Jews rejected historiography for centuries as a conscious refusal, not incapacity

Evidence

The lack of Jewish historiography for this long period must be seen not as a failure but as a rejection. It is not that they failed to produce historians; it is that they did not want historians and they did not want history. The books of Maccabees were rejected from the canon and survive only in translation. Josephus, one of the greatest historians of antiquity, was a renegade Jew writing in a foreign language for a foreign audience. Maimonides even went so far as to denounce the study of history as of no moral or intellectual value and a waste of time. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 337

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said-adjacent claims about why a people’s self-knowledge is mediated through others — here the absence of internal Jewish historiography meant Western/Orientalist scholars constructed Jewish history for them. — connects to: Jews deliberately rejected the writing of their own history
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between inability and deliberate refusal to produce history reframes absence itself as a form of cultural agency — relevant to any historiography founded on a transmitted sacred canon.