The Hebrew language—the language of the Jewish people—lacks a concept of history. The closest term to history is zikharon, or “memory.” Although both concepts—history and memory—relate to past events, they relate to those events and to the nature of time itself, in entirely different ways.
The concept of history involves thinking about time linearly. Time is circular in memory. History is the study of events that happened in the past. Memory is a process of absorbing past events into the present and the future.
