz because they could escape to a world in their minds.