The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE – 1492 CE by Simon Schama

The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE – 1492 CE Reviews

• 
  John Carter McKnight

  Simply the best book I've read in many years, due largely to the quality of Schama's voice. As a history, it's fascinating in its wide range - from the Mesopotamia of 1000 BC to the Spanish Inquisition, from a fort at the head of the Nile to the Tower of London, from Aramaic to Arabic to Ladino. That scope can be a bit dizzying, as the pace accelerates after the Roman destruction of the Temple: generations pass in the blink of a few pages.
  
  But through it all, Schama's narrative voice is a guide: warm, erudite, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, always intimate and human even when taking on metaphysics, theology, and the course of empires.
  
  While I'd read Schama on the history of drying paint at this point, _The Story of the Jews_ does something nearly unique in history writing: it ties everything together. Much of what I've read on the Bronze Age Near East takes cultures in isolation, and I've had a hard time piecing together a picture of the simultaneity of those cultures. Schama does that, moving from Egypt to Mesopotamia to the Hellenistic world, providing a picture of a "globalized" world of interactions.
  
  Also, much of what I'd gotten of early Jewish history has come filtered through the Romans and their followers, who tended to picture Jewish monotheism as incompatible with states and cultures built on polytheistic tolerance. Schama gives us multiple perspectives playing out over millennia - separatists and assimilators, mystics and rationalists, identity as ethnic or theological.
  
  He also celebrates art, beauty, ordinary life, alongside the inevitable horrors: above all, this book is profoundly humanistic in the best sense of the term, delighting in life, and above all, for Jewish culture, the word.
  
  Just read this book. It's a wonderful life experience.
• 
  William2

  Excellent content but very dense prose. Mellifluous it isn’t, but then he’s chosen a story of immense complexity to cover in two volumes. 2,500 years covered here in 421 pages equals 5.9 elapsed years per page. I’m thinking back to Schama’s sprightly
  Citizens of 1990. What did he cover there in 750 pages, was it 60 years? By comparison volume one of The Story of the Jews is super concentrated.
• 
  Richard Epstein

  I thought, "I can't wait to see how it ends!" I should have waited. Volume 1 ends with the Inquisition burning, and the Crown expelling, Jews by the thousands. Schama writes with great brio and a distinctively conversational wit (though I just can't make myself as interested in architectural and holographic details as he is), but there is no way to disguise the terrible sadness of angry Christianity in action. One wants to cry out, again and again, 'Have they never read that book of theirs?"
• 
  Howard Cincotta

  I had never heard of Elephantine, and Simon Schama is betting that you haven’t either, as he opens volume one (“Finding the Words”) of his massive and massively entertaining history of the Jewish people from their puzzling origins to their brutal expulsion from Spain in 1492. Volume two (“When the Words Fail”) takes the story to the present.
  
  In Schama’s telling, Elephantine, a Jewish garrison town on an island in the Nile River that dates from the fifth century BCE both reinforces and contradicts many of our modern preconceptions about the history of Jews and Israel. The founding story, after all, is of Moses leading his people out of Egypt to the promised land. Yet here are Jews returning to Egypt – as Jews did throughout the succeeding centuries. In the 12th century, for instance, Moses Maimonides, after escaping Spain and living briefly in Palestine, ended up as physician to the sultan and leader of the Jewish community in Cairo. He wrote as fluently in Arabic as in Hebrew.
  
  Schama’s purpose, in these and innumerable other examples, is not to discount the unique identity of Jewish religion and culture, nor the oppression and brutality its people endured over the centuries. Instead, he emphasizes how Jews always participated in the cultures where they found themselves – whether that of the Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greek Seleucids, classical Rome, Christian Europe, or the Islamic Middle East. At the same time, they clung to the words of the Torah, and later the Talmud, with a devotion that not even the worst attacks could break – as when the Second Temple in Jerusalem was finally razed for good by the Romans in 70 CE, after earlier sacks of the city by the Babylonians and the Assyrians.
  
