The student of history is thus distanced from the past. Traditional Jewish memory, by contrast, related to the sacred past in a-historical terms. Jews lived timelessly, suspended between the destruction of the Second Temple and the expected messianic redemption, and they interpreted contemporary events as either the fulfillments of prophecy or signs of the coming endtime. Yerushalmi's troubling point was that with the advent of history in our era, and with the wholehearted embrace of history by today's Jews, our study of the Jewish past alienates us from the very heritage we are trying to embrace. The more we learn about the historical contexts underlying biblical or rabbinic texts, the less likely we are to experience their sacred, transformative power.
History is inevitably interpretation.
Historians do not present us with uninterpreted factual data. They select data that they uncover in their research, choosing what they consider significant based on the assumptions that they bring to their work, and shaping the data into coherent narratives that reflect those assumptions. When I study medieval Jewish history with rabbinical students, our first challenge after reading the work on an historian is to extract his or her assumptions and determine how they affect the conclusions that are presented. Then he is liable to justify the actions of those leaders. Then she is likely to believe the Inquisition's accusations about Judaizing conversos.