Klemen Jelinčič Boeta
Jewish Historiography: An Overview
Judovska historiografija: pregled
Abstract: The article is bringing forth a synthetic overview of Jewish historiography through-
out the history, starting already with a brief focus on the Biblical background and Jewish 
Hellenistic historiography. It presents the reflections of historians of Jewish historiography 
on the main milestones in the story of writing the Jewish history and the processes they 
were part of, as well as the ideas and frameworks shaping the writing of such historiography 
in each of the historical periods, including the main issues and shape of the overall Jewish 
historiography today. It also includes a short overview of modern historiography on Jews 
in medieval Inner Austrian lands and in Slovenia.
Keywords: Jewish historiography, Jewish studies, Inner Austria, Slovenia
Izvleček: Članek predstavlja sintetični pregled judovske historiografije skozi zgodovino, za-
čenši že s kratkim fokusom na biblijsko ozadje in judovskim helenističnim zgodovinopis-
jem. Prinaša refleksije zgodovinarjev judovske historiografije o glavnih mejnikih v zgodbi 
pisanja judovske zgodovine in procesih, katerih del so bili, pa tudi o idejah in okvirih, ki so 
oblikovali pisanje takšnega zgodovinopisja v vsakem izmed zgodovinskih obdobij, vključno 
z glavnimi smernicami in stanjem splošne judovske historiografije danes. Članek vključuje 
tudi kratek pregled modernega zgodovinopisja o Judih v srednjeveških notranjeavstrijskih 
deželah in v Sloveniji. 
Ključne besede: judovska historiografija, judovske študije, Notranja Avstrija, Slovenija
Introduction
Even though modern Jewish historiography starts to form, as almost all 
other European national historiographies, from the 18th century onward, 
we can, due to the fact it is hard to distinguish between national and reli-
gious elements of Judaism, speak of Jewish historiography much earlier, 
from the Bible onwards. Thus, the term Jewish historiography can des-
ignate several categories of knowledge. The most basic text of Jewish 
history and of writing the Jewish history is, of course, the Bible, but it was 
Edinost in dialog Unity and Dialogue
78 (2023) 1: 185–224
Pregledni znanstveni članek Review scientific paper (1.02)
Besedilo prejeto Received: 21. 5. 2023; Sprejeto Accepted: 31. 8. 2023
UDK UDC: 26-9
DOI: 10.34291/Edinost/78/01/Jelincic
© 2023 Jelinčič Boeta CC BY 4.0

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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
not written by historians and its purpose was theological, not in recording 
events from the past for the sake of recording. Therefore, only certain, 
the so-called historical books of the Bible can be described as Biblical 
historiography. If by the term Jewish historiography we mean recording 
history by the people who called themselves historians, then we must 
first examine Hellenistic Jewish historiography, which was later forgotten 
among the Jews, and then 1400 years later the Renaissance and Baroque 
Jewish historiography, which also did not receive a high level of intellectual 
legitimacy within Judaism. Only then can we examine the modern Jewish 
historiography. We can also speak of medieval Jewish historiography, even 
though its creators did not call themselves historians. With Jewish histo-
riography, we have in mind the writing of Jewish history by Jews, which 
with modern historiography becomes also national, but to which we must 
add, from the 18th century onwards, also the historiography on Jews that 
from the beginning of modernity starts to appear in numerous Western 
countries outside of Jewish intellectual frameworks. But that is no longer 
Jewish national historiography. Today, at the beginning of the 21st centu-
ry, due to the increasing quantity of writing in both categories and their 
increasing interconnectedness, we begin to speak only of historiography 
on Jews, which is still in great majority produced by Jews. And, in addition 
to that, of course, there is also the history of (Jewish and non-Jewish) writ-
ing of Jewish history. The historians have, namely, not always or universally 
regarded the study of their scholarly predecessors as a noble or worth-
while pursuit and »the unreflexive impulse of historians is particularly 
evident in the case of Jewish scholars, about whom no comprehensive 
history was written until 1993« (Myers 1998a, 2). 
1 Biblical background
Even though the Greeks with Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius and oth-
ers, including later Roman historians, are considered to be the beginners 
of Western history writing, their idea of history in itself, next to recording 
of past events, did not offer a whole and all-encompassing ‘truth’, neither 
on the creation of the world and cosmos and their further path till the ‘end’ 
of time nor on the position of human fate in all that is offered in history, 
as presented in the Bible.

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In comparison with his contemporaries and predecessors, the novelty 
of Herodotus appears to be double. Herodotus, who wrote between the 
years 445 and 425 BC, was, as it appears, the first who analytically de-
scribed the war and has, in his explanation of it and its consequences, 
for the first time also used ethnographic research and research of politi-
cal organisation (Momigliano 1975a, 10). Thucydides has, though, almost 
completely excluded the ethnography, which holds true for almost the 
entire later Greek and Roman historiography, but preserved the strong 
connectedness of history of wars and political order. Herodotus intro-
duced the rule that historians must explain the facts they are encountering 
and, at least since Thucydides onwards, the explanation has changed into 
exploration of causes (11). But, as he says, »the role of the history is not 
in providing a final meaning to the things or to completely measure the 
relationship between the gods and the humans« (15), and even in the 
following centuries gods and metaphysical reasons do not start playing 
an important role in historical narrative. »Pre-Christian Hellenic historiog-
raphy did not tend to reveal the human destiny« (36), and the history had 
in society in comparison to tragedy, comedy, philosophy, and rhetoric 
only a limited meaning. »History had no truths to offer and therefore had 
no place in Greek religion and philosophy« (Yerushalmi 1996, 8), which 
represented a main intellectual framework for an attempt to explain and 
comprehend the human existence in cosmos and therefore had the status 
of eternity in the Hellenic field of knowledge production. If the Biblical 
historian has become subordinated to the prophet and accepted his values 
and knowledge what was, what is and what shall become – where this 
relationship paralleled to the relation between the historian and philoso-
pher – among Greeks, since »Plato comprehensively expressed the antith-
esis between the time and eternity in Greek thought, such cooperation 
between history and philosophy as in Jewish thought between history and 
prophecy was no longer possible« (Momigliano 1966, 88). 
If Greeks are, therefore, considered as ‘fathers of history’, then »the fathers 
of the meaning in history were the Jews« (Yerushalmi 1996, 8). It was 
Ancient Israel that first ascribed a decisive transcendental significance 
to history and thus created a new world-view whose essential lines were 
later on adopted by Christianity and Islam. It is only in ancient Judaism 
and nowhere else that remembering is marked as a religious duty for 
the whole people and this remark appears through the whole of the Old 

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Testament (Momigliano 1966, 87; Yerushalmi 1996, 9). »Beware lest thou 
forget the Lord, who brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, the house 
of bondage« (Deut 6:12), is just one example. This new perspective did 
not appear as a result of philosophical speculations but rather from the 
nature of the Israelite religion itself, where after the departure from Eden, 
the time is indeed seen as a real historical time – in a sense of divine chal-
lenge and human response, whereby the memory of this time is preserved 
by remembering historical events. After the expulsion from the paradise, 
history begins, »historical time becomes real and the way back is closed 
for ever« (Yerushalmi 1996, 8). Even divine revelations come in the course 
of history and the importance of history in Ancient Israel cannot be shown 
clearer than with the fact that God is recognised only if he is revealed ‘his-
torically’. Moses does not appear in the name of the Creator of Heaven 
and Earth but rather in the name of God of the Fathers, and when God 
introduces himself directly to the entire nation at Sinai, nothing is said 
of his qualities, except »I am the Lord, your God, who brought thee forth 
out of the Land of Egypt, out of the land of bondage« (Ex 20:2). Ancient 
Israel knows what God is according to what God did in the past and it is 
therefore important to remember. Similar to that, also Christianity is in its 
essence »a historical religion: meaning a religion, where the most impor-
tant dogmas are based and are leaning on events« (Bloch 1996 [1993], 61) 
from a temporally determined past. In this sense, Judaism, Christianity and 
Islam are religions »whose validity is connected to the authenticity of par-
ticular traditions« (Momigliano 1975a, 35). And thus, to the question »Were 
the books of the Bible to be regarded as books of history?«, Marc Bloch 
responds »Undoubtedly« (Bloch 1962 [2003], 90). In the Bible we find 
historiography, but not history as such (Rubin 1987, 8). 
However, the Biblical call for remembering has little to do with the cu-
riosity about the past events and even though history in Jewish context 
has its meaning, it does not mean everything has a meaning and that 
everything needs to be remembered. Israel foremost needs to remember 
the divine interventions in the past and human responses to it, whether 
they are positive or negative, since the real danger lies not in forgetting 
what happened but rather how it happened. Despite numerous discus-
sions on the role of time in Biblical narrative (Yerushalmi 1996, 119–121, 
n. 4 and 7; Momigliano 1966; Goldberg 2000), the answer appears almost 
self-evident. Time belongs to God. Biblical narrative indeed flows linearly 

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from the beginning of time uninterrupted till approximately 400 BC but 
the historical time is connected to the mythical time, which repeats itself 
cyclically. »They were not familiar with the distinction between mythical 
and historical age.« (Momigliano 1966, 87) »Obedience or disobedience 
to divine commandments are constants with Jews, which is incomparable 
with Greek historiography.« (Momigliano 1954, 149) Jews break the com-
mandments and God punishes them, Jews return to the Torah and God 
rewards them. The Bible does not transmit historical facts to present the 
facts themselves but rather represents a perception of divine providence 
in history, where it is not the ‘objective’ historical event that is important 
but the message that can be learned from it (Rubin 1987, 8). Festivals that 
remind us of specific moments of divine intervention with the lives of Jews 
are simultaneously agricultural holidays that remind us of natural cycles. 
Jewish collective memory, as expressed in the Bible, is based on yearly 
repetition of celebrating the memory of events. A religious vision of the 
history serves primarily the purpose of exposing the divine role through 
time and memory and is expressed primarily in two ways: through ritual 
and through ritual recitations at daily and festive religious duties. The best 
example is certainly the ritualised formula, which had to be pronounced 
by everyone at the ritual of sacrificing the first fruits, which is found in the 
Fifth Book of Moses (Deut 25:5-9; Yerushalmi 1996, 12). There, we can 
locate a summary of the entire historical development, a nucleus of the 
complete Jewish history till the end of the Torah: the patriarchal origin 
in Mesopotamia, creation of the Hebrew nation in history and not in the 
mythical past, slavery in Egypt and liberation with a climax in the conquest 
of the Land of Israel, and, of course, the recognition of God as the Lord 
of history. Almost every Jewish religious holiday also contains a dimension 
of remembering certain historical event of divine intervention. And even 
though the line of remembrance could be preserved in such ritual manner, 
and the basic Biblical concepts of history were formed not by the histori-
ans but rather by priests and prophets, the need to remember inevitably 
passed into an actual historical narrative. During this process and within 
the heterogeneous Hebrew literature that spans over more than a thousand 
years that we call Bible, the line of anonymous authors created the most 
remarkable corpus of historical writing in the Ancient Near East. 
Even though the Bible in its core is a representation of the divine deeds, 
Biblical reports are mostly filled with the deeds of people, Israel and other 

