Uriel Caspi

Modern Jewish historiography is the modern iteration of Jewish historical narrative writing and historical literature. While Jewish oral history and the collection of commentaries in the Midrash and Talmud are ancient, the rise of the printing press and movable type in the early modern period led to the publication of Jewish histories and early editions of the Torah/Tanakh that dealt with the history of Jewish diaspora ethno-religious groups, and increasingly, national histories of the Jews, Jewish nationhood or peoplehood and identity. This was a move from a manuscript or scribal culture to a printing culture. Jewish historians wrote accounts of their collective experiences, used history for political, cultural, and scientific or philosophical exploration, and drew upon a corpus of culturally inherited text.