Jewish Historians Could Stand to Borrow a Trick from the Greeks

I don’t see how one can say, as Eric Mechoulan does in “What is the Meaning of Jewish History?,” that “the very idea of history was a Jewish invention.” What Jews invented was the idea that history has a divine purpose. Apart from Israel’s relationship to God, and God’s relationship to other peoples as a means of punishing or rewarding Israel, the history of anyone or anything never interested the authors of the Bible or the rabbis in the least.

This is precisely Yosef Yerushalmi’s point in Zakhor, a book cited more than once by Mechoulan. We owe to the Greeks—and specifically (or at least his work is the genre’s first surviving example) to Herodotus—the idea of history as the embracing study of past events that seeks to describe and understand them, the connections among them, and the motives and mores of those involved in them. When Herodotus begins his account of the ancient world in the 7th, 6th, and early 5th centuries BCE, and of its wars between the Greeks and the Persians, he writes that he is doing so

so that human achievements may not be forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds—some displayed by Greeks, some by Barbarians—may not be without their glory; and especially, to show why the two peoples fought with each other.