The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC - 1492 AD

by Simon Schama

Hardcover, 2014

Call number

909 SCH

Collection

Publication

Ecco (2014), Edition: First Edition, 512 pages

Description

History. Religion & Spirituality. Nonfiction. HTML: In this magnificently illustrated cultural historyâ??the tie-in to the pbs and bbc series The Story of the Jewsâ??simon schama details the story of the jewish people, tracing their experience across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the new world in 1492 It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance in the face of destruction, of creativity in the face of oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life despite the steepest of odds. It spans the millennia and the continentsâ??from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain. In The Story of the Jews, the Talmud burns in the streets of Paris, massed gibbets hang over the streets of medieval London, a Majorcan illuminator redraws the world; candles are lit, chants are sung, mules are packed, ships loaded with gems and spices founder at sea. And a great story unfolds. Notâ??as often imaginedâ??of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's s… (more)

Library's review

This massive first volume tells the story of the Jewish People from 1000 BC to 1492 AD. It's a sobering history, reminding us of the millennia of persecution that has been suffered by them. It is also a celebration of the vibrant Jewish culture and its contribution to science, technology, language,
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philosophy, and art. The subtitle for this volume is important: "finding the words". It underscores the historical importance of the written word in Jewish theology and life. The volume ends in 1492 with the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal (and the mass executions, under the auspices of the "Inquisition"), including the flight of Abraham Zacuto (creator of the stable, copper astrolabe, and the most advanced and usable almanac for seafarers). "Zacuto's mind, like that of so many Jews, was caught between the ancestral and the visionary, the endless past and the opening future under the charted heavens and the vast ocean. Perhaps the ends of the earth were where the words reached farthest? For all the attempts to burn, expunge and blot hem out, to excise and criminalize Hebrew reading, to beat the books out of the Jews, the words travelled on and on through space and time." (Brian)
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User reviews

LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Epic, thoroughly well researched, and beautifully written. Schama brings a frequently-tragic history to life, and this is full of fascinating historical surprises (to me) - such as the Khazar Correspondence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_Correspondence).

If I were to make a criticism, it
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would be that this is not an introductory history, which is how it was marketed in the UK. A competent understanding of Judaism and the broad sweep of European history is required. If you don't know your mishnah from your haggadah, or your gemara from your talmud, you should begin elsewhere - as I had to.
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LibraryThing member mschlack
No matter where you come from, you will learn something from this book, be it about the Jews, antiquity, philosophy, religion or the history of Christian Europe. Shama takes us through the allotted time period on the edge of our seats, full of deep history and deep insights into what shaped the
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history of the Jews, but also how anti-semitism evolved. You will hear many echoes of today's world (and not just anti-Jewish sentiment, but anti-anyone) in these pages.

I stopped short of five stars because I felt the book stopped short of being an unassailable history, in the sense that while he documents 95% of what he is saying, occasionally he just asserts things. While the book is well-written, it is not well-edited: his editors failed him in small places where a reference to something prior is obscure and that sort of thing.

But don't let that dissuade you. It's an extremely compelling look at a one of the world's great "outsider" cultures. How the Jews fared in mainstream Roman, Christian and Muslim societies at various times and places tells a lot about what made those worlds tick. And his documenting of the atrocities from around 1000 CE to 1492, largely in the Christian world, should be required reading for all of Europe and North America. It's a grim tale, documented both in great detail and in very human anecdotes that go beyond the statistics.

Lastly, the connection of Jewish society with other West Asian cultures, and later the Muslima Umma, highlights the way in which European scholars have conveniently appropriated Greece and even Egypt as somehow Western. Shama's work incidentally documents how late Europe was to that party, and the role that Jews and Arabs played in spreading Greek and even Roman science and philosophy..
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LibraryThing member sloopjonb
This overview of Jewish history from the post-Davidian kingdoms to the Spanish expulsion is very much written in Schama's voice: you can hear him talking to you, the cadences of his writing being very much those of the spoken word. This is very engaging and entertaining, and Schama introduces us to
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a wealth of interesting characters (especially the redoubtable and resonantly named Licoricia of Winchester), but I'm knocking off a star for getting bogged down in too much detail at several points.
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LibraryThing member joeydag
I had some difficulties reading this history. The author is brilliant and his writing can be quite demanding. Also he covers some of the most wretched tragedies. I don't think I've felt so disheartened reading about the atrocities that were suffered during medieval times. This is not an exhaustive
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history but it is more than just a companion book to the TV series. I imagined a series of snapshots in time. And not necessarily where one might expect them to be taken.
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LibraryThing member robeik
This book is not particularly easy to rad for a few reasons. A lot of information is presented, with lots of names. Quite a few are mentioned and it is assume that the reader knows who they are. Quite some prior knowledge is expected. It's also a horrible story in many aspects. It takes the reader
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through Jewish to the 1500s, and we all know that there are more atrocities to describe in later history.

However, the theme of the book that the word, written down, rewritten, copied, spoken and recited, exported and imported, public and hidden, plain and euphoric, direct and ambiguous is central to Jewish history.
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LibraryThing member sriram_shankar
I always wanted to know why the Jews were hated so much - be it by Christians, Muslims or Nazis. It was even more important to me to know how the Jews have preserved their holy books and oral traditions despite the oppression they have faced as a community over millenia.

That said, this book does go
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into great length about the Jews and their history and also covers in great detail all of the points I was looking out for. It is incredibly detailed and no details seem to have been left out in this sweeping narrative that spans continents.

However, this is not a book for those seeking an introduction into Jewish history/theology. I guess it presupposes at least passing familiarity with names like Joseph, Ezra, Ahrasus, Purim etc. In large parts the book turned out to be verbose and disconnected. This might be only for me since I have little familiarity with Jewish history to begin with.
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LibraryThing member Dilip-Kumar
A highly engaging account of the history of the Jews during the medieval period. This volume does not cover the trauma of World War II and the holocaust of the German killing camps, so any reaction or assessment of the book may be relieved of the awful moral responsibility for that horror. However,
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it seems that the author assumes a certain familiarity with the foundation myths of the Jewish religion at the beginning of the book, such as the exile to Egypt and the return to Israel under the leadership of Moses, the commandments received from God, the awful sacrifice (of his own son, and not in an allegorical fashion) that God demanded of Abraham, the special covenant that God made with the Jews, and so on. For a reader not born or brought up in the so-called Abrahamic religious milieu, these fairly dire happenings invoke a puzzled wonder. In succeeding chapters, the book goes on to describe the almost unrelenting onslaught of the Christian and later the Moslem world on these unfortunate people, which is all the more puzzling to us outsiders, as all these so-called universal faiths evidently arose from that very Abrahamic covenant, and claim to be worshiping the very same universal and singular Lord of the Universe. So far, this history reinforces one's relief at being born into a culture and religion that assures us that though the Truth (or God) is one, there are many paths to reach it (or It). The author himself seems to be approving of the relatively more syncretist, multi-cultural life of the Jewish outposts in Pharaonic Egypt (at the start of the book), and perhaps is hinting at the need to make the faith more relaxed. The other great message that I would draw is that Eastern and traditional cultures and religions based on such a universalist, tolerant belief system should hang on to their basically open and welcoming values, and refrain from hardening their systems and boundaries just because the monotheists have been taunting them for all these hundreds of years of being idolatrous, unmanly, vain, sinful, or other calumnies of a similar nature.
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Pages

512

ISBN

0060539186 / 9780060539184
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