Page:Chapters on Jewish literature (IA chaptersonjewish00abra).pdf/216

212 quired for the compilation of objective histories. Thus, in their aim to find religious consolation for their sufferings in the Middle Ages, the Jewish historians sought rather to trace the hand of Providence than to analyze the human causes of the changes in the affairs of mankind.

But in another sense the Jews were essentially gifted with the historical spirit. The great men of Israel were not local heroes. Just as Plutarch’s Lives were part of the history of the world’s politics, so Jewish biographies of learned men were part of the history of the world's civilization. With the “Order of the Tannaim and Amoraim” (written about the year 1100) begins a series of such biographical works, in which more appreciation of sober fact is displayed than might have been expected from the period. In the same way the famous Letter of Sherira Gaon on the compilation of the Rabbinical literature (980) marked great progress in the critical