How Golden was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?

It is more or less a commonplace that XVIe siecle est un point culminant de l'historiographie juive. In formulating this statement in one of his earlier essays, 1 Salo W. Baron was probably influenced by the views on historical writing which were current in the first decades of this century (those of Fueter, Barnes, and so on). Indeed, the statement seems to stem from the belief that the Middle Ages did not produce any real historiography, and that Jewish writings during this period were quite naturally to be considered as reflecting this general condition. Baron himself stated this view clearly in the next sentence: Apres les grandes productions de l'antiquite, le moyen-age juif-pas plus d'ailleurs que le moyenage chroftien [my italics] n'avait connu aucune oeuvre historique dans le veritable sens du terme. Oddly enough, however, in the revised English translation of the same essay, as it appeared thirty-five years later,2 the words italicized above had disappeared. Why did Baron remove the terminus comparationis? Was this simply an unintentional omission, or should we rather infer that in Baron's later historical outlook, the comparison with the Christian Middle Ages appeared irrelevant to the exposition of the Jewish case? If so, why did he not remove the entire introductory section, which sets out to show that medieval Jewry indeed failed to bring forth any major historical work in the true sense of that term? Should we infer that in Baron's revised view, medieval Christianity did produce some major historical works, while medieval Jewry did not? The pertinence of these questions to the subject of the present enquiry is not immediately obvious. At first glance, it may seem that a study of Jewish historiography in the Renaissance and Baroque periods3 need not concern itself with the medieval antecedents of the genre. Indeed, no fewer than ten substantial Jewish works of history were composed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.