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nations. Despite the possible expectations that Biblical historians would 
sacrifice facts and details of a certain age in favour of legendary and mythi-
cal presentations and preconceived patterns, most of the Biblical historiog-
raphy is despite its variety concrete, and instead of telling the story through 
legends is quite well embedded in historical realities. Events and charac-
teristics of one age are seldom mixed with others, historical personalities 
do not appear only as types but rather as completely formed individuals, 
and also the chronology is mostly valid. Much of what is written in the 
Bible is based on contemporary archival records (Momigliano 1966, 87). 
The text presents us with a real feeling of a current historical time. Isaac 
is not presented as observing the laws Moses gave. »That Biblical histori-
ography is not ‘factual’ in the modern sense is too self-evident to require 
extensive comment« (Yerushalmi 1996, 13), and therefore the use of term 
historiography has only a limited use as it relates only to certain books 
of the Bible. Also, not all chapters of history are presented equally well. 
Events until the conquest of Canaan are given in a more legendary fash-
ion than the events from the period of both kingdoms, and each passage 
definitely has its own characteristics. In addition to Torah, in this con-
text, Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles and the books of Ruth, Esther and 
Daniel certainly are worth mentioning. The period of the Second Temple 
(536 BC–70 AD) was in its historiography much poorer than the period 
of the First Temple (1006–586 BC). After the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, 
which, to a certain measure, are already based on research of the archives 
and public collections of the time, only books of Ecclesiastes from the 
end of the 3rd century BC and Daniel from the 2nd century BC were 
included in the Hebrew Bible, and both already show new influences 
of Hellenistic and apocalyptic thought. Ecclesiastes or Kohelet in a way 
loses a sense of history or rather a sense for a particular direction of events, 
wanders among reflections and interpretations to which it »is only too 
easy to ascribe a label of Epicureanism or Scepticism«
1
 (Momigliano 1976, 
119). The Book of Daniel, in which also the idea of succession of empires 
is codified, is also the only of many apocalyptic books that the Pharisees 
accepted into the Biblical canon. The Book of Sirach from the beginning 
1 It is interesting to mention that in the present-day religious Jewish world the name Apicorus (being 
the name of the philosopher Epicure) still serves as a synonym for a 'heretic', since according to the 
tradition he was the only Greek philosopher, who saw the truth of the Torah. The problem was that 
he rejected it. 

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of the 2nd century BC that ponders on Kohelet, for instance, was gone. 
From the books of Ezra and Nehemiah up to the books of the Maccabees, 
for almost three hundred years almost nothing historical had been writ-
ten. Up to the 2nd century BC, the Biblical corpus was finalised and its 
consequent influence on Judaism was in its totality. Post-Biblical Judaism 
did not inherit any separate historical sources and documents but rather 
a holy and organic totality.
2 Jewish Hellenistic historiography
With the arrival of Alexander the Great (336–323 BC), Jews also became 
exposed to Hellenism. Jewish historiography experienced a new revival 
towards the end of the Second Temple period with an appearance of im-
portant historical literature, most of which was preserved only partially 
or within other works. And if a national historiography has patriotic prej-
udice (Momigliano 1975a, 21), then not only Biblical but also Hellenistic 
Jewish historiography is national. From the times of Herodotus, there were 
authors from different lands that met the Greeks and afterwards started 
writing histories of their own homelands in Greek language and accord-
ing to Greek methods (Momigliano 1960, 98). »The ambition to be seen 
Hellenised can be hardly separated from an attempt to defend their own 
ethnical traditions from ever increasing Hellenisation.« (Momigliano 1975a, 
30–31) Here, Jews have a special position, since Judea was the only ter-
ritory where creative literature developed in an indigenous language 
(Momigliano 1970, 78), and outside India, Jews were »the only people 
that opposed the value system of Hellenistic civilisation with its own 
doctrinary and life systems« (90). Hebrew Demetrius the Chronographer 
from the 3rd century BC and Eupolemos from the 2nd century BC, who 
wrote in Greek, are such examples (Stern 1994, 293). Examples of crea-
tivity in domestic language certainly are the books of Ecclesiastes, Daniel 
and Sirach. Moreover, we encounter Jewish Hellenistic historiography 
in Hebrew, more specifically in connection to the Hasmonean revolt 
against the Seleucids. At the same time, most of the Jews that already lived 
in Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere across the Mediterranean, already 
adopted Greek as their own language and, consequentially, Bible was 
translated into Greek. Such circumstances by imitating Greek historiogra-
phy led to different results, as with Maccabees I and II (Momigliano 1975a, 

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31), and even III (1st century BC) that is imitating the Second Maccabees 
(Momigliano 1976, 125), and IV (1st century AD) (126). The author 
of the First Book of Maccabees, who wrote in Hebrew, was obviously 
an admirer of the Hasmonean dynasty and probably lived in the period 
of John Hyrcanus (135–104 BC), when it seemed the independence was 
finally assured. In the book that was later translated into Greek, we see 
»a dynastic history of a Biblical type, written in a Biblical language, even 
though with many details […] taking example in Greek historiography« 
(Momigliano 1975a, 31). As a historical source for the research of the 
Hasmonean revolt, the book is indispensable (Stern 1994, 291). Older than 
this book is the Second Book of Maccabees, which was originally written 
in Greek by a Hellenised Jew, Jason from Cyrene (Momigliano 1976, 121). 
The book in itself, which represents a summary of a five-volume history, 
is in comparison with Maccabees I written naively and is filled with the 
description of miracles in which the author obviously believed. Despite 
the fact that the book uses techniques which strongly remind us of pop-
ular Greek historiography techniques, including miracles and pathetic 
scenes, was composed in Greek and the Jews did not include it into the 
Biblical canon, the Maccabees II possess »something exclusively Jewish«, 
where in addition to the ‘patriotic prejudice’ »the perception of individ-
ual martyrdom is tightly connected with the purity of the Jewish cult« 
(Momigliano 1975b, 142).   
Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BC–50 AD) has, in addition to his philosophical 
works, also written a historical work, of whose five volumes only two are 
preserved, and in which, despite the historical writing, theological pres-
entation of divine intervention and revelation in Jewish history is obvious. 
His contemporary, Nicolaus of Damascus, a personal secretary to Herod 
the Great (37–4 BC), who was not of Jewish descent, included in his uni-
versal history a long description of Herod’s rule, the important sections 
of which are, as it seems, preserved unaltered in later works of Flavius 
Josephus (37–100 AD). Of the historical works of Justus of Tiberias, Flavius 
Joseph’s contemporary, only a few fragments are preserved (Stern 1994, 
292). Certainly, the most important work of Jewish historiography from this 
period is the work of Flavius Josephus that includes the books Jewish War 
(75–79 AD) and Jewish Antiquities (93 or 94 AD) (Yerushalmi 1996, 16). 
Flavius Josephus or Yoseph ben Matityahu used Biblical and extra-Biblical 
sources and transferred into his, according to the Greek models constructed 

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work a good knowledge of Jewish oral tradition (Momigliano 1976, 127). 
The importance of his achievement lies in the fact that he succeeded 
in writing a Jewish history based on Bible, which was still comprehen-
sible to Greek and Roman readers for whom it was written in the first 
place (Momigliano 1966, 88). Jewish Antiquities are a history of Jewish 
people from the beginnings to the Jewish revolt against Rome. The work 
is extraordinary in its attempt to explain the traditional texts in accordance 
to the principles of contemporary historiography, inclusion of other works 
and in searching and quoting materials from public archives. The Jewish 
War begins at the end of Jewish Antiquities and is exceptional foremost 
because, in addition to describing the events of the war and the hostili-
ties, it accurately describes the political background and even the remote 
events that influenced the beginning of the hostilities leading to the final 
destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It is interesting that, even though 
the works of Flavius Josephus did not survive in their original form among 
the Jews, in the 10th century in southern Italy appeared a Hebrew compi-
lation named Yosippon, based on a part of the writings of Josephus that 
became, due to the belief that it was his original work, extremely popular 
among the medieval Jews and in Elizabethan England (Roth 1948, 60). As in 
the case of Philo, also the writings of Josephus had greater success among 
the Christians than among the Jews. It is of interest that Flavius Josephus 
partly built his Jewish Antiquities on Roman Antiquities of Dionysius 
of Halicarnassus (ca. 60 BC–after 7 AD) and in the story on the beginning 
of historiography among the barbarian nations, both their works have its 
own place (Momigliano 1975a, 28). Also Eusebius (ca. 260–340 AD), the 
author of Church History, has in his work adopted an approach from the 
works of Josephus (Momigliano 1963, 158). Latin texts of Jewish War came 
into existence in the 4th century AD, while the Latin translation of Jewish 
Antiquities appeared only in 570 AD (Momigliano 1978, 122). Flavius 
Josephus is also the author of Contra Apionem which represents not only 
a relic of then extant Jewish Hellenistic apologetic literature (that defended 
Judaism) but is also one of the most important essays on historiography 
that were preserved from all the Antiquity. The work is also »an essay 
in historiography and historical criticism« and actually »Joseph performed 
historical criticism in all of his works« (Cohen 1988, 1). In a manner, Flavius 
Josephus represents an embodiment of Jewish Hellenistic historiography 
since on the one hand, he uses Hellenic methods of historiography and 
historical criticism, while on the other, he joins other ‘oriental’ historians 

