This seminar explores the phenomenon of historical writing among Jews and asks how and why Jews wrote about their past from the books of the Hebrew Bible to the emergence of academic Jewish history as a "scientific" discipline in nineteenth-century Germany to the practice of history in our own day. Students interrogate how historical writers' contemporary politics and anxieties shaped the ways they narrated Jewish history in response to anti-Judaism, antisemitism, totalitarianism, Zionism and anti-Zionism.