  The priests may have controlled the words of the Hebrew Bible and the rolling commentaries of the Mishnah and Talmud. But as Schama points out, the archaeology and the surviving scrolls of papyrus and parchment remind us that Jewish history is not all thundering prophets and Biblical prohibitions, but ordinary people living complicated and rich, if often difficult lives that didn’t correspond to anyone’s stereotypes (particularly the role of women ). We have glimpses of these worlds in the Elephantine papyri of the ancient world; but a veritable picture-window view of 11th- and 12th-century Jewish life in the vast materials remains preserved in the Cairo Geniza collection of the Ben Ezra synagogue of Fustat, Old Cairo.
  
  But if ancient and medieval Jews did not live by words alone, words were absolutely central to their cultural survival, whether in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew characters). The Arch of Titus in Rome, for example, celebrates the conquest of Jerusalem with a carved procession of spoils from the Second Temple, but significantly it lacks the Torah scrolls. They were just words written on parchment or papyrus, after all: how important could they be? Perhaps not to Rome, but absolutely key to Jewish identity and survival. A fact not lost on the fanatical friars, monks, and Judeophobic rulers and Popes of medieval Europe who arranged for “trials” of Judaism that resulted in mass book burnings of illuminated Talmuds, Haggadahs, and other holy books – when they were not whipping mobs up to murder Jews directly.
  
  The repeated attacks and generalized cruelty toward Jews from England to Spain in the medieval period makes for painful reading. We have few firsthand chronicles of battles for or against Jews in the ancient world, but eyewitness accounts abound, with individual names, of the atrocities in later centuries in both the Christian and Islamic worlds. (An ancient-world exception is Josephus, Jewish officer turned Roman adviser, who wrote a history of the sack of Jerusalem, The Jewish Wars.)
  
  The narrative of Jewish life in the Christian and Muslim worlds is nuanced and alive; Schama is a vivid if not flamboyant writer who knows how to exploit a remarkable life from Jewish history when he finds one. Among the most memorable: the poet-warrior Shmuel ibn Naghrela and physician-poet-scholar Yehudah Halevi – both of whom lived in the Christian and Islamic Spain of the 11th and 12th centuries. Schama also devotes considerable and careful space to the life and work of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), author of the highly influential A Guide to the Perplexed.
  
  The conclusion of Schama’s book is a bitter one: the final persecution of the Jews in Spain that concluded with their brutal expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella in the year more familiar to us for other reasons – 1492.
  
• 
  Christopher

  I really enjoyed both Mr. Schama's multi-episode documentaries A History of Britain and The Story of the Jews, which this book is the first of a planned two-volume companion to that series, but I had never actually read any of Mr. Schama's works. I am pleased to say that Mr. Schama's style of telling history is just as good on the page as it is on the screen. This book spans the story of Jews and Jewish life from their earliest biblical days still being unearthed in Israel and Ancient Egyptian cities such as Elephantine to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal circa 1492. Like its accompanying documentary, Mr. Schama typically starts with a more personal and intimate look at a single figure or event to illuminate a broad period of history, a style that deftly synthesizes both the ground level tales and the broad historical trends into a fascinating tale. This book also does a great job of illuminating the fact that Jews have been a persecuted group for centuries. Even in early Islam, which some hold up to be a paragon of pluralism in the medieval period when compared to Christian Europe, was not an easy place for Jews to live as the Jizya, the tax Muslims applied to unbelievers, could be used in incredibly oppressive ways. And everywhere the Jews lived, as Mr. Schama points out, there always a sense that their good life would not last as pogroms, forced conversions, and expulsions were always somewhere in the offing. But the triumphs of Jewish culture, the Talmud, the building of beautiful synagogues, and the poetry and art remind us of the great contributions of Jews throughout history. While not an exhaustive history, I would highly recommend this book and Mr. Schama's documentary to anyone interested in Jewish history.
• 
  Christoph Fischer

  I was somewhat disappointed by the book. Given the high profile of the author I had come to expect a very competent and thorough historical account but found myself confused from the first chapter onwards about the direction of the book. Although I appreciate that this is not meant to be popular science or Jews for Dummies the book expects a lot of prior knowledge in several disciplines, unless you want to continuously flick back to the index. I know some of the necessary background but not enough to follow Schama's narrative and train of thought which seemed to jump between tribes, locations, philosophical aspects and other topics.
• 
  John Farebrother

