CHAPTER XXI

HISTORIANS AND CHRONICLERS

     Order of the Tannaim and Amoraim.—­Achimaaz.—­Abraham Ibn
     Daud.—­Josippon.—­Historical Elegies, or Selichoth.—­Memorial
     Books.—­Abraham Zacuto.—­Elijah Kapsali.—­Usque.—­Ibn
     Verga.—­Joseph Cohen.—­David Gans.—­Gedaliah Ibn
     Yachya.—­Azariah di Rossi.

The historical books to be found in the Bible, the Apocrypha, and the Hellenistic literature prove that the Hebrew genius was not unfitted for the presentation of the facts of Jewish life.  These older works, as well as the writings of Josephus, also show a faculty for placing local records in relation to the wider facts of general history.  After the dispersion of the Jews, however, the local was the only history in which the Jews could bear a part.  The Jews read history as a mere commentary on their own fate, and hence they were unable to take the wide outlook into the world required for the compilation of objective histories.  Thus, in their aim to find religious consolation for their sufferings in the Middle Ages, the Jewish historians sought rather to trace the hand of Providence than to analyze the human causes of the changes in the affairs of mankind.

But in another sense the Jews were essentially gifted with the historical spirit.  The great men of Israel were not local heroes.  Just as Plutarch’s Lives were part of the history of the world’s politics, so Jewish biographies of learned men were part of the history of the world’s civilization.  With the “Order of the Tannaim and Amoraim” (written about the year 1100) begins a series of such biographical works, in which more appreciation of sober fact is displayed than might have been expected from the period.  In the same way the famous Letter of Sherira Gaon on the compilation of the Rabbinical literature (980) marked great progress in the critical examination of historical problems.  Later works did not maintain the same level.

In the Middle Ages, Jewish histories mostly took the form of uncritical Chronicles, which included legends and traditions as well as assured facts.  Their interest and importance lie in the personal and communal details with which they abound.  Sometimes they are confessedly local.  This is the case with the “Chronicle of Achimaaz,” written by him in 1055 in rhymed prose.  In an entertaining style, he tells of the early settlements of the Jews in Southern Italy, and throws much light on the intercommunication between the scattered Jewish congregations of his time.  A larger canvas was filled by Abraham Ibn Daud, the physician and philosopher who was born in Toledo in 1110, and met a martyr’s end at the age of seventy.  His “Book of Tradition” (Sefer ha-Kabbalah), written in 1161, was designed to present, in opposition to the Karaites, the chain of Jewish tradition as a series of unbroken links from the age of Moses to Ibn Baud’s own times.