Originally published in Ada Rapoport-Albert, ed., Essays in Jewish historiography. History and Theory 27 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 66-77. From the close of the Babylonian Talmud in the sixth century CE down to the period of the Emancipation (late eighteenth century), the preponderance in Jewish studies was in the halakhah, the legal…