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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
in their attack on Greek history writing and defence of their own. Also his 
perception of the history, as an absolute and ‘objective’ truth, isn't Greek 
and derives from the Bible (11). 
As in Ancient Greece, other historical books existed also in Ancient 
Israel, such as the Book of the Deeds of Salomon (mentioned in Kings 
I 11:41), chronicles of Judean kings and other books that are lost to us 
today (Yerushalmi 1996, 15) and were written by intentions, which did 
not serve a search for a transcendental meaning, and were therefore not 
included into the Jewish Biblical canon. Jewish historiography, which ap-
peared in the period of Hellenism or the Second Temple, certainly belongs 
to this category. The books of Joshua, Samuel, Kings and other historical 
books of the Bible were preserved because they became a part of the 
authoritative anthology of holy texts, the final canonisation of which was 
concluded around 100 AD in the town of Yavneh in Palestine. The dis-
appearance of books like Maccabees II from the Jewish literature is just 
a specific example of rejecting the history »and the revival of Jewish his-
torical writing in the period between 200 BC until 100 AD is inseparable 
from the Greek influence« (Momigliano 1975b, 144). With the conclusion 
of the Biblical canon by the rabbis, Biblical historical books achieved im-
mortality which no later historian could hope for and that was even de-
nied to certain historical works of that time. Jewish historiography of the 
Hellenistic period, even works such as the first three books of Maccabees 
and works of Josephus, were pushed aside and despite the fact that some 
of them were preserved by the Church, all these works were inaccessible 
to Jews until the modern times. It had been almost fifteen centuries until 
the Renaissance when another Jew called himself a historian. 
3 Rabbinical foundations
As we focus on the classical rabbinical literature of Mishnah and both 
Talmuds, we move, in relation to history and historiography in comparison 
to the Bible, to a totally different ground. In contrast to Biblical writers, 
in the eyes of Talmudic scholars, time, present and past, have a completely 
different role. Historical specificities, which are so exposed in the Biblical 
narration, are turned into seemingly unconscious anachronisms. Ancient 
Middle-Eastern mythological motifs, which are mentioned in the Bible only 

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superfluously, are shown here more elaborated than ever, and even the his-
tory of the Biblical period is here, even though anachronistic and uncon-
nected, treated more thoroughly than in the Bible itself (Yerushalmi 1996, 
16). The triumph of rabbinical Judaism means a practical disappearance 
of that sense of providential direction from the most remote past to pres-
ent and beyond, a sense so characteristic of the Biblical history. As op-
posed to Kohelet, the Pharisees transformed this sense by focusing solely 
on yearly repetition of chosen events from the past, a tradition always 
typical of Judaism. The history of the Biblical period is present in the Bible. 
But, even though reconstruction of this history through modern critical 
research, connected with archaeology and discovery of Ancient Middle-
Eastern languages and literatures, is nowadays offering a more contextual 
understanding, which sometimes differs quite strongly from the remarks 
and explanations of the Biblical writers, Bible can still serve modern ac-
ademics as a permanent reference point for their research. As opposed 
to that, history of the Talmudic period from all this vast body of aggadic 
literature cannot be deciphered. Historical events are not even mentioned 
or are mentioned in such a rudimentary or legendary form that any con-
clusion of their course is impossible. 
Despite that, though, from all this literature we can still decipher a sense 
of history (Neusner 1988, 12–39). Even though the Talmudic literature 
does not bring chronological and systematic presentation of events, it is, 
in spite of the widespread opinion, all but ahistorical. In this literature, 
we will not be able to find either stories on big events or uninterrupt-
ed narrative of events which occurred, even though Jews at that peri-
od do represent a natio and do possess an intensive political life. »But 
if manifest history scarcely passes before us, a rich and complex world 
of latent history – the long-term trends and issues of a society and its life 
in imagination and emotion – does lie ready at hand.« (14) What appears 
in front of our eyes are »the philosophical processes behind political and 
social and religious policy, class struggle and popular contention« (14). The 
uniqueness of the Talmudic canon is in that it presents to us in detail the 
thought processes that fathered the decisions shaping the entire Jewish 
world-view until the 19th century processes of modernisation and up to 
this day represent a basis for the thought pattern of the actively religious 
Jewish world. The mentioned directions become strongly expressed also 
in the daily life in what we call Halachah or rules and laws of life. Here, 

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we can speak of an example of forming a collective doctrine of rabbini-
cal Judaism, which was shaped by a limited class of intellectuals but was 
accepted by all Jews, except the Karaites, and was in an unchanged form 
transmitted with explanations from Late Antiquity until the modern day. 
»In terms of Brian Stock, what we have is the inner history of a textual 
community.« (18) Treating of history by the designers of Mishnah clearly 
shows that these creators were very well aware of the historical events and 
their meaning for the daily life, but confronted with the tragedy of events, 
which at this stage of the Jewish history were not few (for instance the 
destruction of the Temple in 70 AD), they incorporated them into the 
already existing or rather ideologically-religiously artificially formed pat-
terns of disaster. In such a way, the uniqueness of events was reduced and 
thus »the power of taxonomy in imposing order upon chaos once more 
does its healing work« (26). And when the uniqueness of events fades 
away, also history loses its importance as a didactic intellectual construct. 
The world becomes composed of nature and supernature (29), which 
is strongly reminiscent of the space-time construction of early medieval 
Christianity, and what really matters are the same repetitious laws that 
are discovered in Heaven. Here the category of salvation, including the 
ideology of messiah that is hardly present in Mishnah, loses its function 
that is now gained by the sanctification of daily life. »If what is important 
in Israel’s existence is sanctification, an ongoing process, and not salvation, 
understood as a one-time event at the end, then no one will find reason 
to narrate history.« (30) This direction of Mishnah was in complete oppo-
sition to the emphasis of more than a thousand years of Israelite history. 
The events from wars with Rome were still very vivid in the memory and 
the Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud is »taking these events seriously and 
treats them as unique and remarkable« (31). In Mishnah, there is talk of ‘this 
world’ and ‘the world to come’, while the Jerusalem Talmud distinguishes 
between ‘this period’ and ‘the period when the Temple was still standing’. 
»History and doctrine merge, with history made to yield to doctrine.« (33) 
The entire world and all its events are set into a meaningful framework that 
was determined by the Torah. »It was the story of the suffering of Israel, the 
remembrance of that suffering, on the one side, and the effort to explain 
events of that tragic kind, on the other.« (34) In the Palestinian Talmud, 
we can witness a »reversion to Biblical convictions about the centrality 
of history in the definition of Israel's reality« (ibid., 36). Salvation and 
messiah regain their importance. In Talmud, we encounter a connection 

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of observing all the laws of Torah (sanctification) with reaching the end 
of time and the arrival of the messiah. More than that, the ‘whole of Israel’ 
becomes a social category in a historical time and for instance »if Israel 
would keep a single Shabbat in the proper way, forthwith the son of David 
will come« (yTaanit 1:1; Neusner 1988, 38). Therefore, histories of other na-
tions become only a mere reflection on the deeds of Israel (Neusner 1988, 
33), and thus we see that while historical laws and even logic may exist, 
they are derived from a framework of moral virtue or culpability, wherein 
destroyers are punished and builders rewarded (Gafni 1996, 27). 
For the rabbis, it was clear that history has its significance, which is the 
foundation of Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and that Jews play a cen-
tral role in the process. For the rabbis, Torah was not only a deposito-
ry of the past history but rather a revealed pattern of the entire history 
(Yerushalmi 1996, 21). From the Bible, they learned that the real rhythm 
of the history beats often enough under the revealed acts and that the 
invisible history can be recognised and is more real than what the world, 
blinded with the rhythms of power, can recognise. Assyria was a tool of di-
vine wrath over Israel, even though Israel did not know that at the time. 
In accordance with that, there was no need to create a new concept of his-
tory to adjust the appearance of Rome and in fact any other world empire, 
which would follow later on. And, since even this empire will crumble, 
then there is no need to follow its developments and the usual historical 
knowledge is unnecessary. In these intervals between the destruction and 
salvation, the main Jewish task was to completely and finally respond 
to the Biblical challenge of becoming a holy people, which meant, most 
of all, studying and fulfilling the written and oral law and creating a Jewish 
society on its basis. Biblical past was known, messianic future assured and 
the time in between became unimportant. The dynastic stories of Roman 
emperors, arrivals and departures of Roman procurators and wars of the 
Parthians and the Sassanids did not offer any new understanding. Thus, 
also the events of Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties, which were Jewish 
history, did not present novel revelations and were therefore neglected 
(24). Only the messianic activities still had the ability to redirect the atten-
tion to momentary historical events and lead into direct action, but after 
the unsuccessful revolt of 132–135 AD, a tendency began to stop and 
even repress such activities, which signified a responsible rabbinic lead-
ership of the community in many generations to come. Sages and rabbis 

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preserved what was relevant for them or rather for the continuation of re-
ligious and communal and therefore also ‘national’ life of the Jewish peo-
ple, so from the Jewish literature of the period we learn something on the 
current events only by chance and in service of another purpose. They 
did not preserve the political history of the Hasmoneans but they noticed 
the conflict between the Pharisees and Alexander Yannai (103–76 BC). 
They did not include the course of events of the Second Temple history 
but they carefully recorded every single detail of the Temple ritual. They 
showed almost no interest in the Roman history but they did not forget 
the persecutions under the emperor Hadrian (117–138 AD). They also 
neglected the battles of the Maccabees and yet preserved the memory 
of miraculous rededication of the Temple, which is celebrated up to this 
day and is at the same time the only post-Biblical holiday, accepted because 
it presented the continuation of divine intervention in Jewish history. »The 
centrepiece of rehistorisation of Judaism accomplished by the framers 
of the Talmud of the Land of Israel and related writing, of course, is the 
reversion to Scripture« (Neusner 1988, 39), where daily events possess 
a meaning solely within the framework of sanctification for the sake of as-
soon-as-possible arriving salvation. 
Usually two works are mentioned, which should point to the opposite, 
even though one of these (Megilat Taanith or The Scroll of Fasts) is not 
historiography but rather a calendar of 35 semi-holidays and fasts, which 
derive from the Hasmonean period and mostly signify events from the 
Maccabean wars. Only the second work (Seder Olam or The Order of the 
World), which is ascribed to a rabbi Jose ben Halafta from the 2nd centu-
ry AD, can serve as a basis for historical recording but even here we only 
find a dry chronology of persons and events from Adam to Alexander the 
Great (Yerushalmi 1996, 20).
4 The Middle Ages
Jewish historical writing after Talmud, which is in its narrowest categorisa-
tion limited to chronicles, recorded predominately specific and individual 
events, where the records are limited to one location or area and mostly 
focused on individual communities. The wide dispersion of the Jews over 
such a large geographical area could not enable a growth of historical 

