On the Dark Periods in History and Jewish History

What Kind of Assumptions does Our Picture of History Make?

Here’s an overview of history, as usually taught in western schools.

First there was pre-history with cavemen and stuff.

Then the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, then there were the Israelites who invented monotheism which led to Jesus and Christianity.

Meanwhile, there was Greece, which did a Democracy and defeated the Persians, but they were eventually eclipsed by the Roman Republic, which “conquered the world in self defense” and became the Roman Empire when they dropped the democracy, and then times were good for 300 years until it collapsed.

And then nothing happened for a while until the Muslim conquest, which only stopped because of Merovingians, and the Muslims had a big empire which changed rulers every so often, and Europe sent crusades to try and defeat Muslims but it didn’t work, and then in 1492 Columbus discovered America, and oh by the way there’s indigenous people, we feel super bad about that, but anyway, the Spanish did a bunch of stuff but the English eventually were the big winners because of all the trading companies they had that conquered all this territory, and also there was the Renaissance, blablabla Napoleon blablabla World War I blablabla World War II blablabla today.

I’m being deliberately unfair, sure, and maybe there’s stuff I should’ve paid more attention to in class, but I want to call your attention to a focus this tends to have. Besides for the obvious Western bias, it has a bias in favor of people who a) conquered a lot b) got a lot of stuff, by trade or by sword. Think about the way we talk about the Roman Empire as a kind of Golden Age, the “Pax Romana” and then after the Romans we go into the “Dark Ages”, which, even if contemporary historians don’t use the term, is still how it exists in the popular imagination. We view the Roman Empire as a default, even a praiseworthy default, and the times without empire as an abberation at best.

But was the Roman Empire’s Pax Romana a Golden Age for everyone? How did the Judeans feel about the Pax Romana? The Gauls? The Germanic tribes? Egypt? Whatever was left of Carthage? Who was the Pax Romana a time of peace of prosperity for? Everyone? Or just Rome? Everyone in Rome? Or just an incredibly wealthy elite? And this is what our history books tell us was the height of Western Civilization such that the period after its collapse was the “Dark Ages!”