Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews

Have officially given up on this book, after reading over 100 pages. I loved Potok's novels, and I was hoping that his history of the Jews would hold my interest as well as his Jewish fictions--but alas. His writing is middling: he does not write with the authority of an expert (which he admittedly

is not), but still attempts to cover as much ground as he can (the book is huge, given the subject matter). Potok's novelistic tendencies betray him here, leading to him speculate rather unhelpfully about the thoughts and desires of his ancestors.

Perhaps his material on the Middle Ages and modern Jews would make for a better read, but I don't think I'll ever find out.

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LibraryThing member JBGUSA

This book, Chaim Potok's only work of non-fiction, was a history of the Jews, from Ur (Abraham's birthplace) to Entebbe. I gave the book three stars despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and found large parts of it worthwhile. Several reasons:

1) The treatment of the last 170 years of

Jewish history was overly compressed;
2) Very short shrift was given American Jewish history;
3) The treatment of Islam focused on its "golden era" in Spain, not the far more representative periods of extreme violence and bloodshed. Think September 11; and
4) The author thoroughly trashes the period of history known as The Enlightenment.

The book, as it must, focuses heavily on the ups and downs of pre-Diaspora life in the Levant. That portion of the book was extremely good. Potok seems to take the point of view that Jewish life, at that point, transferred to Europe, and at that point Jewish life died at first a slow, than an accelerating death. He views the Enlightenment era as a disaster.

That is problematic. The pre-Enlightenment period was horrific. And when the Enlightenment first spread to England and then America, the results were extremely positive for the Jewish people. There is no question in my mind that the European interlude was a barely mitigated tragedy and disaster. He does give very good, even humorous examples of the totally crazed nature of Catholic religious belief and other fringe Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages.

Inexplicably, he barely mentions the Protestant Reformation and does not at all mention the Gutenberg Press. Overall, the book was well worth the month I spent in reading it. Was it perfect; hardly.

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