  Everyone should read this book. Why? Because the Jewish experience of the 20th century has marked profoundly the world we live in today. The author, who has obviously dedicated his life to this subject, tells the story of Jewish history from after the exodus up to 1492, the year the Jews (and last Muslims) were driven from Spain - and the newly reunited Catholic power expanded into the New World.
  The original Jewish state was caught between two superpowers, to the south Egypt, and to the east Iraq/Iran. Thus from the earliest times there was a Jewish diaspora - and attempts by central authority to define and impose a single identity. The tool used to achieve this was the chronologies that came to form part of the Old Testament - to the exclusion of much other theology that was only revealed in the Dead Sea scrolls discovered in the 1970s. But the Jews were not the only people with a diaspora - the Greeks in particular are mentioned. In good times the Jews flourished in the communities they called home, but in bad times they could become the scapegoats for the fears of the majority.
  Alexander changed the power balance of the region, and Greek culture became dominant. This is also portrayed as a golden age for the Jewish people throughout the region. Then came the Romans, for whom Palestine was a key province, allowing domination of much of the territory further east. The Jews' greatest king, Herod, had grown up in Rome, and his family were converts to Judaism. He was able to use his intimate understanding of the colonial power to leverage maximum benefit from the relationship, resulting in a period of unprecedented prosperity. But after his death, radical rebel movements became stronger, leading to much violence, and culminating in the destruction by the Romans of the temple in Jerusalem, the centre of their religious and cultural identity (it had been destroyed once before, by the Assyrians, several centuries earlier).
  With the advent of Christianity, the position of Jews was initially favourable. Until in 386 John the Presbyter began to preach in Syria against Jews, warning Christians that they were demons, and that synagogues were "worse than brothels". The author describes this as the time when the focus of Christian theology shifted from Jesus' life to his death. This appears to mark the beginning of anti-semitism as we know it today, and some of the descriptions and portrayals of Jews used are chilling in their similarity to the aftershocks that reverberated directly from them into the 1930s and 1940s and beyond.
  After the advent of Islam, the Jews once again found themselves caught between two greater forces. But while at times they found themselves the victims of persecution in the Islamic world, usually at times of religious fanaticism and political upheaval, more often they were able to co-exist and flourish in countries like Egypt, and Muslim Spain. It is in Christian Europe that life was more challenging, and periodically the Jews found themselves singled out for violent persecution. In France, in Germany, in Italy - and in England. In 1279, 269 Jews were hanged in London - the leaders of their community, some of whom were not coincidentally the creditors to Edward I, who had indebted himself up to the ears to pay for his wars. All their property was seized (and debts written off), and in 1290 the remaining Jews of England were all expelled. 200 years later this served as a template for the expulsion of the Jews from Christian Spain - but which was organised by the Inquisition, preceded by nationwide campaigns of book burnings, forced conversions and mass live burnings (even of the converted). The work of the Inquisition is itself presented as the template for Hitler's Final Solution.
  But this is not a book of lamentation. On the contrary, it is a celebration of the vibrancy and success of Jewish communities in an adverse world. The author brings to life fragments of pottery and parchment found in sites almost 3,000 years old to recreate the communities who once lived there. The triumphs and trials of various leading Jews from different periods are likewise brought to life, with such vivid effect that the book seems peopled by these characters, who tell us their part of the greater story of the Jews with their own words.
  The only criticism I have is that in the early part of the book, some of the Old Testament references are rather obscure, and would be helped by some explanatory notes for those who weren't so attentive at their RE classes.
• 
  Mal Warwick

  Can you think of any ethnic group that has been more closely studied than the Jews? I can’t. Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Jews and Judaism; more than 53,000 are listed on Amazon alone — surely a small fraction of the total works produced over the three millennia that have passed since King David united the nation of Israel.
  
