The Jews in the Reformation Era

Abstract

The Talmud has a dictum: “There is nothing early and nothing late in the Torah”. This disregard for the historical approach has undoubtedly contributed to the relative neglect of historical study by Jews—both the study of their own history and that of the peoples amongst whom they lived. As recently as some two centuries ago, the representative spokesman of the Jewish Enlightenment. Moses Mendelssohn, explicitly proclaimed his boredom when he had to read anything historical. Of course, a corpus of Jewish historical writing does exist—large portions of the Bible, the works of Josephus, the historians of the 16th and 17th centuries C.E. (Abraham ibn Daud, Solomon ibn Verga, Azariah de Rossi, Gedaliah ibn Yahya, David Gans et. al.) but it would be difficult to speak of a historiographical tradition comparable to that established amongst other peoples. Not until the 19th century did this relative lack of interest give way to informed and scholarly investigation into the Jewish past. This was a primary achieve...