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The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC - 1492 AD, by Simon Schama
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In this magnificently illustrated cultural history—the tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews—Simon Schama details the story of the Jewish experience, tracing it across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the New World in 1492 to the modern day.
It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds.
It spans the millennia and the continents—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 spice and gems founder at sea.
And a great story unfolds. Not—as often imagined—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 story, too.
- Sales Rank: #16650 in Books
- Brand: Ecco Press
- Published on: 2014-03-18
- Released on: 2014-03-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.58" w x 6.00" l, 1.70 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 512 pages
- Ecco Press
From Booklist
*Starred Review* 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. --Jay Freeman
Review
“Award-winning Columbia University historian Schama . . . 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.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))
“A multifaceted story artfully woven by an expert historian.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))
“Schama has written an unconventional but masterful and deeply felt history of his people…” (Booklist (starred review))
“Mr. Schama’s The Story of the Jews is exemplary popular history. It’s engaged, literate, alert to recent scholarship and, at moments, winningly personal.” (New York Times)
“In his brilliant new history of the Jews, the unconventional scholar somehow manages to be simultaneously sentimental and subversive, consensual and contrarian - and we readers are the beneficiaries.” (Haaretz (English edition))
“Mr. Schama’s history flashes by with entertaining velocity…” (Wall Street Journal)
“An energetic cascade of prose and erudition, rife with pointillist detail and witty colloquialisms…” (Chicago Tribune, Printers Row)
“Schama writes history from below, and from the middle and other unexpected angles, resurrecting the unrecorded and long-forgotten, and analyzing the social and cultural forces that shaped his subjects’ lives… [he] has pulled it off with opinionated flair and literary grace.” (New York Times Book Review)
“Stirring and fascinating” (Los Angeles Times)
“Schama is a historian of prodigious and varied gifts. He can take a specific subject and drill deep; he can take a wide-angled view of many countries over long periods of time. He does both in this excellent first volume… Revealing and moving.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
“Reading Schama is like sitting across from the world’s most dazzling dinner party guest…” (Seattle Times)
“The story that Schama tells is wide-ranging, well documented, delightful, amusing, personal, and inspring…” (New York Review of Books)
From the Back Cover
In this magnificently illustrated cultural history—the tie-in to the pbs and bbc series The Story of the Jews—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 continents—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. Not—as often imagined—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 story, too.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
No glory here
By Nick Name
As a book, this falls woefully short of other Schama's other projects, such as the wonderful Power of Art. A televised documentary -- which was the first from for this work -- is fundamentally "of the moment," with immersive visuals to absorb the viewer. Turning that experience into language is in this instance largely a failure, yielding an avalanche of verbal stuff that is hard to follow, often boring, and ineffective. "Big" ideas are at best tentatively suggested; at the other extreme, most of the concrete details (say, descriptions of objects) are not engaging. I expected to encounter a marvelous history of a people with a compelling religion and culture, but, instead, came away with thinking that most of what had been conveyed was truly ordinary, often trivial. If there is grandeur or triumph in Jewish history, it does not exist in this flabby, unfocused, tedious rendition of "stuff the Jews did." Surprisingly disappointing, this book reads like an uninspired group project dignified by a famous writer's name.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
What I most like about Schama’s book was the emphasis on the tangible
By Randall Smith
What I most like about Schama’s book was the emphasis on the tangible. He concentrates on archeological discoveries, surviving papyrus letters and fragments, the ruins of ancient synagogue, their styles, locations and decorations, in other words, things that can be seen, felt, read. He does not start the history with Abraham, Moses and similar mythic characters for whom there is no real evidence. Since he deals mainly with the tangible, the history does not start as early as one might have thought, but starts early enough, at around 1000 B.C.E., and follows the Jews through Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Ages up until nearly the 16th century.
One question that always comes to mind when reading Jewish history is how did this particular group survive when just about all other cotemporaneous religions and ethnicities disappear ages ago. Schama stresses the great advantage literacy gave the Jews for enduring cohesively through two Temple destruction, numerous exiles, attempted annihilations, forced conversions, and other scourges. Literacy seems always to have been encouraged. After all, even Yahweh himself was depicted as literate, inscribing the Ten Commandants himself and tagging Belshazzar’s wall. What other early gods sent missives to their people? I don’t recall off the top of my head Astarte, Baal, Zoroaster, Zeus depicted as reading and writing; usually their intentions were interpreted by oracles, omens and the like. But the laws of the Jews (unlike, say, the Moabites) were transcribed early on and apparently could be read a wide range of the populace. As early as the eighth century B.C.E., even heavy laborers carving a water conduit left inscriptions strongly suggesting they were literate. And from twenty-five centuries ago survive the letters of a Jewish mercenary at a faraway post to his family back home. The book has many more such examples.
Simon Schama is a noted British lecturer and TV documentarian. He has a pleasant, conversational manner of speech, and he attempts to infuse this manner into his writing. So his sentences often have asides, phrases and comments through the use of commas, parentheses, dashes, quotation marks and italics. The result is that, for a history, his style seems chatty. This chattiness might be off-putting to some, but I found it pleasant, like a friend telling a story.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A great read, maybe not what you expect?
By Nick
This book is really well written and very easy to follow. It just wasn't what I thought it would be; it's more of a history of Jewish-ness - like, what does it mean to be Jewish at different places and times in antiquity - sometimes told out of sequence, than it is a history of "the Jews" as a social, political and geographic tale. As someone who is not Jewish I felt like I was missing a lot of references and meaning in the discourse about what it means to practice Judaism. Not a criticism of the book or of Schama at all, it just wasn't 100% for me and that's okay.
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