A century and a half ago, in a pioneering meditation on the tortuous vicissitudes of the people of Israel, Heinrich Graetz, the father of modern Jewish historiography, proclaimed the need battle for the right to have a history of our own. He observed that Christian historiography, as is well known, denies Judaism any history, in the noble sense of the term, after the disappearance of a Jewish political entity, which moreover coincided with an event that was essential for Christianity.... The historian's pen flits past the story of the Jewish Calvary, as if in fear that evoking harsh memories might reawaken a conscience lulled to sleep by sophisms.... But how might we at last acknowledge and honor the intense activity of Jewish history, the enduring creations produced by Judaism behind the locked gates of the ghetto or in the mournful solitude of its cloisters?' In answer to this question, Graetz himself compiled over the following years his monumental Geschichte der Juden, of which eight volumes were dedicated to the period between the destruction of the Temple and the middle of the nineteenth century. Within the Jewish world people felt the need to reconstruct their own past, addressing themselves not so much to the biblical era as to a later period, the centuries of exile and diaspora whose vicissitudes had left a distinctive mark on their identity. In those same years, the great romantic historians-from Thierry to Ranke, Michelet to Macaulay-were reconstructing the events that for them revealed the distinctive characters of the various peoples of Europe: it was a way of trying to define the idea of the nation-state which, unleashed by the French Revolution, burst upon the Europe of the Holy Alliance with liberating force. Similarly, among the Jews there were those who realized that it might be possible to overcome their ancient separateness, and thus perhaps attain a certain equality within the societies in which they lived, by becoming conscious of the historical reasons for an othemess that had been encouraged and magnified, but not exclusively determined, by intolerance and superstition. In other words, their