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conscience that would include all of the settlement areas of the entire 
nation, even though centres of such settlement did exist (like Babylon 
and the Iberian Peninsula), which in certain periods possessed and ex-
ecuted their authority, like, for instance, in the areas of liturgy. »The life 
of an individual was recognised only in accordance to the collective fate 
that interconnects the complete life in the Land of Israel in the past with 
the messianic future, which promises salvation with returning to the Holy 
Land. From this perspective, concerning Jews, we can really talk about the 
‘Middle Ages’.« (Michael 1993, 11) 
But Israel in exile did not lack a sense of history. As emphasized by Yitzchak 
Baer in his historical work on Jewish exile: »This old system of thought is by 
no means unhistorical, for it has history as its foundation; the decisive 
historical events of ancient and recent times retained their fixed place 
in Jewish thought, more than in other religious systems.« (Baer 1947, 110) 
The changes of time the Jews were always aware of were in their eyes only 
a change of scenery of one single vision deeply rooted in the tradition 
of their prophets and seen as sanctified. On such a basis, critical histori-
ography could not develop (Michael 1993, 11). 
In almost all areas of Jewish writing in the Middle Ages, we indeed find 
a great deal of thought dedicated to the position of Jews in history, the 
idea of Jewish history and the meaning of exile and salvation, but very 
little about the momentary Jewish historical experience. Interpretations 
of history, explicit or implicit, can be encountered in philosophical works, 
homiletics, Biblical exegesis, legal and mystical texts, but almost always 
without any reference to an actual historical event or a specific historical 
personality. After the tradition of writing history was interrupted in the 
Talmudic period, it has not reappeared. Historical works, which after all 
were written, appeared occasionally and after long periods of silence. And 
even though there is no doubt on the scarcity of medieval Jewish historical 
writing, there are serious reasons that should prevent us from seeing this 
as an exclusive characteristic of Jewish literary production, as if there were 
certain essential differences between the Jewish and Christian medieval 
practices of historical writing, since Christian medieval historical writing 
was scarce as well (Bonfil 1997, 8). 

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Only in one area, completely in accordance with the Talmudic thought, 
we can talk about a historical genre in the framework of the so-called 
‘chain of tradition’ (Shalshelet Ha-Kabbalah) literature of the oral law, the 
intention of which was through chronological recording of the sequence 
of sages, most of all, the presentation of the uninterrupted tradition 
of teaching and authority of the Bible through Talmud and halachic litera-
ture, in many instances up to the author himself (Yerushalmi 1996, 31). The 
first document of the type is certainly the first chapter of a part of Mishnah 
called Masechet Avot written already in the 2nd century AD and represents 
a chronology of the transmission of tradition from Moses up to the author 
of the chapter. The first text that confronted the question of counting the 
years and of time chronology of the events was the mentioned Seder Olam 
Raba by Yose Ben Halafta. In the Talmudic times, the date of the creation 
of the world was calculated according to this text, writers of rare Jewish me-
dieval chronicles learned from it and even Azariah de Rossi (ca. 1511–1578) 
and David Gans (1541–1613) consulted it (Michael 1993, 12). The earliest 
medieval work of such methodology is an anonymous Seder Tannaim 
ve-Amoraim, which, in all probability, was composed in the year 885, and 
the period of its appearance coincides with the appearance of the Karaites 
that opposed the authority of Talmud (Jacobs 1988, 67). This ‘chain of tra-
dition’ is also mentioned in the introductory part of the most influential 
medieval halachic text, called Mishnah Torah, written by Maimonides 
(1135/38–1204) (Chazan 1988, 41). From this tradition, we receive the fa-
mous Letter of Sherira which hints at the fact that medieval Jews knew 
their history more than we think (Michael 1993, 12). It was composed 
by the leader of the famous Babylonian academy in Pumbedita in 986/987, 
who responds to a question from Kairouan in Tunisia on how the entire 
Talmudic literature came into being. The Epistle of Rabbi Sherira Gaon still 
serves as an important primary source for the history of this, i.e., geonic 
period, and is even more interesting due to the fact that we are in posses-
sion of this most influential work of Talmudic chronology in two variations 
(Jacobs 1988, 68–69). An additional example that the Jews did know some 
of their history after all can be seen in the Letter to Yemen by Maimonides 
that includes a brief history of four messianic movements. If at that time 
no messianic movement would have appeared in Yemen and the question 
was not addressed to Rambam, we would not even know that such kind 
of historical information was even available to him (Yerushalmi 1996, 32). 
»Within a Jewish context, critical comments by Biblical exegetes, debates 

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about the antiquity of kabbalistic works, historical reasons proposed for 
the commandments, and halakhic approaches to changing conditions 
have sharpened our awareness of medieval sensitivity to textual, theologi-
cal, and social change. Jewish polemic against Christianity is a particularly 
promising field for the purpose of this inquiry« (Berger 1998, 25) as »histor-
ical context could help determine the plausibility of a scriptural argument; 
historical analysis could shed light on Talmudic references to Jesus and 
to Gentiles; the history of the Jewish people in exile demanded expla-
nation – often theological but sometimes naturalistic; the larger pattern 
of history might reveal the character of the age in which medieval Jews 
and Christians lived.« »From late antiquity through the early seventeenth 
century, this quest moved from hostile legends to unsystematic criticism, 
both naïve and penetrating, and finally produced flashes of genuine his-
torical reconstruction.« (26) 
In medieval Judaism, only this type of historical material achieved legit-
imacy and even though a lot of historical material can be found within 
it, the reason for its writing does not derive from the need to record the 
past events, but from rejection of the internal heretics and external ene-
mies who denied the legitimacy of the Oral law, meaning Talmud, and 
from serving to the practical need of understanding the development 
of legal norms in relation to the previous rabbinical authorities. In this 
context, we should certainly mention the abundant literature of responsa, 
which has been appearing across the entire Jewish world from the medi-
eval to present times, and in case of Rabbi Israel Isserlein from the 15th 
century also represents a precious source of information on the contem-
porary Jewish life of Southeastern Alps. Here, in the function of letters 
that include legal questions and answers of important rabbis, through 
an explanation of specific aspects of religious Jewish law and its daily 
applications, we find a series of historical data, which, of course, are subor-
dinated to the primary legal intention of such texts (Soloveitchik 1990, 12). 
Thus, Maimonides in the 12th century can »calmly say of works of general 
history that they are of no practical consequence so that to read them is a 
sheer waste of time« (Jacobs 1988, 66). From exactly the same reasons 
we can find apologies to the readers on even dealing with the subject 
of secular history by writers of historical texts even up to the 19th century. 
It is necessary to emphasise that there was also no need to find novelties 
in the events of the time. Rather the opposite. Through the entire Middle 

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Ages, it is possible to find inclinations to reduce the momentary events 
to familiar archetypes from the past. In accordance to that, every new 
oppressor becomes Haman and every court Jew who tried to prevent 
a catastrophe became Mordechai. Christianity became Edom or Esau 
and Islam Ishmael. Geographical names from the Bible received a new 
meaning and Spain therefore became Sfarad, France Tzarfat and Germany 
Ashkenaz. Thus, also the relations between Jews and Gentiles were already 
formed in their basic outlines within the rabbinic Aggadah and therefore 
no specific interest in the history of contemporary non-Jewish nations 
developed. The idea of four successive world-empires that appeared in the 
Book of Daniel and was elaborated in Midrashic literature reappeared 
whenever Jews experienced apocalyptic moods. In this style, they simply 
switched the name of the last empire or joined the two together regarding 
them as one. A similar function was served by the idea of a final confron-
tation between Gog and Magog. These roles were in turn played by the 
Byzantines, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, and even in the 19th century some 
Hassidic circles of Eastern Europe viewed the Napoleonic wars in such 
a manner (Yerushalmi 1996, 37). Also in the case of medieval Christian 
Europe, in basic pattern, the things were not that much different, since 
even here we can speak of a theological function of historiography even 
outside of the frameworks of Church History. Also among the Christians, 
the medieval writers were even with events that seemed as mundane 
as they could possibly be, from the creation of the world onwards until 
their own age, searching for the signs of divine intervention that leads and 
directs human activities (Mlinar 2000, 3–4), which as any other thought 
had their roots in Biblical examples and were modelled after the Church 
teachings and beliefs. 
Evidence for the uninterrupted interest of Jewish readers in their al-
ready understood past until the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 
is certainly the above-mentioned book Yosippon from the 10th century 
Southern Italy that has remained popular until the appearance of print. 
The book was printed for the first time in 1480 in Mantua and then in 1510 
in Constantinople (Michael 1993, 13). In this long period between the 
conclusion of Talmud and the end of the 15th century, when printing 
arrived, though, not many books survived that could testify to historical 
writing among Jews. 

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Despite the medieval Jewish idea of continuity in representing the events, 
»from time to time, circumstances forced a reconsideration of the notion 
of an unbroken continuum of Jewish experience«, as said by Robert 
Chazan (1988, 47), who on the questions of medieval Jewish historiog-
raphy points us to the book of Yosef Yerushalmi, where »the most use-
ful observations on the topic are available to us« (40). Yerushalmi says 
(1996, 31) that only in two cases a complete conscience that something 
really new happened can be distinguished in the medieval Jewish histor-
ical writing. One case are certainly the four Hebrew Crusader chronicles 
from the 12th century, where we do not only see a clear feeling that a sharp 
change occurred in the relations between Judaism and Christianity, when 
entire Jewish communities of northern Rhineland were wiped out, but 
also an expression of bewilderment and awe with this first case of Jewish 
mass martyrdom on European soil. The chronicle that was composed 
by Shlomo Bar Shimshon on the city of Mainz is certainly such an example 
(38). The other case is the Book of Tradition or the Order of Tradition (Sefer 
Ha-Kabbalah or Seder Ha-Kabbalah), a historical work of the Spanish 
philosopher Abraham Ibn-Daud (ca. 1100–1180), where we can locate 
a completely clearly expressed awareness of the move of Jewish spiritual 
and cultural centres from Babylon to Egypt, North Africa and the Iberian 
Peninsula and in his time from Muslim to Christian Spain. The chronicle 
which came into existence in Toledo in years 1160–1161 and was print-
ed in 1514 is the first Jewish chronicle that came to us preserved in full. 
Besides using the text of Yosippon, this chronicle was based on the chro-
nology of transmitting the Biblical tradition from the Letter of Sherira and 
on calculations of time by the book Seder Olam Raba. In addition to that, 
the author presents a transmission of rabbinical authority from Babylon 
to Spain and thus also important data on Jewish life of his age. The third 
part is dedicated to the history of Spanish Jewry (Michael 1993, 15). With 
all these works in these six hundred or more years, historiography never 
served as a primary framework for the Jewish memory in the Middle Ages, 
which also holds true for the non-Jewish peoples of the time, a fact that 
is scarcely mentioned in research for reasons of a lack of medieval Jewish 
historiography. This is clearly shown by the fact that through the entire 16th 
century, in at that period already well-established Hebrew press, besides 
permanently popular Yosippon, only four other historical works, written 
before 1500, appeared: the longer Seder Olam Raba, the shorter Seder 
Olam Zuta, Leter of Sherira, and Sefer ha-Kabbalah (Yerushalmi 1996, 

