The Jewish World: Revelation, Prophecy, and History

London: Thames and Hudson, 2003. Soft cover. Fine. Large 4to. 328 pages, indexed, bibliography, illustrated. Overseas customers please note the book weighs over a kilo and will attract additional postage. A clean, unmarked and solid copy, which appears to have lived most of its life unread on the shelf. "The Jews are one of the great enigmas of history. What makes them unique? What has given them their resilience, their power of survival and their ability to adapt to radically new conditions without losing their identity? What combination of religious faith, social organization, intellectual toughness and poetic imagination constitutes Jewishness? The Jewish World approaches these questions in a new way. Eighteen eminent authorities survey Jewish history from its beginnings down to the 20th century: the earliest days before the Exile; the Jewish polity in its encounters with the Great Powers of the ancient world; Jewish life after the destruction of the Jewish state under Christianity and Islam; the impact of the Enlightenment on Jewish thought and traditions; the Jewish experience in 19th- and 20th-century Europe; the rise and development of American Jewry; the appearance of Zionism and its culmination in the foundation of Israel. That is the 'outer' history - but there is another, 'inner', history, without which the first is meaningless. An equal number of chapters are thus devoted to the Bible, to the Talmud, to Jewish philosophy and to mysticism, to imaginative literature, Le. Hebrew poetry and fiction, and to the challenge of modernity and the way in which Judaism as a system of thought and belief has tried to cope with it. The scheme of the book is therefore novel. So is the rich use of illustrations: contrary to common belief, the Jews have always had a tradition of visual art, largely derived from the art of their neighbors but employed in the service of strictly Jewish needs. Synagogues from Dura Europus to modern times have yielded pictures, manuscript illuminations and liturgical objects whose beauty will be a revelation to many. From the 17th century onwards, ordinary Jewish life is illustrated in prints and popular art of all kinds, much of it never reproduced before. A main concern of the volume is to articulate Jewish history in its own terms, to show how this ancient human group has tried to respond to the extremely varied conditions and challenges, whether political, social or intellectual, which it has encountered in its long history. No previous book has attempted this type of presentation on the same scale and with comparable scholarship." (back cover)