  Why, then, does Simon Schama write yet another history of the Jews? The easy answer, of course, is that he was approached to produce a television series for the BBC (later broadcast on PBS, too), but of course the reality is more complex. Schama is himself Jewish, and early in his career he began work on a history of his people, which remained unfinished for four decades. Equally important, he is an accomplished historian as widely celebrated for his lucid prose as for his award-winning and bestselling books (Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Rembrandt’s Eyes) and for his previous work on television (A History of Britain for the BBC).
  
  Schama isn’t the sort of historian who chronicles the succession of kings and battles and Great Men that dominate most traditional historical works. He’s a cultural historian. Though English and formerly on the faculty of Cambridge and Oxford Universities, he now serves as University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University in New York. His books spotlight the work of the poets and painters, the merchants and bankers, the preachers and rabbis — in short, those who most directly affect the way people lived their lives — as well as the economic and political circumstances that enveloped them all.
  
  In The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, Professor Schama conveys an impressionistic picture of Jewish life from just before the reign of King David until the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 (yes, the same year we celebrate as the time when the New World was “discovered”). Like the French Impressionists of later centuries, Schama daubs a little paint on the canvas here or there, giving the reader an impression of one key figure or fateful event, and a little more somewhere else, jumping to a different topic, creating a sense of the warp and woof of life for the Jews during a particular period. His account is chronological, at least for the most part, but the overall impression conveyed by the book is that of broad trends and consequential periods that dominate the story, while other times and other trends appear only in passing, if at all.
  
  Schama’s overarching theme is clear, at any rate, and it’s signaled in the book’s subtitle. Judaism is one of the three religions of the Book; it’s very essence lies in words. But for Jews, the words keep coming long after the rules laid down in the Ten Commandments and the Torah — the Mishna, the Talmud, the ceaseless outpouring of rabbinical thoughts — so that our lives continue to revolve around words. (Should anyone therefore be surprised that it’s said of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that it consists of 120 members with 120 different points of view?)
  
  I found the book to be rough going, even though I feel reasonably well grounded in Jewish history: Schama dropped far too many names of obscure figures, and too many words in Hebrew or Latin, without definition or explanation. The Story of the Jews is not a good introduction to the topic for the general reader. As a companion to the PBS series, it might make better sense, but I didn’t view it.
  
  The present volume brings the tale up to 1492. A second volume (The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail, 1492 – Present) is due in November 2014. I’m undecided whether to buy it.
• 
  Luke Gardiner

  A very good book! Though at times I got lost in some of the minutia of Jewish cultural references, the book was well written and easy to read. Schama writes in a very engaging way and brings to light the horrors of suffering put on the Jews across the centuries, but also beautifully paints a picture of the rich culture and history that developed in spite of this. All in all a brilliant insight into an often forgotten aspect of history!
• 
  Adam Glantz

  In this first volume, Simon Schama largely succeeds in attaining his two goals for a history of the Jews: It should tell the story of the Jews in their complex interaction with other peoples, and it should deal with a range of real Jewish character types, as opposed to the stock characters of the medieval rabbi and the modern Zionist. He starts out with the bold decision to begin his narrative, not in Palestine in the era of the patriarchs, but in Egypt around the time the Hebrew Bible was codified. We're there presented with a community that's robustly Jewish to the point of constructing its own Temple in defiance of the Deuteronomic rule, but which routinely intermarries with its non-Jewish neighbors and even swears by their gods.
  
  This account raises a theme to which Schama frequently returns in the rest of the book. Judaism and Jewish culture overlap, but one is not completely reducible to the other: Instead, they are in dynamic interaction, a state of affairs that's perhaps unavoidable for a civilization whose ritual of Torah reading is more a raucous conversation than a lecture. Jewish practice may often be at variance with religious rules, particularly those of a later age: It's not uncommon to find mosaics of animals, biblical personages, and even gods in Greco-Roman synagogues, perhaps in defiance of the Decalogue strictures against images. On the other side of the coin, the Hasmonean monarchy's attempt to make Hanukkah a kind of second Passover was never really embraced by the rabbinical establishment. And though elite Jewish opinion agreed with the desirability of living in the Holy Land, Jews throughout the ages frequently found themselves seeking refuge in a place the Bible proscribes: Egypt. There were always many ways of being Jewish. And though Schama is emphatic against "minimalist" critics that the Jews are a bona fide people of ancient provenance, he stresses that their culture has always existed in synergistic interaction with the cultures of others.
  