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40). As concluded by Chazan (1988, 55), in the medieval Jewish grasp and 
representation of current happenings, there is no doubt on a tendency 
to see these events through a prism of Biblical patterns, but by evaluating 
the medieval perception of historical circumstances it is needed to avoid 
oversimplifications since these specific circumstances led to descriptions 
that are rooted in »full awareness of the inevitable complexity of everyday 
human experience« (55). 
Yerushalmi in his »landmark book« (Myers 1998a, 3) designates as carriers 
of Jewish historical memory in the Middle Ages four characteristic literary 
and cultural complexes (Yerushalmi 1996, 45–46). These were, firstly, for-
giveness prayers or slichot, of which a great part includes names of places, 
course of events and the dates of tragic events. Secondly, memorial books 
appeared mostly among the Ashkenazim and included lists of rabbis, im-
portant members of the community, events and martyrs, who had to be 
remembered in religious rituals. The famous Memorbuch of Nürnberg 
commences in 1296 and records events until 1392. Thirdly, second Purims 
were appearing throughout the entire Jewish diaspora until the modern 
times, where they wanted to remember cases of rescue from persecution 
or some danger. Such ‘second Purim’ existed, for instance, also in Sarajevo 
from 1820 onwards. As a balance, fourthly, also throughout the diaspora, 
minor fasts appeared, which remembered more bitter experiences, when 
there was no salvation. One of the earliest minor fasts is certainly the one 
introduced in memory of 32 Jews that were burnt at stake in the French 
town of Blois in 1171. Indeed, all this shows us the importance of remem-
bering but also a resistance to novelty in history and the precedence that 
was given to liturgy and ritual over historical narrative, where historical 
memory was being preserved without historical details, a characteristic 
typical of all four complexes. 
5 Renaissance and Baroque
In the course of the 16th century, eight Jewish authors wrote no less that 
ten important historical works and this cultural phenomenon can be rec-
ognised with »little hesitation as genuinely historiographical« (58). Five 
authors were either exiles from Spain or Portugal or their children. In 1553, 
in Ferrara, the book by Samuel Usque (ca. 1500 – after 1555) was printed 

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JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN OVERVIEW
in Portuguese, encompassing the whole of Jewish history (Michael 1993, 
43). In 1554, in Adrianopolis, a book by Solomon ibn Verga (after 1460–
ca. 1530) appears in Hebrew about a history of persecutions in gener-
al and the expulsion from Spain in particular. By the 19th century, the 
book was translated into Yiddish, Latin, Spanish and Ladino. In the same 
year, the book by Joseph ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575), The History of Kings 
of France and Kings of the House of Osman was published in Hebrew 
in 1554 in Sabbioneta. He also wrote the book Valley of Tears, a history 
since the fall of the Second Temple. The Book of Genealogies with chronol-
ogy of events in Jewish and general history by Abraham Zacuto (1452–ca. 
1515) was printed in Hebrew in Constantinople in 1566 and in Cracow 
in 1580 (Yerushalmi 1996, 57, 132–133). The Chain of Tradition, describ-
ing also historical events in Italy and elsewhere, written by Gedaliah ibn 
Yahia (1526–1587), was printed in Hebrew in Venice in 1587 and in Cracow 
in 1596 (57, 134). In the years before his death in 1550, Eliya Capsali (ca. 
1485–1550/1555) from Crete, who was under a strong cultural influence 
of the Sephardi arrivals to the island, wrote a history of Ottoman Turks 
with a history of Turkish and Spanish Jews, and between 1508–1515, also 
in Hebrew, he wrote The Stories of Venice, which is a chronicle of Venice 
(57). Only two of these authors do not belong to the Sephardi cultural 
circle. One was David Gans from Prague who in 1592 published a general 
history Tzemach David or The Plant of David (58, 135), while the other 
one was Azariah de Rossi from Mantua who in 1575 in Ferrara published 
his famous Light to the Eyes (57, 134).
Despite the opinions of Yerushalmi (1996, 59) and Reuven Michael 
(1993, 17) that the shock of the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and in 1496 
from Portugal represented, through the awoken existential questions and 
awareness of historical break, the strongest reasons causing this appear-
ance of historical literature, Robert Bonfil (1988, 78–102) adds another 
dimension. He turns our attention to a general tendency of Jewish histo-
riography (and of any national historiography for that matter) of seeing 
Jewish history as somehow ‘separated’ from the histories of other nations. 
This holds true especially for the Middle Ages, where up to a recent period 
we could witness domination of a dichotomous thought and explanation 
»in terms of external-non-Jewish-challenge/internal-Jewish-response, this 
in itself being no more than a particular variation of the general scheme 
that almost totally opposes Jewish to non-Jewish« (82, n. 17). This could 

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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
certainly be said also of historiographies of other ‘historically subordinate’ 
or ‘smaller’ and ‘younger’ nations, as in case of Slovenians, Latvians or the 
Irish, to name a few. A break with this vision is certainly shown also by the 
book Two Nations in Your Womb, concerning the issue of mutual image-
ry of Christians and Jews in Middle-Ages in Europe, published in 2000 
by Israel Jacob Yuval, or by the book of Ariel Toaff, Love, Work and Death: 
Jewish life in Medieval Umbria, published in 1996, where he reminds 
us that in most part money-lending and anti-Semitism were almost the 
only aspects of Jewish presence of interest to medievalists (Toaff 1998, 1). 
Accordingly, Bonfil emphasises that the appearance of this quantity of his-
torical works cannot be explained solely by the expulsion from the Iberian 
Peninsula but it would be necessary to take into consideration Renaissance 
and Baroque historiography outside of Jewish frameworks that emerged 
in that period and, among others, rediscovered the Antiquity’s approach 
to writing history with an emphasis on politics and wars. 
These works, though, do bring several extremely important novelties into 
the Jewish historiography. They possess a chronological and a geograph-
ical width that surpasses everything written by that period. They do not 
focus solely on specific instances of persecution or a series of events, 
but are attempting, as much as the data was available to them, to present 
a complete and uninterrupted overview of many centuries. During the 
Renaissance, these Jewish writers became increasingly interested in the 
people among whom they lived and began to use increased historical real-
ism in their historical works, in which they began to explain history more 
in terms of natural than divine causes (Kohn 1979, viii–ix). A new element 
is certainly also the importance the authors ascribe to the Jewish history 
after the Bible, and for the first time we can really feel author’s interest 
in the entire Jewish history up to the period. Even though the writers see 
the exile and diaspora in the spirit of a punishment for the sins of their 
fathers, it seems that they recognise the relevance of the events in the di-
aspora for the present and also for the future, which cannot be perceived 
only by focusing on remote past. This in itself represents a new approach. 
Simultaneously appears the novelty of interest in the histories of other na-
tions, especially the contemporary ones, even though only for the compre-
hension of their own history. Thus, in this period, we do not receive only 
a complete Jewish history in Hebrew and Portuguese, but also a Jewish 
history in the context of a general history, a world history, a history of the 

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Ottoman Empire, a chronicle of Venice, kings of France and Turkey and 
even a Hebrew translation by Joseph ha-Kohen of the history of Spanish 
conquest of Mexico and Peru. 
Despite claims that »the resurgence of Jewish historical writing 
in the sixteenth century was without parallel earlier in the Middle Ages« 
(Yerushalmi 1996, 57), the break with Middle Ages is not that dramatic. 
The writers couldn’t really free themselves from the concepts and ways 
of thinking which were rooted so deeply, such as messianic thoughts, 
concepts of pre-messianic war of Gog and Magog or a divine intervention 
behind the events. Of all the works, only with the book by Azaria de Rossi 
can we seriously talk of the beginning of historical criticism. De Rossi tried 
to critically examine the rabbinical legends and stories in comparison 
with the general history and even included the research of non-Jewish 
sources (Michael 1993, 17–71). He wrote a pioneering series of historical 
essays, in which, among others, Hellenistic Jewish literature, such as Philo 
and the Letter of Aristeas (3rd–2nd century BC), was first brought back 
to the attention of Jews, and »both classical rabbinical Aggadah and the 
Jewish calendar were first subjected to historical scrutiny and criticism« 
(Yerushalmi 1996, 58). But even de Rossi did not write his history in con-
temporary manner of Renaissance and Baroque historiography in the 
sense of focusing on political and military events, which, though, can 
be said of the works of Capsali, Kohen and Gans (Bonfil 1988, 84–85).
De Rossi’s method did not have heirs among the Jews not because the 
book caused such a scandal but because »sheer erudition can never take 
the place of history and the time had not yet come for a ‘New History’ 
among both Jews and non-Jews« (101). Specifically, the Jewish reading 
public did not recognise the historiography as a legitimate reading material 
and has seen the historical work only as something pleasant and relaxing 
for spare time. In relation to the works that coped with other nations and 
were called ‘books of war’, there are even conflicting contemporary opin-
ions whether it is permitted to read them, and if so, in what language. Part 
of this reading public that was still seeking a meaning to the Jewish histor-
ical suffering and the length of exile found this meaning in the Kabbalah 
of Isaac Luria (1534–1572) and his disciples, which quickly spread from the 
Galilean town of Safed through the entire Jewish world – »a mythical rep-
resentation of history which lies beneath the present history and provides 

