The sixteenth century witnessed the production of several popular Jewish histories.  At that epoch the horizon of the world was extending under new geographical and intellectual discoveries.  Israel, on the other hand, seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the slough of despond.  Some of the men who had themselves been the victims of persecution saw that the only hope lay in rousing the historical consciousness of their brethren.  History became the consolation of the exiles from Spain who found themselves pent up within the walls of the Ghettos, which were first built in the sixteenth century.  Samuel Usque was a fugitive from the Inquisition, and his dialogues, “Consolations for the Tribulations of Israel” (written in Portuguese, in 1553), are a long drawn-out sigh of pain passing into a sigh of relief.  Usque opens with a passionate idyl in which the history of Israel in the near past is told by the shepherd Icabo.  To him Numeo and Zicareo offer consolation, and they pour balm into his wounded heart.  The vividness of Usque’s style, his historical insight, his sturdy optimism, his poetical force in interpreting suffering as the means of attaining the highest life in God, raise his book above the other works of its class and age.

Usque’s poem did not win the same popularity as two other elegiac histories of the same period.  These were the “Rod of Judah” (Shebet Jehudah) and the “Valley of Tears” (Emek ha-Bachah).  The former was the work of three generations of the Ibn Verga family.  Judah died before the expulsion from Spain, but his son Solomon participated in the final troubles of the Spanish Jews, and was even forced to join the ranks of the Marranos.  The grandson, Joseph Ibn Verga, became Rabbi in Adrianople, and was cultured in classical as well as Jewish lore.  Their composite work, “The Rod of Judah,” was completed in 1554.  It is a well-written but badly arranged martyrology, and over all its pages might be inscribed the Talmudical motto, that God’s chastisements of Israel are chastisements of love.  The other work referred to is Joseph Cohen’s “Valley of Tears,” completed in 1575.  The author was born in Avignon in 1496, four years after his father had shared in the exile from Spain.  He himself suffered expatriation, for, though a distinguished physician and the private doctor of the Doge Andrea Doria, he was expelled with the rest of the Jews from Genoa in 1550.  Settled in the little town of Voltaggio, he devoted himself to writing the annals of European and Jewish history.  His style is clear and forcible, and recalls the lucid simplicity of the historical books of the Bible.

The only other histories that need be critically mentioned here are the “Branch of David” (Zemach David), the “Chain of Tradition” (Shalsheleth ha-Kabbalah), and the “Light of the Eyes” (Meoer Enayim).  Abraham de Porta Leone’s “Shields of the Mighty” (Shilte ha-Gibborim, printed in Mantua in 1612); Leon da Modena’s “Ceremonies and Customs of the Jews,” (printed in Paris in 1637); David Conforte’s “Call of the Generations” (Kore ha-Doroth, written in Palestine in about 1670); Yechiel Heilprin’s “Order of Generations” (Seder ha-Doroth, written in Poland in 1725); and Chayim Azulai’s “Name of the Great Ones” (written in Leghorn in 1774), can receive only a bare mention.