Historians & The Dark Side

Robert Liberles: Historians, imbued with curiosity and a fascination with the dark side, can easily be drawn toward the negative, the hostile, the antinomian side of human behavior. In addition, deviant behavior has much to teach about a society under study. There is also the endless fallacy of being drawn by sources deep into the abyss of misrepresentation. Records in the public archives relate strife and despair more often than happiness and love. Rabbinic responsa pertaining to family life also tend to deal with discord. Abuses in Jewish family life can be abundantly documented, and they should be. These sources have been ignored too often, partly because they were not known, partly because they were at times consciously overlooked. Research based on prescriptive sources has depicted a portrait that is quite distant from the harsher reality that emerges from primary descriptive sources.