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the individual with power to actively participate in hastening of its messi-
anic liquidation« (Yerushalmi 1996, 74). Thus, Renaissance and Baroque 
Jewish historical writing does not signify some independent phenomenon 
that suddenly emerges after the silence of Middle Ages, but is its contin-
uation and appears as an epilogue of medieval Jewish historiography. 
»For Jewish historiography, radical change could indeed be achieved only 
in one of two ways: by transforming the Jews into actors of political and 
military history, or by radically changing the very conception of history. 
But while the first alternative was obviously ruled out […] the time had not 
yet come for the second, for instance cultural history.« (Bonfil 1988, 101) 
Instead, works continuing with the old approach kept appearing all 
the way to mid-18th century. There were numerous reprints of popular 
works such as Yosippon and different versions of the Chain of Tradition. 
Sefer Ha-Yashar as another version of the Chain of Tradition was printed 
in Venice in 1625 (Bonfil 1988, 87), where in 1653 appeared Yeven Metzula 
by Nathan Hannover (1610–1683) (Michael 1993, 83), who in medieval 
terms described the history of Jews in Poland until the massacres of 1648 
(Kohn 1979, 188). Another book, Divrei Yosef, begins with creation of the 
world and ends in 1672 (Bonfil 1988, 86), and in 1743 in Amsterdam, the 
History of Jews by Menahem Man Amilander already appears. At that time, 
with the appearance of the European Enlightenment, also among Jews 
first forms of modern historiography started to be shaped.
6 Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah
The singularity of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah lays in its emer-
gence against the background of social and cultural integration of the Jews 
into their surroundings, where in most cases we find a small Jewish com-
munity composed of a few privileged individuals or families (Ettinger 1994, 
782), the so-called ‘court Jews’, Jewish merchant financiers that so visibly 
served the Central-European courts of the 17th and the 18th centuries 
(Dubin 1999, 19). From the Inner Austrian, northeast Italian or Slovenian 
perspective, is of special interest the position of Jewish communities 
in Habsburg Gorizia, Gradisca and Trieste, where already in the 17th cen-
tury there were several privileged individuals in the service of the Empire, 
‘hofbefreiten Juden’ or ‘Jews, liberated by the court’, antecedents of  the 

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so-called ‘court Jews’, such as families Pincherle of Gorizia and the de-
scendants of Jews from Maribor, more specifically of Aram the Rich, the 
family Morpurgo of Gradisca in 1624 (Roth 1946, 337), as well as Ventura 
Parente of Trieste in the same year (Dubin 1999, 18), who was also a de-
scendant of Aram from Maribor. In these communities, and especially 
in Trieste, which was declared a free imperial port in 1719, conditions 
developed that enabled several Jews of Trieste, in connection between the 
absolute rule and the enlightenment culture, to importantly participate 
in this movement of Jewish Enlightenment (118–137). Among them was 
also Samuel David Luzzato (1800–1865), who was closely connected to the 
Collegio Rabbinico in Padua, established in 1829, which is known to be 
the first modern rabbinical seminary. The unpaid rabbi of Gorizia, Isaac 
Samuel (or Isacco Samuele) Reggio (1784–1855), received a nickname 
‘Italian Mendelssohn’. The first modern Hebrew poetess, Rachele Luzzatto 
Morpurgo (1790–1871), also came from Trieste (Roth 1946, 496–498). 
Haskalah has, of course, come into being under the influence and in con-
nection to the appearance of general European Enlightenment and, also 
among the Jews, the carriers of these ideas worked for the ‘enlighten-
ment’ of the society on the basis of ‘a reasonable understanding of things’, 
through which they desired to ‘liberate’ themselves from historically con-
ditioned social and religious frameworks. A great quantity of academic 
literature was written on the subject already from the 19th century onwards 
(see bibliography in Ben Sasson 1994 and Dubin 1999). The appearance 
of the conditions that enabled the birth of Haskalah movement is con-
nected to specific conditions in which the 18th and early 19th century 
Jewish communities of the Netherlands, Paris, North Italy, Austria, Bohemia 
and Germany lived. Here are of special importance not only Königsberg, 
Wroclaw and Berlin, but also Paris, Prague, Trieste and Vienna. For the 
year 1800, in a book A History of the Jewish People (Ben Sasson 1994, 
785), Trieste is marked as one of the most important centres of this move-
ment in Europe. As shown by Lois Dubin (1999, 6), »for understanding 
the changing situation and self-understanding of Jews in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, we need a tale not of two cities, Berlin and Paris, 
but one that includes a third city, Trieste, or perhaps a third and fourth 
city in tandem: Trieste and Vienna«. The Jews within the mentioned com-
munities started to search for new ways to improve the situation with-
in the Jewish communities, while simultaneously new socio-economic 

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conditions enabled a creation of new kind of relations with the non-Jew-
ish environment. Until the movement of Jewish Enlightenment, the Jews 
are not occupied by their own historiography and the first real attempt 
to write a comprehensive Jewish history in modern times was performed 
not by a Jew, but rather by a French Huguenot pastor and diplomat Jacques 
Basnage (1653–1723), who, exiled in the Netherlands in the years 1706–
1711, published a seven-part History of the Jewish people in Rotterdam. 
Also the first Jewish history of the Jews, which is partly based on the his-
tory by Basnage, appeared in the Netherlands and was published in 1743 
in Yiddish by Amilander (died in 1767?) (Yerushalmi 1996, 82). 
The modernisation of European Jewry was a gradual process that spread 
from individuals to communities and from one social class to the other. 
The process moved from larger to smaller cities and from Central and 
Western Europe to Eastern Europe. Among its characteristics, there are cer-
tainly economic redistribution, acculturation, secular education, receival 
of civil rights and religious reform. A part of this process is of course also 
the appearance of a new historical awareness. Thus, for instance, in histo-
riographical sense, one of the earliest modern Jewish historians, Marcus 
Fischer, in his history of North African Jewry from 1817 not only quotes 
a non-Jewish historian, but it seems as if »this would be the first instance 
when a Jew realized that his own writing constitutes a part of a wider his-
toriography« (Meyer 1988, 163). Not only did the Jews start to absorb the 
cultural values of educated Europeans but here, for the first time it is possi-
ble to notice that the Jewish authors are taking their basic understandings 
from cultural and social achievements of the neighbouring culture. The 
movement became an expression of ‘universal’ spiritual aims, in which 
there was no space for the traditionalistic world-view. With all the com-
plexity of the Haskalah movement, which we can follow from the mid-18th 
to mid-19th century, it was not simply about the relaxation of traditional 
Jewish more or less orthodox religious and related social and cultural 
frameworks, but about Jews starting to absorb the languages, clothes, hab-
its and customs and the outlook of their non-Jewish surrounding, meaning 
assimilation. It was also about an attempt to bring the Judaism on the basis 
of ‘universal’ values closer to the new generations of Jews from these nu-
merically small communities, which not only started to lose their interest 
in Judaism but in this ‘enlightened age’ saw in it no further relevance for 

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their own lives, a thing that also led to a particular psychological moment 
of these individuals, sometimes even in a conversion to Christianity. 
Even though already in 1744, in his request for admittance to the Royal 
Academy of Berlin, Aaron Samuel Gumpertz (1723–1761) described the 
basic outlines of the Haskalah movement (Michael 1993, 97), it is Moses 
Mendelssohn (1729–1786) who is considered as the ‘spiritual father’ of the 
movement. After his arrival to Berlin, he met Ephraim Lessing (1729–1786) 
and was drawn into the German Enlightenment circles (Ettinger 1994, 782). 
In 1778, Mendelssohn started to publish his German translation of the 
Torah with Hebrew commentary. In the same year, the first school for 
boys, based on the ideas of Haskalah, was opened in Berlin and there they 
started to teach non-Jewish subjects as well. Mendelssohn was involved 
in the preparation of a schoolbook that was printed on this occasion. The 
printing house that was founded near the school in the following years 
published a great number of Hebrew books (Michael 1993, 97).
Mendelssohn, his disciples and close colleagues, Naphtali Herz Weisel, also 
known as Hartwig Wessely (1725–1805), David Friedländer (1750–1834) 
and Naphtali Herz Homberg (1749–1841) desired an as-soon-as-possible 
reform and adaptation of the Jewish society to the environment, espe-
cially in the field of education (Ettinger 1994, 783). Weisel in his Words 
of Peace and Truth from 1782 indeed includes a call for the study of Jewish 
and general history (Yerushalmi 1996, 82), but among these intellectuals, 
the maskilim, we cannot detect a strong inclination to study the history 
(Michael 1993, 101) until 1788, when in the fourth number of the first 
Hebrew magazine, called Measef, we find an exhaustive biographical ar-
ticle on the already deceased Mendelssohn. Even though in the following 
volumes, we can detect contributions on the history of Persia, Assyria and 
other areas of the Ancient Near East, we still cannot find a single article 
dealing with the Jewish history after Bible. In the year 1806, Josef Wolf and 
David Frankel, who already represented a new type of a Jewish teacher, 
founded a magazine Schulamit, where, slowly, first historical articles start-
ed to appear (126), which were mostly written by maskilim from Prague 
(133). Among these, certainly the most visible is Peter Beer (1758–1838), 
who between 1822 and 1823 published a History of Jewish Sects, which 
is considered as the first comprehensive historical study of the Jewish 
religion by a modern Jew (Brenner 1998, 390). 

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7 Wissenschaft des Judentums
If Haskalah in reading the Biblical text continued to rely on medieval 
Jewish exegetical method, as Mendelssohn did, Wissenschaft already tried 
to reconstruct the Biblical text on the basis of modern hermeneutical prin-
ciples deriving from Protestant tradition of Biblical criticism, especially 
the critical philology of Friedrich August Wolf, where not only non-Jew-
ish techniques but also non-Jewish interpretations of the text were used 
(Simon-Nahum 2003, 40–41). Even though the first generation of maskilim, 
which did not include more than 200 active individuals (Feiner 2002, 9), 
did not father the appearance of modern Jewish historiography, it has 
with its secularisation of certain aspects of Jewish society and worldview 
thoroughly prepared the ground for its appearance some forty years 
or one generation later. It is a fact that maskilim in 1794 republished 
De Rossi’s book. This is already the period of beginnings of modern criti-
cal historiography, especially in Germany. Historisches Journal was already 
being published for two decades, Barthold Niebuhr was 18 years old and 
Leopold Von Ranke will be born a year later. A modern Jewish historian 
is not an heir of Azaria de Rossi, but of modern secular historians such 
as these (Yerushalmi 1996, 75). Examination of different sources from 1782 
until 1881 shows not only that maskilim showed great interest in history 
but that their relation towards the history was significant for the ideology 
of Haskalah, as well as for the development of modern Jewish historical 
conscience (Feiner 2002, 5–6). 
In 1817, Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) writes an article Something 
on Rabbinical Literature, in which he sketches a programme for historical 
research of the entire Jewish civilisation (Michael 1993, 190), and already 
in 1819 Zunz and a group of other German Jews, which at that time includ-
ed still unbaptized Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), establishes a Verein fur 
Kultur and Wissenschaft der Juden (An Association for the Culture and 
Science of the Jews). In 1822, in the magazine of the association, Zeitschrift 
fur die Wissenschaft der Juden, a famous manifest On the Idea of Jewish 
Science, written by Immanuel Wolf (1799–1847), appears. Between the 
years 1820–1828 appeared A History of the Israelites by Isaac Marcus Jost 
(1793–1860), which was the first history of Jews written by a Jew in mod-
ern times. Thus also in France in 1828, we witness a first general post-Bib-
lical history of Jews written by a French Jew, Résumé de l'histoire des Juifs 

