© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�8750��4-� �34� �68 zutot � � (�0 �5) �6-30 brill.com/zuto ZUTOT: Perspectives on Jewish Culture brill.com/zuto History for Religious Purposes: The Writing, Publication, and Renewal of Tzemah David David Sclar University of Toronto, Canada Abstract This paper examines the pervasive religiosity of Tzemah David and of its subsequent reprinting. David Gans’s work of history was published at least ten times between the end of the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, indicating its popularity and continued relevance among Eastern European Jews. The book took on varied and unexpected meaning, as printers amended the text to renew it for succes- sive generations. Although some historians have argued that early modern Jews did not have an imminent interest in historical events, the sustained demand for Tzemah David suggests that Ashkenazic Jewry valued history as it related, in the least, to Jew- ish religious identity. That is, piety involved more than memory, and historiography, broadly speaking, has not only been utilized in the realm of the secular. As I will show, Tzemah David provided laymen entry into personal religiosity otherwise reserved for scholars of rabbinic texts. Keywords history – David Gans – Tzemah David – Rezeptionsgeschichte – Prague – piety – chronology – printing In his groundbreaking 1982 publication Zakhor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi enu- merated ten histories composed by Jews during the sixteenth century, eight *  A version of this essay was presented at the conference ‘David Gans (1541–1613) after Four Centuries: The Legacy of an Early Modern Jewish Polymath,’ sponsored by the Prague Centre for Jewish Studies at Charles University in Prague, May 27–29, 2013. I am grateful to Shlomo Berger, Jeffrey Culang, Pavel Sladek, and Josh Teplitsky for helpful comments.