This essay is an investigation of Ludwig Philippson and Marcus Lehmann, the most important German-Jewish publishers of the nineteenth century, and their notions of Jewish historiography. It aims to show, by means of significant examples of their extensive journalistic writings, that both figures, as representatives of Reform Judaism and Neo-Orthodoxy respectively, actively sought to establish the dominance of their interpretations of the course of Jewish history, to the end of justifying their aims of either the reform or the perpetuation of Jewish tradition in an age of modernisation and emancipation. The article suggests a reassessment of modern Jewish history as a history of relationships between the various ideological trends within modern Judaism, such as Reform and Orthodoxy, taking into account the influence of the Christian majority society on intra-Jewish relations.