  With the advent of Christianity and Islam, Schama's account becomes more like a traditional lachrymose history of the Jews. The cross-fertilization of ideas continued across the religious divide, sometimes in surprising ways: As just one example, the Passover seder may have been influenced by the Catholic rite of Holy Communion. And Jews continued to excel in many roles, pushing the boundaries of knowledge and industry (e.g., in medicine and navigation). But with the maturing of the Middle Ages, exclusion, massacre, forced conversion, and expulsion became a recurrent feature of Jewish existence, as though Christendom was attempting to forcibly eliminate the ancient interaction between Jews and non-Jews. This probably marks the end of an era and therefore a logical place for Schama to conclude his first volume.
• 
  Julio Reyes

  Escribir la historia de un pueblo que se define por su propia memoria es un desafío enorme. Schama cumple y lo hace con elegancia. Da voz a las personas, poderosas y comunes, y hace tremendamente humana una historia de tenacidad, cultura, sobrevivencia, horrores y migraciones. Sumamente recomendable.
• 
  Luis

  Tiene cosas buenas y malas. Las buenas son que hay un montón de historias originales que rescata, historias de judíos poco conocidos a los que le da mucha importancia, que cuenta la historia a través de personajes puntuales y también hace un buen trabajo de escritura, el autor intenta contar la historia con cierto aire literario.
  
  Las malas son que el autor omite mucha información. Este no es un libro para principiantes, hay muchos personajes y hechos que se dan por sentados sin la menor explicación. Por ejemplo, el origen de los judíos sefarditas y los Askenazi no aparecen en ningún lugar, no se detallan los cambios históricos, no se explican muchas cosas. Además, para darle ese aire literario, el autor ha decidido contar las cosas un poco en desorden para que el lector las vaya descubriendo con cierto dramatismo, el resultado no funciona muy bien, termina mezclándose todo, haciéndose muy confuso. Además la edición en castellano tiene una traducción con múltiples errores de redacción que hacen que algunas frases sean muy enrevesadas y terminen complejizando innecesariamente el texto.
• 
  Mac

  Bust.
  
  This was a major disappointment for me because I had looked forward to this two part history for a long time. Based on excellent reviews, I felt confident that I would breeze through its many pages and come out all the wiser.
  
  Instead, I found Schama's writing incredibly dense and whimsical - making it very hard to follow or grasp on to. This is the type of writing that suffers you the agony of having to read the same sentences twice.
  
  The subject matter is presented in a form which I can only assume was made for fellow followers of the faith who have already spent a lifetime steeped in Jewish faith and especially traditions. Fulfilling neither of these criteria, this made it very difficult for me to follow along.
  
  This is, as some reviewers have said a labour of love by Schama. I can see and feel that. But it's not one designed for a wider audience of gentiles.
• 
  Mela

  I wouldn't mind if it was more about real historical events and less about beliefs and mythical people, but still, it was a great book about Jews. It helped me connect many points, and I have learned a lot. Not knowing Jews' history is like not knowing the history at all. How their religion and communities evolved was fascinating, and it was an example of many other "evolutions/adaptations".
  
  The main conclusion? Where is religion, there are repressions and persecutions. At least, when believers of one of them are more powerful (or more numerous) than of other ones. The same easily takes place with nations and other "characteristics" that group/divide people.
• 
  Richard Block

  Tale of Woe
  
  The brilliant, erudite and articulate Simon Schama produces a muddled, idiosyncratic history of his people (OK, our people). Using his usual trick of engaging you through people you may or may not have heard of to make general points, this first volume only pays dividends in the later chapters on the late middle ages and the inquisition. Until then, it's a mess.
  
  Schama does not credit biblical history much, unless it is Christian or Muslim history. He thinks the Old Testament is pretty much invention, and the opening chapters are so disappointing, they nearly put me off reading it. Things pick up with Josephus, but Schama spends more time covering 10th Century Jewish poetry than he does on the Second Revolt. He totally blows the connection between the rise of Christianity and the destruction of the Second Revolt, or the rise of Pauline Christianity's anti-Jewishness in the light of the First Jewish Revolt.
  
