…offers deep pleasures…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.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
★ 01/13/2014
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
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
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.
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.
Mr. Schama’s history flashes by with entertaining velocity…
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)
An energetic cascade of prose and erudition, rife with pointillist detail and witty colloquialisms…
Schama has written an unconventional but masterful and deeply felt history of his people…
Booklist (starred review)
Mr. Schama’s history flashes by with entertaining velocity…
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.
Stirring and fascinating
Reading Schama is like sitting across from the world’s most dazzling dinner party guest…
The story that Schama tells is wide-ranging, well documented, delightful, amusing, personal, and inspring…
An energetic cascade of prose and erudition, rife with pointillist detail and witty colloquialisms…
03/15/2014
★ 2014-01-20Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill, and My Mother , 2011, etc.), in a book tie-in to a PBS and BBC series, fashions a long-planned "labor of love" that nicely dovetails the biblical account with the archaeological record. Indeed, as this densely written effort accompanies the visual story, the author fixes on a tangible element (such as papyrus, shard or document) in each chapter as a point of departure in advancing the early history of the Jews. For example, a missive in papyrus by a father to his missionary son from an island in the Upper Nile circa 475 B.C. illustrates the thriving expat Jewish community in Egypt, despite the dire "perdition" narrative about Egypt being written at the same time by the first Hebrew sages in Judea and Babylon. The remains of early synagogues in Hellenized Cyrenaica and elsewhere, built in a classical Greek temple style, with graphic mosaics, reveal how the Jews were intimately situated in their crossover surroundings. The inscriptions and excavations at Zafar (in present-day Yemen) attest to the Judaic conversion of the Kingdom of Himyar in the late fourth century, evidence that "the Jews were far from a tenuous, alien presence amid the ethnically Arab world of the Hijaz and the Himyar." In the long litany of persecution and suppression, climaxing but scarcely ceasing with the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70, the Jews had to scatter, taking their words with them, and the Torah was later enriched by the "picayune" codifications of the Mishnah and Talmud, all as a way "to rebuild Jerusalem in the imagination and memory." Schama is relentless in faulting the break between Christianity and Judaism as the spur to the subsequent phobia against the "pariah tribe." A multifaceted story artfully woven by an expert historian.
