Judaic Texts and Their History?

[...]political factors provided the decisive incentive for Jesus’ followers to distance themselves from the majority of Jews after each unsuccessful revolt against Roman rule. Salo Baron’s Social and Religious History runs eighteen volumes, and although Professor Goodman considers it “very readable,” mere mortals do not.7 In any event, Baron’s innovations in statistics, demography, migration patterns, and linguistic variations shed far more light on the social than the religious half promised by Baron’s title. [...]the mastery of the myriad host cultures needed to advance Jewish history makes it unlikely that any one person could replicate, much less improve upon, what Baron accomplished. [...]perhaps, the shift from one author to three in the most popular single-volume textbook for undergraduates—John Efron, Steven Weitzman, and Matthias Lehmann’s The Jews: A History.8 While Robert Seltzer’s Jewish People, Jewish Thought dominated the field for a couple of decades, it has been displaced by Efron and colleagues, who have produced a truly excellent work that aspires to be, and is, an excellent introduction for undergraduates.9 The Jews: A History incorporates primary documents, material culture discussions and visual aids far more effectively than Seltzer’s learned work. Since Goodman begins a history of Judaism with Josephus’ re-telling of the Bible, why not deploy the lengthy and accessible rabbinic discussion of Hannah in Babylonian Talmud (Ber. 31a-b), where Hannah is construed by the rabbis as the positive paradigm for recitation of a statutory prayer (the Amidah) from which Hannah herself would be exempt?