Our history books are often filled with tearful accounts, emphasizing the tragic, sorrowful, pitiful, and sad aspects in people’s lives during the past, and this to an extreme. Medieval and early modern chroniclers, like modern-day journalists, were fully aware of the effectiveness of sensational accounts, and sacrificed at times objectivity for a number of subjective strategies. This is not to deny the value of chronicles and other official texts, but we always have to keep in mind their natural bias within specific contexts. These observations apply directly to the way Jewish authors have depicted the history of their people in the pre-modern world, leading today to a highly charged, negative assessment based on accounts about pogroms, expulsions, and killings. In reality, however,…
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Citation: Classen, Albrecht. "Ma’aseh Book". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 March 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=41558, accessed 25 November 2024.]
