“To contrast history writing and storytelling as polar opposites is thus to distort the nature of both types of literature”

Fraenkel’s approach would seem to create an unbridgeable chasm between historical writing and other sorts of literature, with Rabbinic tales irrevocably in the non-historical category. By contrast, as I have been arguing, the two types of writing, different as their intellectual orientations may be, may have more in common than is apparent at the outset. History writing, to conclude, is not quite as objective as Fraenkel would make it out to be; story telling of different sorts, on the other hand, is not as devoid of memory of the past as Fraenkel argued. To contrast history writing and storytelling as polar opposites is thus to distort the nature of both types of literature.

Albert I. Baumgarten, “Rabbinic Literature as a Source for the History of Jewish Sectarianism in the Second Temple”, Dead Sea Discoveries, Vol. 2, No. 1 (April 1995), 34, n. 68.