David Gans · 1592 (first composed/printed Prague, שנ"ב; this is a later reprint)
Read the translation (PDF) · Editorial footnotes (PDF)
A Hebrew historical chronicle in two parts by David Gans: the first traces Jewish history from creation to the sixteenth century — biblical figures, sages, and rabbis; the second surveys world and gentile history from Julius Caesar to Emperor Rudolph.
Part One runs by millennia of the Hebrew calendar — first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth — and within them by short dated entries. Its spine is the chain of transmission: the generations of Tannaim reckoned from the destruction of the Temple, then the orders of the Amoraim, the Savoraim and the Geonim, carried forward through the medieval rabbinate. It closes with an index to its own entries, which is how the book was meant to be used: as a reference for placing a name in a generation.
Part Two turns to the wider world, from Julius Caesar to the reigning Emperor Rudolph. Its preface — a defense of the value of studying secular history — is the passage the book is best known for, and an early and unusually direct statement of Jewish openness to knowledge from outside the tradition.
Tzemach David was the first history book printed in Hebrew, at Prague in 1592, and it became a widely read reference well beyond its author’s circle. Its two-part structure is itself the argument: by giving gentile history its own volume rather than folding it into the margins of Jewish chronology, Gans treated the wider past as a subject a Jewish reader could legitimately study — the same instinct that took him to Tycho Brahe’s observatory.
The translated volume is the Warsaw 1871 printing of the expanded recension, which is considerably more than the 1592 book: it carries the Part III continuation down to 1692, together with later supplements running as far as