ABSTRACT
To write Jewish history is perhaps the hardest of historiographic undertakings, being immensely long – almost four millennia – and covering practically the entire globe, its sources scattered in scores of libraries and languages in dozens of countries. The problems of the Jewish historian are complicated by the interconnection of Judaism and Jewish history. The biblical criticism of Christian or pseudo-Christian scholars in the eighteenth century was probably the first major attempt to present a secular history of ancient Israel. The great national liberation movements of the nineteenth century revived Jewish hopes for the future. Jews turned inward, as other nationalists did throughout Europe, to explore and understand the history and achievements of their nation. Dubnow showed that behind the legal-religious disputes between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the later Second Commonwealth were two political parties, representing bitterly divided rival social classes struggling for mastery.
