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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)
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If I were to make a criticism, it
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..
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.
That said, this book does go
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.