  The later chapters redeem the book to a non-Turkey level. The sections on Maimonides and the end of the Spanish Jews are just brilliant, readable and special. His English tale of woe is also terrific.
  
  This followed the television show - the first chapter was a mess, but it improved greatly in later chapters. When he shines, he shines brightly. When he feels it, he can really communicate.
  
  Ancient history is clearly not that compelling for Schama, and he often assumes his readers know a lot, when they know much less than him. He bends over backwards to be nice to Christians and Muslims, despite their terrible ideas and behaviours.
  
  Most importantly, he never really addresses the core question of Jewish persecution - the Job question - why me? Why the Jews? The Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims. I mean, Randy Newman wipes the floor with him -listen to the words on God's Song
• 
  Bob Breckwoldt

  When I saw Simon Schama launch his book “The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000BCE-1492CE” at
  Manchester Jewish Museum it took 10 minutes of talking for him to realise he hadn’t switched on the microphone and not everyone could hear him. This very much encapsulates him and the book. It is like him, excitable and voluble, personal and academic, Jewish and learned, polemical and partisan, jokey and deadly serious. And everywhere there are words, words, words - yet images and artefacts abound too with mosaics and paintings which are often sensuous and arresting. Illuminated books that imitate and transcend the environment in which they are created.
  Heroes and heroines find their voice – often as at Elephantine in the humdrum events: births, deaths and marriages. The villains too – such as the golden tongued John Chrysostom –are given the chance to hoist themselves by their own petard.
  Throughout he weaves common threads, such as a pluralism and adaptation (within limits) to the surrounding culture, while creating a tradition of all encompassing law and stories that mould their dreams and aspirations through the centuries .
  Simon Schama is a gifted speaker and writer. The book is fascinating and powerful, reminding how minorities can flourish whilst the demonization of any group can lead to appalling crimes. It is easy to question some of his judgements (it is a story of argument and debate) but the extensive bibliography and references give plenty of scope to follow up the diversity of opinion..
  I would thoroughly recommend the book, and if you get the chance watching the series, to anyone.
  
• 
  Marcus Bowman

  Schama himself is the word of God. It is hard to learn anything at all from 400 pages. It is written as if he was actually there. For every event going back 3,000 years. Schama knows EXACTLY what people did and what exactly they MEANT in those actions. Nothing to dispute. Was a rock found with an inscription? Schama knows exactly who wrote it, when and where they did, what type of people they were and what they were thinking and doing at the time. All of that will be neatly explained in like 1 easy sentence. So don’t worry you won’t be boggled down by references to texts and such because Schama is the word of God on every subject in the book. And thus history is not only known now but Schama seems he solves everything once and for all. For me the bottom line is the tone of his writing now makes me question a lot of things way way more than I would have before.
• 
  Jennifer (JC-S)

  ‘In the beginning…’
  
  A chance conversation led me to borrow this book from the library. I wanted to get behind the vague knowledge drifting within my memory to a more factual appreciation of Jewish history.
  
  In this book Mr Schama starts with Elephantine, a Jewish garrison town dating from the 5th century BCE. Elephantine, which I had never heard of, is an island in the Nile River. I kept reading, some of the details reinforced my existing knowledge, others contradicted it. Why, I wondered, did the Jews return to Egypt? The more I read, the more I stepped away from the mythology (part of my Christian upbringing) and into Jewish participation in the world. I met scholars and poets, physicians, and philosophers. I became immersed in a world that I can appreciate without fully understanding. I admire the endurance and creativity displayed by Jewish people despite centuries of bigotry and persecution.
  
  This book finishes in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. I intend to read the second book (‘When Words Fail’) as well.
  
  I finished this book with a greater appreciation of aspects of Jewish history albeit overwhelmed (at times) by the detail.
  