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modernes by Léon Halévy (1802–1883), which as a book from before the 
period of Wissenschaft represents a »historical vision that emerged out 
of the crucible of the French revolution and emancipation, and prefigures 
and indeed formulates for the very first time some of the fundamental 
themes of what was to become the standard Franco-Jewish historiosophy 
in the second half of the nineteenth century« (Rodrigue 1998, 413). 
Here, suddenly, there is no apologetics. History offered by maskilim dif-
fered from the traditional feeling of history and offered an alternative to the 
‘traditional history’ (Feiner 2002, 17–30). Thus, in the picture of history 
presented by maskilim we also encounter the modern period (36–50). For 
the first time we reach a moment when the history has no need to prove 
its usefulness to Judaism but it is the Judaism that must prove its historical 
validity. As Wolf constantly mentions the term ‘science’ through the entire 
text, he is talking about the new critical historical spirit and historical meth-
odology, which was conquering Germany and soon afterwards became 
one of the characteristics of Europe in the 19th century. Wolf's explicit plan 
for the Jewish science was threefold: textual research of Judaism, history 
of Judaism and the philosophy of Judaism (Yerushalmi 1996, 84). 
When the Jewish writers at the end of the 18th century show pride in an 
increased number of Jews that are physicians and scientists, they do not 
simply emphasise the apologetic nature of this claim but are also show-
ing to the world that Jews recognise the salvatory role of non-theological 
knowledge (Meyer 1998, 372). In accordance with the ideologies of libera-
tion, some radical German maskilim thought that studying the history will 
liberate the Jews, especially the unenlightened ones in Poland, from the 
chains of tradition which they never approached critically (Meyer 1988, 
164). This new spirit of Jewish historiography was not a fruit of years-long 
gradual development as was the case with general historiography, which 
was slowly advancing since the Renaissance, but is rather a result of inner 
Jewish needs in relation to the tradition and the receiving of civil rights 
or emancipation. Almost all the present ideological and cultural move-
ments in Judaism were formed, if not as an answer to, definitely under 
the influence of the emancipation of the Jews, which gradually follows 
the French bourgeois revolution. »Modern Jewish historiography did not 
develop from scholarly curiosity but as an ideology, as one of many an-
swers to the crisis of Jewish emancipation.« (Yerushalmi 1996, 85) Modern 

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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
attempts to reconstruct the Jewish past begin in time when we witness 
a sharp cut in the continuity of the Jewish way of life and therefore in-
creasingly greater decline of the collective Jewish memory. »In this sense 
history becomes what it had never been before – the faith of fallen Jews.« 
(86) And, of course, ‘history’ enabled those appealing to it very different 
conclusions (86). 
Though, whereas German or French historiography started with political 
and institutional history and only later on focused on intellectual history, 
Wissenschaft first and almost exclusively focused on the intellectual one, 
since it seemed that Jews do not have their own political history. They 
reconstructed Jewish history, where the national element was suppressed 
and a hope for national restoration was seen as anachronism. In order 
for the Jewish historiography to become modern, it had not only to give 
up the ideas that served as a basis for all Jewish concepts of history in the 
past, but even had to stand against the basic nucleus of Judaism, against 
faith that the divine intervention is not only ultimate, but also an active 
factor in the Jewish history, and against faith in the uniqueness of Jewish 
history itself (Yerushalmi 1996, 89). Even though the Haskalah movement 
explicitly opposed seeing the Jews as one of the ‘objective’ European 
nations, as many of its German maskilim identified with the German na-
tional movement, it was this Haskalah that has with writing in Hebrew 
strongly contributed to the formation of a modern Jewish national move-
ment at the end of the 19th century. In general, it could even be said that 
for centuries, the Jews saw themselves as a ‘nation’ but it was this ‘nation’ 
that in Western Europe in the course of the 19th century ‘dissolved’ it-
self. If the Jews of Western and Central Europe agreed to appear on the 
national censuses solely in terms of religious and not national terms as a 
price to be paid for the ‘emancipation’, in the 1890s it was already possible 
to feel the Jewish national movement, i.e., Zionism, even in the western 
part of the continent. Despite that, we can still say that »the prevailing 
tendency of European Jewish history in 19th century Europe was the ten-
dency of national ‘self-destruction’« (McCagg 1989, 4). If the modern histo-
riography is a child of the 19th century, constructed as a tool of European 
nationalism (Geary 2005 [2002], 19), its Jewish version that starts to devel-
op in northern German lands simultaneously with German nationalism, 
in contrast with German nationalism, does not invent first the nation and 
then with the assistance of texts and philological analysis its, i.e., German 

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history (35), but first writes the history of Jews as a religion that slowly, 
in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, cautiously becomes 
also the history of Jews as a nation. 
The climax of the Wissenschaft movement and its success is certainly 
between the years 1853 and 1870 published first modern general history 
of the Jews in a synthesis that would have been fifty years before consid-
ered impossible. It was written by Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891). He saw 
Judaism as a specific political-religious organism and has despite the ideo-
logical approach to the narrative in his work (where divine providence still 
plays a certain role), with all the lack of available archival materials, used 
a great number of up to that day neglected sources in many languages. 
Despite the fact that, in addition to several other things, he also neglect-
ed several social and economic aspects of history, his work counts as a 
standard Jewish history of the 19th century. His contribution is especially 
important in presenting the Jewish position in medieval Europe.
8 Modern Jewish Historiography
In the 20th century, all the complexity of the mentioned aspects is over-
taken and expanded by post-Wissenschaft Jewish historians, especial-
ly Simon Dubnov (1860–1941) in Eastern Europe and Salo Wittmayer 
Baron (1895–1989) in USA, who tried to include in their work the entire 
course of Jewish history, but also by those historians that were operat-
ing within the national renaissance of the Jewish people in their own 
land in the so-called Jerusalem school, among which Gershom Scholem 
(1897–1982) had the most revolutionary effect. In the period up to the 
First World War and even more up to the Second World War, we witness 
a beginning in writing local Jewish histories in different countries, espe-
cially in Central and Eastern Europe. Dubnov, the author of the History 
of the Hasidic Movement and the History of Jews of Poland and Russia, 
also wrote the World History of Jewish People (1925–1929). Salo W. Baron 
was with his Social and Religious History of the Jews the last author 
who in his monumental work included the entire Jewish history. In the 
years 1952–1983, 27 parts were published and his work after his death 
in 1989 remained unfinished. Graetz, Dubnov and Baron are considered 
as three great narrators of Jewish history in modern times. 

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All three also mentioned the Inner Austrian and Slovenian lands on sev-
eral occasions, as did Haim Hillel Ben Sasson, even though, of course, 
not in a very detailed manner. More detailed Wissenschaft treatment 
of the area, though, appears already in History of Jews in Austria by Josef 
von Wertheimer, who in 1842, 1853 and 1858, in German, published 
three books on the topic, which was done also by Johann E. Scherer 
in 1901. The first one to treat responsa of Rabbi Isserlein was Moritz 
Güdemann in 1888 in his history of medieval German Jews, followed 
by Abraham Berliner in Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft 
des Judentums 18 from 1896. First essay with a more local focus, in this 
case Styria, appears by Emanuel Baumgarten in 1903, which was followed 
by a more detailed book by Artur Rosenberg in 1914. Rabbi of Djakovo, 
Hinko Schulsinger was with his three papers (1925, 1928 and 1929), written 
in Serbo-Croatian, the first one in the area of ex-Yugoslavia to examine the 
responsa of Rabbi Isserlein and of his pupil Leket Yosher. This is the period 
when we also see first texts written by historians in the context of Italian, 
Austrian and Slovenian national historiographies appear, such as by the 
Slovenian Austro-Hungarian historian Josip Gruden (1910–1916), who pro-
vided a few pages of a general overview on Jewish history of Slovenian 
lands, by the Slovenian historian Franc Kos who between 1919 and 1925 
published five papers concerning the medieval cities of Gorizia, Ljubljana, 
Slovenj Gradec, Ptuj and Maribor, in which he also mentioned the local 
Jews, or, for instance, by the Austrian historian Fritz Popelka, who in his 
treatment of history of Graz in German also wrote about Jews in Graz 
(1919) or about the medieval Jewish villages in Carinthia (1935). In the 
Italian language, the Jews of Friuli, Gorizia, Gradisca and Trieste are dis-
cussed already in 1844 by Giuseppe Bianchi and in 1862 by Abraham 
Vita Morpurgo, to give just the two early examples. At the end of the 19th 
century, the Wissenschaft movement commenced an attempt in German 
to cover the entire area of the Holy Roman Empire under the title Germania 
Judaica. The first part covering the period until the year 1238 was pub-
lished in 1934. They continued with the second part (1238–1350) and then 
with the third part (1350–1519), of which the second volume was published 
in 1995 in cooperation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Here, the 
entries for the region of Inner Austria were written by Marcus Wenninger. 
In 1936, in issue 80 of the MGWJ, Jewish tombstones of Carinthia are cov-
ered by the Carinthian rabbi Joseph Babad, who published another paper 
in English in 1945, while Styrian Jewish tombstones were treated by the 

