The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

Certainly we are not all influenced in the same way by the same events; moreover,
certain fundamentals are idiosyncratic to us by nature and they are also brought to bear under
the most stupendous impressions of the outside world in such a way that they sometimes
become fully evolved only by means of these effects. If it is correct, however, that a person is a
product of his ancestry and his environment, then it follows necessarily that by means of an
alteration of this environment the person becomes another, and all the more so indeed the
more strongly the environment is altered. And since historical conception is contingent upon
the subject who perceives, as is well known, so a historical conception must change as well
along with a change in the feelings of a person, of course not in areas that are inwardly foreign
and immaterial to us – nor does this bear upon historical issues at all here, rather upon
antiquarian ones – but in cases where we indeed excite a historical impression within
ourselves, where we philosophize historically. Voltaire, who had at first seen his ideal in Louis
XIV, worked new biases into his second edition of Le siècle [234] de Louis XIV, not because new
sources became available to him, but rather because he developed a more sceptical view of
Louis XIV on account of his antireligious sentiments that had increased in the meantime.
Whoever considers history to be not a collection of antiquaria[n details], but rather life and
present [time], knows that history must be dependent upon the changing attitudes of its
narrators. 83
Although [scholars were] further removed from such ideas earlier, I certainly no longer
fear any disagreement on this point today from researchers who are to be taken seriously; on
the other hand philological criticism has raised the objection that it would not be possible to
extract, from a single extant text, an inner development such as the one that I have [attained
from my] reading of Polybius. I have replied to these objections in detail in an exhaustive
treatment of Polybius’ tenth book, which appeared in Hermes, and I would like to refer to this
essay herewith. Methodologically [speaking], however, it is of enormous
satisfaction to me, in fact, that we have b een able to prove categorically the
83
I am speaking here only about serious characters, and not intending, for example, those
completely unrelated monotonies of Burnet who changed his historical narrative from one
edition to the next according to the constellation of the moment (Ranke, Analecten zur englishen
Geschichte, page 291 ff.), or of Johannes von Müller, who skipped over the legend of Gessler’s
hat in his first adaptation of Swiss history, but later included it in consideration for the public.
Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, page 406.
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