  Jennifer Cameron-Smith
  
• 
  Trish

  This history includes the little people, often living far from the centre of action, thanks to archeological discoveries of recent times (the last 200 years or so). The preservation of papyri archived by the Jewish people in far flung communities, of documents which were important to them, at that time, and being gradually analysed by scholars reveals the lives of those history generally ignores- like those living on the island of Elephantine, in the Nile, possibly centred on Jewish mercenaries.
  Even if you think you know it all through the Hebrew Bible, contradictory as it sometimes is -often?- and even the apocryphal texts like Maccabees, Schama adds clarification.
  I have read Maccabees, but somehow I still had the idea that the Masada story, and the origins of Hanukkah must be there, and escaped my notice, in all that bloodshed.
  
  I’ve only recently started to look at Josephus, probably from revulsion- like a history of UK written by Lord Haw-Haw - now I gather he has some insights.
  
  The “family disagreements” between the hellenists and purists are better known, but Schama expands on their conflicts with wide references.
  
  It’s only in the last year or so that I learned that we Scots and the Jews in England share a common bogey man in the person of King Edward I of England- Longshanks- that unhung Haman! Malleus Scotorum was also Malleus Iudeorum!
  
  He does get a wee bit tedious in discussion of Hebrew poetry, with particular reference to the Iberian peninsula - I cannot help thinking of l’Académie Française and its futile rulings on what can be considered French!
  
  This first part ends in that fateful year of 1492 - expulsion of Jews from Spain, election of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and the voyage of Columbus to the Americas: good news for the invaders, not for the inhabitants- the beginning of another history of oppression and violence.
• 
  Michelle

  I think Schama could make the history of dirt exciting, and gory. So when I saw he was taking on the history of the Jews I was excited. I'd somehow missed--or possibly just never thought about--his being Jewish when I read his previous books. If you are a very religious traditional Jew who believes the Biblical narrative completely, you may have some disappointments in the early chapters. I enjoyed the early chapters for the stuff I *didn't* know--like there was a colony of Jews in southern Egypt long ago who were--soldiers for hire??!!--and left records of their lives and family. And then the book gets better and better as it goes, tracing Judaism through Persian and Greek and Roman domination, on into the Christian and Muslim worlds. I knew some of what I was going to read or be subjected to here---but I still wasn't prepared for the experience of reading Schama's impassioned but thoroughly detailed telling of Jewish suffering. (I should have known the bloody details were coming, having previously read Citizens.) And I knew what happened, the basic outlines anyway. It sure seems different when you are talking about real people with real names and details. I am eager for Vol. 2 of this. The only part where I got lost in this book was on a chapter about Jewish poets writing Arabic poetry? Somehow I got lost here. The rest was gripping and enlightening and, for a Christian like me, convicting. Very worthwhile read.
• 
  Michael Burnam-Fink

  For a supposedly educated Jew, I'm actually pretty week on my own culture. Schama's magisterial history cultural history is triumph of ordinary Jews across the millennia. He begins, not with the Torah or the Patriarchs, but with the Egyptian town of Elephantine, a frontier garrison with a thriving Jewish community, their lives recorded in garrulous Hebrew potsherds and a semi-heretical temple.
  
  Then it's off through the Iron Age, the Second Temple, Herod, and so on. This was a period of exile, of return under Cyrus the Great, and of Jewish kingdoms playing a key role in the fraught politics of the Alexandrian successor states.
  
  Jewish history isn't quite a dirge, but there are many mournful points, most involving the other monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam. Jews were cast as god-killers from the origin story of Christianity, with the key anti-Semitic mythos promulgated by 4th centruy archbishop John Chrysostom, who declared Judaism anathema in an effort to bulwark up the shakily Christian Eastern Roman empire. While relationships with Muslim communities were generally better, Jews were still forbidden from bearing arms and forced to pay a humiliating head tax.
  
  This is a long book, hard for me to sum up, but to essay an attempt, Schama has a talent for showing the diversity and continuity of Jewish life across time, and how it has thrived in harsh terrain.
• 
  William Crosby

  I saw the title and thought this would be a linear history. I should have paid more attention to the word "story" and the subtitle: "Finding the words."
  
  So if you are looking for a strictly historical and linear account as I was you could be frustrated. It jumps around and includes discussion of archaeology and research and spends extensive pages on stories.
  
