"[...] Democritus, who laughs at the world, and Heraclitus, who weeps over it.

The story of the #Jews tends to be told in the Heraclitan mode.

There is a name for this tendency: it is the ‘lachrymose conception of #Jewish #history’. This was the coinage of the #historian #SaloBaron, and intended in a pejorative way: #Baron spent his career criticising an earlier generation of #scholars for painting such a gloomy picture of #Jewishhistory. The #FrenchRevolution, #HeinrichGraetz had said, was a ‘judgement which in one day atoned for the sins of a thousand years’; the #emancipation of the Jews that followed in its wake marked the ‘dawn after their long slavery among the nations of #Europe’. Baron’s 1928 essay, ‘Ghetto and Emancipation’, called for a ‘break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in accord with historic truth’. The historic truth, in his view, was that emancipation wasn’t all good, and the ghetto wasn’t all bad."

https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/venice-and-the-fate-of-the-jews/