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Rabbi of Graz, David Herzog, in 1931, who in 1934 in German published 
The Sources for the History of Jews in Styria. The British Jewish historian 
Cecil Roth touches the region in his books History of Jews of Venice (1930), 
Jews of Italy (1948) and Jews in the Renaissance (1964). In these books, 
of course, most attention is given to Trieste, bibliographically most covered 
in the entire area, as from of all the regions of Carinthia, Styria, Carniola 
and the Austro-Hungarian Küstenland, i.e., Coastal Region (Istria, Trieste, 
Gradisca and Gorizia), in the period of 1515 to 1867, Jews only lived in the 
Coastal Region, basically in the three cities of Trieste, Gradisca and Gorizia. 
American Jewish historians provided three books focusing on the study 
of medieval responsa, which discuss these lands as well. In 1959 comes the 
book by Solomon Freehof, The Responsa Literature, in 1962, Jewish Life 
in Austria in the 1 5
th
 Century by Shlomo Eidelberg, and in 1970, Harmony 
and Discord by Erich Zimmer. In 1971, The History of Jews of Yugoslavia 
by Yakir Eventov appears in Hebrew, where a few chapters are dedicated 
to Slovenian lands in the Middle Ages. Since mid-1960s and especially 
since 1980, in addition to the growing number of texts on Jews of the 
area in decades prior to and during Holocaust, discussions on other pe-
riods occasionally started to appear in journals or short monographies 
also in general Italian, Austrian and Slovenian historiography, for instance 
on various localities, such as Piran, Trieste, Gorizia, Cividale, Villach, 
Friesach, Ljubljana, Maribor, Graz, Radkersburg, and on various topics, 
such as Jewish villages, money lending activities, banking and commerce, 
immigration and demography, legal position and civil emancipation, ex-
pulsions from Carinthia and Styria in 1496 and from Carniola in 1515, 
Jews of Aquileia, relations with Christian surroundings, cultural activities 
or medieval inscriptions. Some of these papers were published together 
in special issues, resulting from symposiums or other forms of cooperation 
between Slovenian, Austrian, Italian, and other historiography. In 1971, 
1972 and 1974, new general histories of Austrian Jews were published, 
and in 1981, a comprehensive History of Jews in Carinthia in German 
with data on all of the Inner Austrian lands was published by Wilhelm 
Wadl. Within the Slovenian historiography, in 1992 Vlado Valenčič pub-
lished a short book on Jews of Ljubljana, in 1996 Jože Mlinarič on Jews 
of medieval Maribor, in 1997 Mirjana Gašper and Beata Lazar on Jews 
in Lendava and in 1999 Janez Peršič on Jews in Piran. In 1991, in Italian, 
appears the collection of papers The Hebrew World, dedicated to medieval 
north-eastern Italy and edited by Giacomo Todeschini and Pier Cesare Ioly 

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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
Zorattini. This book, as well as monographies by Shlomo Spitzer from 1997 
on Jewish medieval Austria in German, the comprehensive History 
of Austrian Jews from 2006, written by Eveline Brugger, Martha Keil, Albert 
Lichtblau, Christoph Lind and Barbara Staudinger, also in German, and 
the comprehensive Jews in Slovenian Lands in the Middle Ages and The 
Jews in Slovenia, both by Klemen Jelinčič Boeta from 2009 in Slovenian, 
already include conclusions of all national historiographies, including the 
medieval responsa (see a detailed study in Jelinčič Boeta 2009, 57–123). 
After 2009, monography on modern Jews of Gorizia, written by Renato 
Podbersič, appeared as did some essays or books on other specific topics, 
such as Holocaust or anti-Semitism or specific localities, for instance the 
first comprehensive article in English on the medieval Jewish community 
of Maribor (Jelinčič Boeta 2020). 
When in December 1924, in the British Mandate of Palestine, the Hebrew 
University in Jerusalem was established, the expectations for a revolution-
ary progress in Jewish sciences were certainly very high. Even though the 
new Institute for Jewish Studies, to which most of the researchers of the 
so-called Jerusalem school belonged, was conceived as a secular institute, 
the language at its foundation was full of religious symbolism, where, 
perhaps unconsciously, appeared equation of Torah with science, which 
expressed double tendencies and desires of the present. On the one hand, 
they wanted to establish a new connection with the ancient national tradi-
tion and homeland, while on the other, they aspired to the highest stand-
ards of objective research (Myers 1998b, 93). The expressed goal of the 
new national educational institution was seen as an opposition to the 
previously dominant model of modern Jewish studies of Wissenschaft 
des Judentums. With this, the new Jewish university rose with a change 
in paradigm from religion into nation as a lens for recording the Jewish 
past. Most of these experts originated from the Central and Eastern Europe 
and were professionally educated in modern rabbinical seminaries, which 
represented the institutional home of the Wissenschaft. Thus, these histo-
rians represent a new generation (Wasserstein 2002, 5). 
Accordingly, the historians started to focus mostly on the mechanisms 
and activities of pre-modern Jewish community and on the Land of Israel 
as a primary locus of Jewish national activity, because of which also Land 
of Israel studies appeared. For the experts in Jerusalem, the Land of Israel 

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JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN OVERVIEW
not only represented a momentary geographical and social space but also 
an end to a long temporal process – a thelos of long path of Jewish people 
through dispersion and exile (Myers 1998b, 96), where, for which praise 
goes primarily to Yitzhak Baer, medieval Jewish community represents 
an idealised proto-state (97). Diaspora among these experts, despite clear 
national-historical purposes, was represented as a period when desired 
national values were preserved, and it occupied an important place in the 
historical flow which brought the Jews to the Land of Israel. As with the ex-
perts of the Jerusalem school, so was Zionism a movement which constant-
ly needed to adjust its birthplace in Europe with the place of their activities 
in Palestine, West with the East. G. Scholem, Y. Baer, Ben-Tzion Dinur, 
Joseph Klausner and their other colleagues from the Jerusalem school 
belonged to a generation of transition between Europe and Palestine, 
between the standards of Wissenschaft and attachment to Zionism and 
of course between the impulse to retain the standards of critical historical 
research and the desire to create new boundaries of collective memory 
(99). Among these researchers from this period, Sholem’s opus directed 
the attention to the vast amount of forgotten and of course unresearched 
mystical texts and extracted from them things not seen before. Sholem 
and members of the so-called ‘historical-critical school’ from 1939 onwards 
did not see the Jewish mysticism just as a literature of the elite, but since 
the 16th century onwards also as an important force that shaped the Jewish 
history (Idel 1998, 39–42). The fundamental History of the Second Temple 
from 1958 by Klausner also represents a watershed in Jewish historiog-
raphy that influenced all later research of the period, as well as of earlier 
Biblical periods. A few years later, in 1969, appears the new wholesome 
The History of Jewish people, edited by Ben-Sasson, which was translated 
into English in 1976 and since then revised and updated, for instance, for 
the edition of 1994. 
The academic historiography on Jewish national movement and the build-
ing of a nation is much younger than the Zionist movement and even the 
state of Israel. While the texts on Jewish national thought and the Zionist 
movement in diaspora were written in many lands, especially in USA and 
Great Britain, the historiography of Yishuv and the State of Israel is written 
almost exclusively in Israel, where it represents an area of sharp political 
and social conflicts and has also a strong generational undertone on five 
universities (Penslar 1998, 105). Mid-1960s and 1970s meant a beginning 

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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
of Zionist historiography as an academic discipline with first doctoral the-
ses on the history of Yishuv, academic magazines such as Tzionut (1970) 
and Cathedra (1976), but also with the Weitzman Institute at the University 
of Tel Aviv. In diaspora, especially in Great Britain and USA, the emphasis 
remained on synthesis, and in the 1970s, two books appeared that are still 
widely used today: Walter Laqueur and his History of Zionism and Howard 
Sachar and his History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. The 
Modern History of Israel, which was published in 1975 by Noah Lucas, had 
already foretold the appearance of ‘new Israeli history’ of the 1980s. In the 
same year, also Beginnings of Zionism were published by David Vital. 
When the so-called ‘new history’ appeared for the first time, it was mostly 
identified with the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 but has since spread to other 
topics. In this historiography, suddenly the differences between the exter-
nal and internal affairs, between politics and society, experts from Israel 
and diaspora are not as clear as they used to be. Of special importance 
here is the attempt to alter the entire framework of Jewish national histo-
ry, so well-known from the dominating historiography (Volkov 1996, 91). 
Today, we could speak of the ‘new history’ in more general terms and 
could say that it became the main direction of Israeli and general Jewish 
historiography as well as other historiography on Jews, produced also 
at numerous departments of Jewish studies across the Western World and 
published in various journals in several languages. Instead of a ‘new histo-
ry’, some rather speak of postmodern approaches to historical research, 
where deconstruction, contextualisation, and recognition of several layers 
of meanings appear, as well as does the research of up to then less studied 
aspects of history, such as the role of women, history of daily life or other 
issues. In accordance with the development within the general historiog-
raphy grew the importance of research of social history, partially started 
by Baron in his fundamental work, where the historian within the Jewish 
context pays attention to the roles of institutions such as family, school, 
synagogue, voluntary organisations and so on, but not without taking 
into account political history, not only in the sense of a secular non-Jewish 
authority, but also in the sense of exploring the institutions of Jewish po-
litical and legal autonomy (Katz 1993, 91). From early 1980s, certain Jewish 
historians, for instance Bonfil and Eliott Horowitz, started to examine how 
the models and constructs from cultural anthropology would be leading 
to new questions and styles of research of the premodern Jewish culture 

221
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JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY: AN OVERVIEW
and society (Marcus 1990, 123). In recent period, such books with new per-
spective appeared in all fields of the contemporary Jewish studies: Biblical 
studies, Talmudic studies, studies of the Land of Israel, and Jewish history, 
as well as all the other related fields: oriental studies, cultural studies, and, 
of course, sociology and anthropology. 
Also the history of historiography is quite a new direction and in the case 
of Jews even more so. Extremely important milestone is the appearance 
of a book called Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, which was 
published by Yerushalmi first in 1982, when a new period of introspection 
into history and practice of Jewish historians begins (Myers 1998a, 2–3). 
Bonfil (1988, 83) even sees Yerushalmi as someone who »has significant-
ly altered the terms of reference which now define the field«. Another 
such book is the first history of Jewish historians published by Michael 
in 1993 in Hebrew under the title Jewish Historical Writing since the 
Renaissance until the Modern Times. Of no less importance are also the 
unique 27 Beiheft of History and Theory: Essays in Jewish Historiography 
from 1988, the book The State of Jewish Studies, edited by Shaye Cohen 
and Edward Greenstein in 1990, or the book The Jewish Past Revisited: 
Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, published in 1998 and edit-
ed by David Myers and David Ruderman. In 1998, also Jewish History 
and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edit-
ed by Elishiva Carlebach, John M. Efron and David N. Myers, appeared. 
Additional texts had been written after 2000 with some new fundamental 
works appearing since 2018. In 2018, in The Cambridge History of Judaism, 
Volume 6, edited by Robert Chazan, chapter 30, written by Eva Haverkamp, 
is dedicated to historiography. In 2019, as volume 102 of Studia Judaica, 
Jewish Historiography Between Past and Future: 200 Years of Wissenschaft 
des Judentums appeared, and in 2020, The Routledge Companion to Jewish 
History and Historiography was published. The debate on Jewish histori-
ography is, as shown, very much alive. This internally directed shift of the 
Jewish historians is not only a product of internal self-contextual deci-
sion, but also a result of the time. Present-day students of Jewish history 
»inhabit the same postmodern world as other historians, a world in which 
fixed meaning – literary, historical or otherwise – is assumed not to exist« 
(Myers 1998a, 4). It is this scepticism of the postmodern moment about 
the possibility of historical truthfulness that has, among other things, led 
to this new critical self-awareness among the historians. 

222
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KLEMEN JELINČIČ BOETA
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