Modern Jewish historiography
Modern Jewish historiography is the modern iteration of Jewish historical narrative writing and historical literature. While Jewish oral history and the collection of commentaries in the Midrash and Talmud are ancient, the rise of the printing press and movable type in the early modern period led to the publication of Jewish histories and early editions of the Torah/Tanakh that dealt with the history of Jewish diaspora ethno-religious groups, and increasingly, national histories of the Jews, Jewish nationhood or peoplehood and identity. This was a move from a manuscript or scribal culture to a printing culture. Jewish historians wrote accounts of their collective experiences, used history for political, cultural, and scientific or philosophical exploration, and drew upon a corpus of culturally inherited text.
Modern Jewish historiography intertwines with intellectual movements such as the European Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. It drew upon earlier works from the Late Middle Ages and antiquity, such as Christian and Hellenistic materials. Modern Jewish historiography as distinct from earlier medieval historiography and ancient biblical historiography developed characteristics of what historians think of as formal historiography such as the study of sources and methods.
Background and context
Historian Salo Baron argued that medieval Jews preferred storytelling to history, while Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argued that past was remembered in ritual. However, the abundance of medieval works shows that medieval Jews both produced and consumed historical work.Mircea Eliade defined Judaism as a "historical religion;" Yerushalmi disagreed, but believed Jews practiced oriented or sacred history, such as biblical history, and were the "fathers of meaning in history." However, premodern Judaism before the Renaissance often didn't focus on post-biblical history, preferring philosophy and mysticism. Moshe Idel posits a model of Jewish history distinct from the typical role of history in European nationalism, conceived as a unification with, and then a rupture from, Jewish religious tradition.
Though not many of their works fully survive, Hellenistic Jewish historians such as Artapanus of Alexandria and Eupolemus presented an interpretatio Judaica which argued for the antiquity of their people, drawing on inherited texts. While Hellenistic Jewish historiography was forgotten by mainstream Jewish thought for many years, it was preserved by the Church and in the Book of Maccabees from Hasmonean Judea. The historical works of Philo of Alexandria and Justus of Tiberias are only partially preserved. Another example is Demetrius the Chronographer.
The earliest Hebrew books were printed in Rome starting in 1469. Early printers were aware of the strong sofer tradition of Hebrew scribal production. The move to printing eliminated the diversity in manuscripts and enabled texts to reach more people.
The major publications in Jewish history in the early modern period were influenced by the political climate of their respective times. Certain Jewish historians, acting on a desire to achieve Jewish equality, used Jewish history as a tool towards Jewish emancipation and religious reform. Regarding the Jewish historians of the 18th and 19th century, Michael A. Meyer writes that: "Envisaging Jewish identity as essentially religious, they created a Jewish past that focused on Jewish religious rationality, and stressed Jewish integration within the societies in which Jews lived."
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Attitudes toward historical writing
Talmudic authorities discouraged the writing of history in the medieval and early modern era; the extent to which this was effective in discouraging actual historical production is unclear. Moritz Steinschneider and Arnaldo Momigliano had observed that Jewish historiography appears to slow down at the end of the Second Temple period, and even Maimonides considered history a waste of time. Maimonides does however relate Jewish historical content in his Epistle to Yemen. Isaac Abarbanel, while he practiced and defended traditional biblical historiography, criticized contemporary historiographers for bias and unreliability, mixing truth with falsehood due to their preferences, and emphasized the importance of eyewitness accounts.Officially, secular philosophy was seen by some medieval rabbinic authorities as a gentile activity and forbidden. Higher-class Jewish scholars were encouraged to study medicine. Astrology was also permitted. Medicine, astronomy and cosmography were an acceptable blending of religion and science, drawing on the Babylonians. History was read at times but considered an activity pursued by other groups; however, medieval Jewish authorities in the Arab world treated the practice of secular philosophy with salutary neglect, though banned, a blind eye was turned to its practice. In fact, as David Berger notes, Spanish Jewry was clearly hospitable to philosophy, literary arts and the sciences.
Joseph Caro called history books "books of wars," which he prohibited the reading of as the "sitting in the gathering of thoughtless people," and the Geonim, such as Saadia Gaon, implied the roots of heresy or simply lack of education. Some medieval attempts at critical historiography were met with controversy or imposed sanctions or prohibitions, such as bans, selective or general, or ordered burnings, or boycotts and effective sabotage of the publication's success. The conventional wisdom in Jewish historiography, as epitomized by Baron and Yerushalmi, is that halakhic attitudes severely limited the output of medieval Jewish historians, though this has been refuted by Robert Bonfil, Amos Funkenstein, and Berger, the former considering the Renaissance to be the "swan song" of earlier work, forming an important Yerushalmi-Bonfil debate in Jewish historiography according to Yerushalmi's student David N. Myers.
Amram Tropper has explained that intellectual elites used classicist literature and scholasticism to construct identity in the Roman Empire after failed Jewish revolts. Explaining through the example of Maimonides, ha-Cohen's, and Elijah Capsali 's attitude toward history, Bonfil shows there is nonetheless a medieval historiography inherited by later writers, though he acknowledges the paucity of Jewish medieval historiography and the impact of the negative halakhic stance that should not be underestimated. Capsali, an important historian of Muslim and Ottoman history, has a medieval historical approach, with early modern subject matter. Capsali's chronicle may be the first example of a diasporic Jew writing a history of their own location.
Bonfil surmises that the return to traditionalism in orthodoxy was actually a later phenomenon, a reactionary response to modernity. When those among the halakhic authorities who valued philosophy studied it, such as Moses Isserles, they justified it with a continuity to Hellenistic philosophy.
Notably, Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated for transgressing the bounds of Rabbinic thought into the growing domain of Enlightenment philosophy in 1656. Spinoza and rabbi Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, who studied with Galileo, shared a goal to liberate science from theology, and combined it with scriptural references. Spinoza and others, such as Abraham Abulafia or Ibn Caspi, became figures in the conflict between emancipation and traditionalism in Jewish political and historical ideology., per Marina Rustow, has stressed that the anti-rabbinic themes expressed by both Uriel da Costa and Spinoza had emerged from the crucible of Iberian crypto-Jewish culture. Early modern philology had an important impact on the development of the Enlightenment intellectual movements through work such as that of Spinoza. Richard Simon also had his work of historical biblical criticism suppressed by the Catholic authorities in France in 1678. While some Jews were willing to express doubt or disbelief privately, they feared the judgment or ostracism of the community to go too far in criticism of the establishment.
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Medieval Jewish historical consciousness permeated various writings beyond formal historiography. Steinschneider included a broad range of texts in his definition of historical literature, such as selichot, qinot, communal statutes, travel accounts, minhagim, testaments, and letters. Yerushalmi acknowledged "the so-called ‘chain of tradition’ of the oral law " was the exception to the scarcity of medieval Jewish historiography, that Bonfil pointed out remained a bestseller even in the era of early printed books, leading Bonfil to view Renaissance and Baroque Jewish historical writing as a "sad epilogue" of the medieval period. Bonfil further argued that this scarcity was partly due to a perceived Jewish marginality and lack of agency in political and military spheres, which were the predominant subjects of medieval historiography. Bonfil has pointed out that the chain of tradition has parallels in the Christian historiographical genre of apostolic succession as established by Eusebius in his medieval ecclesiastic historiography such as the Ecclesiastical History and other historiography in the Middle Ages, and Tropper has pointed out that both inherit from Hellenistic succession tradition such as those from the second Sophistic movement. Eusebius was influenced by Josephus. points out that shalshelet ha-qabbalah influenced later historians such as David Gans and Menahem Amelander.