The Story of the Jews

Starred review from January 13, 2014
Award-winning Columbia Univ. historian Schama, NBCC Award winner for Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, brings to bear his gift for synthesizing mountains of information into a well-crafted, accessible narrative in this impressive volume that spans nearly 2,500 years and serves as a companion volume to a PBS series. His aim is to incorporate the telling details that make the past, and its people, live and breathe for a modern audience—“the prosaic along with the poetic: a doodle on a child’s Hebrew exercise page from medieval Cairo; battling cats and mice on a sumptuously illustrated Bible from Spain... the aggravation of an NCO sweating it out on a hilltop fort while the Babylonians are closing in.” He opens with a Jewish soldier on Elephantine in 475 B.C.E., known from a letter sent by his father, discovered again after two-and a-half millennia, and continues through the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal. Throughout, Schama offers cogent arguments for the credibility of numerous sources, including the controversial Josephus, and supports the notion advanced by Rabbi Gershon Cohen that assimilation had its benefits, by stimulating growth and creativity for the Jews. Maps & Illus. Agents: Michael Sissons & Caroline Michel; Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (U.K.)

Starred review from February 1, 2014
Witty, nimble and completely in his element, Schama (History and Art History/Columbia Univ.; Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill, and My Mother, 2011, etc.), in a book tie-in to a PBS and BBC series, fashions a long-planned "labor of love" that nicely dovetails the biblical account with the archaeological record. Indeed, as this densely written effort accompanies the visual story, the author fixes on a tangible element (such as papyrus, shard or document) in each chapter as a point of departure in advancing the early history of the Jews. For example, a missive in papyrus by a father to his missionary son from an island in the Upper Nile circa 475 B.C. illustrates the thriving expat Jewish community in Egypt, despite the dire "perdition" narrative about Egypt being written at the same time by the first Hebrew sages in Judea and Babylon. The remains of early synagogues in Hellenized Cyrenaica and elsewhere, built in a classical Greek temple style, with graphic mosaics, reveal how the Jews were intimately situated in their crossover surroundings. The inscriptions and excavations at Zafar (in present-day Yemen) attest to the Judaic conversion of the Kingdom of Himyar in the late fourth century, evidence that "the Jews were far from a tenuous, alien presence amid the ethnically Arab world of the Hijaz and the Himyar." In the long litany of persecution and suppression, climaxing but scarcely ceasing with the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70, the Jews had to scatter, taking their words with them, and the Torah was later enriched by the "picayune" codifications of the Mishnah and Talmud, all as a way "to rebuild Jerusalem in the imagination and memory." Schama is relentless in faulting the break between Christianity and Judaism as the spur to the subsequent phobia against the "pariah tribe." A multifaceted story artfully woven by an expert historian.

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March 15, 2014

Schama (art history & history, Columbia Univ.; The American Future: A History) presented a five-part BBC series of the same title last year, with this book published in the UK to be "organically interconnected" with the series. It is the first of a projected two volumes. (PBS will air the series beginning in late March.) Schama turns his attention to a topic that resonates with his own heritage, at once celebrating a rich and distinct religious history while also embracing the idea that Jews often lived side by side with other cultures and were to some extent integrated into them. He argues that "it was possible to be Jewish and Egyptian, just as later it would be possible to be Jewish and Dutch or Jewish and American." Schama's emphasis on acculturation is highlighted in his discussions of Jewish art, society, and even their religious practices having been influenced by cultures around them. Equally, he offers cases in which Jews were persecuted by neighbors as in Blois, France (1171 CE), and in forced conversions and mob rampages in Toledo, Spain, during the 1300s. The book ends with Spain's expulsion of the Jews in 1492. While Schama more than makes his case about cultural influences and immersion, the occasional pauses as he focuses intensely on the minutiae of a particular topic make his tempo uneven, a pattern that is made more challenging by his jumps back and forth in time. VERDICT Perhaps too cumbersome to absorb for a neophyte of Jewish history, the book (BBC/PBS series and illustrations not seen) is recommended for serious readers who would like a new interpretation of a well-covered subject.--Crystal Goldman, San Jose State Univ. Lib., CA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2014
Schama is a professor at Columbia University, an award-winning author of history and art books, and a writer and producer of acclaimed television documentaries. This is the first of a planned two-volume work, and it covers the development of Judaism and the Jewish people from their first stirring of a sense of a national identity up to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Schama has written an unconventional but masterful and deeply felt history of his people, which seamlessly integrates themes of art, religion, and ethnicity as he illustrates how Jews both influenced and were influenced by the other people they lived among for more than 1,500 years. While Schama follows a roughly chronological approach, this is not a strictly narrative account. Rather, he focuses on particular topics to define the essence of a particular period, and he does so by examining literary and archaeological remnants that provide a human and often deeply moving touch. A letter from a Jewish mercenary in Egypt illustrates the paradox of a Jewish return to the land of their enslavement. The writings of a poet in eleventh-century Granada convey both the benefits and difficulties of Jewish life in a Muslim state. This beautifully written chronicle is a tie-in to an upcoming PBS series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)