had ceased to write history. It no longer engaged in speculative philosophy of any kind. All its traditional forms–wisdom, poetry, psalmody, allegory, historical novellae, apocalyptic–had been abandoned. It was engaged, with passionate concentration and sincerity, on a solitary form of literary work: commentary on the religious law. And it continued this task, oblivious of its richer past, unaware of any intellectual ferment in the world outside, for hundreds of years.