  I found the jumping around distracting. Dwells extensively on a comparison of the mythology of the Jews (as told both in the Bible and in other stories) and the purported archaeological history including an extensive discussion of when is/was a Jew a Jew. This often became quite tedious. Though during his discussion of the Talmud I wondered if he was just trying to follow the basic form and essence of the Talmud with this book.
  
  Also, maybe it was buried in there and I missed it, but it seemed that I suddenly saw references to the Ashkenazi and Sepphardic lines of Jews, but I did not catch their story line or how they got those names.
  
  I did appreciate the discussion regarding the ancient Jews and Arabs since I did not realize that they were so intermixed in Arabia.
  
• 
  Noreen

  Fills in the blanks, before and after the birth of Jesus for the Jewish people. Most of the book covers the origins of Jewish people before they were "Jews". They were Hasmoneans, Maccabees, many and other Jewish"tribes." Before there was a Yiddish language, there was Aramaic and Hebrew. Before there were Persians, there were the oldest tribes, Assyrians, Babylonians. At one time Jews were an integrated part of Greek and Roman societies. What separated Jews from Christians philosophically was the prejudice of Christians against business and money. How can a complex society grow without money and trade?
  
  The PBS 2 disc, 5 part movie by the same name and author answers basic questions about Judaism. How do Askenazi and Sephardic Jews differ? Where did the Kabbalah come from?
  
  The Pale of Settlement was an area (450,000 sq miles, 11 million Jews) covering Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Poland for 130 years (1790 to 1920) where most Askenazi Jews lived.
  
  Reminds me of the area covered by Viking Danelaw in Britain.
  
  Muslims and Jews haven't always hated eachother.
• 
  Bettie

  Description: In this magnificently illustrated cultural history -- the companion volume to the five-part PBS and BBC series THE STORY OF THE JEWS -- award-winning historian 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.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Socraticgadfly

  OK as an intro, but not much more.
  
  The main problems are twofold and related.
  
  It's thin in places, and it's just wrong in a few. The latter first.
  
  The main areas of errors are in events related to Jesus and his time. First, Schama indiscriminately uses the term "procurator" for the Roman governor of Judea when, in most the material covered by Acts, that person was a "prefect."
  
  Second, he's too credulous on Suetonius and Tacitus and just how much, or how little, they knew what they were talking about on Claudius' CE 49 expulsion of the Jews. My informed stance has long been that this was for general Messianic disturbances and nothing specific to Jesus as a particular would-be Messiah.
  
  A place where it's thin? Medieval Europe, especially al-Andalus. On both sides of the Islamic-Christian curtain, but especially on the Christian side, we have several known cases of Jewish conversions, as in converting TO, not from. Schama doesn't even talk about this.
  
  I don't know if the PBS series was any better; I kind of doubt it.
• 
  Daniel

  How can history be so painful, and biblical exegesis so deadly... The details that Schama includes in this book help fill in the gruesome reality of the process by which anti-Semitism developed. I was somewhat frustrated by the amount of time spent early on describing Victorian archaeology since that was not what I was hoping for in this book, though I appreciated the payoff once it all came together to shape my understanding of how we interpret the stream of discoveries today. I had hoped for more material on the Jews in central Asia, under the Sassanids then the Abbasids, but the focus was more on Egypt, and later, Spain. There was a fascinating bit on the Dura-Europos synagogue and community, but that was about it, from then on the narrative swung west. Nonetheless those stories were insightful and well told. Looking forward to the second part.
• 
  Jonathan

  Despite his occasional annoying habit of letting his television voice slip into the narrative, Simon Schama's work is a minor masterpiece, especially in his extrapolation of the latest archeological research into the history of the Jews of the Biblical era. He assumes a certain familiarity with the general themes of the topic (not a problem for me, but I can't speak for everyone) but, as is par for the course with Professor Schama, the language flows effortlessly as a seamless, captivating garment. Schama is also an art historian and so he pays a little too much attention to iconography and architecture than is really warranted, but that is to quibble.
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  Ariel

  Finally done. I learned so much and so painlessly, thanks to Schama's erudition combined with a witty, irreverent, lively, sometimes poignant style. Longer review to follow.