The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  On the archaeology of the biblical period: A good, balanced yet critical introductory guide to the earliest period, surveying most recent developments in excavation and interpretation, is Amihai Mazar, The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: An Introduction (10,000– 586 BCE) (New York, 1990); see also his collaboration with the ‘dean’ of the ‘minimalist’ school, Israel Finkelstein, The Quest for Historical Israel (Leiden and Boston, 2007); and the many works of Finkelstein himself, such as David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (New York, 2006), and with Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: archaeology’s new vision of ancient Israel and the origin of its sacred texts (London and New York, 2001).William G. Dever, initially a fellow-‘minimalist’, has moved away from this position to a more flexible position in a number of spirited reinterpretations, see for this shift the passionate Historical Biblical Archaeology and the Future: The New Pragmatism (London, 2010); for his earlier position, Sacred Time, Sacred Place: Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Winona Lake, Ind., 2002), Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did they Come From? (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003) and Did God Have a Wife? (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005). Important new work is covered in Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling and Laura B. Mazow, Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond (Leiden and Boston, 2011). The only full account of the important excavation at Khirbet Qeiyafa is Yosef Garfinkel, Saar Ganor and Michael Hassel, In the Footsteps of King David (Tel Aviv, 2012).

  On the development of Judaism during the Hellenistic and Roman periods and its relationship with classical culture: The great modern authority on the evolution of Judaism is Shaye Cohen, see his collection of essays, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Philadelphia, 1987), and The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, 1999). See also Jacob Neusner, From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden, 1970) and First-Century Judaism in Crisis: Yohanan ben Zakkai and the Renaissance of the Torah (reprint, 2006). On the Bible at the point of its canonical closure, the master work is James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A guide to the Bible as it was at the start of the common era (Cambridge, MA, 1998); and also Michael E. Stone, Scriptures, Sects, and Visions: A Profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish Revolts (Philadelphia, 1980). The best guide to archaeology is Eric M. Meyers and Mark A. Chauncey, Alexander to Constantine: The Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (New Haven, 2012) and Archaeology, the Rabbis and Early Christianity (Nashville and Abingdon, 1981). See also Elias Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, MA, 1988), The God of the Maccabees: Meaning and Significance in the Revolt of the Maccabees (London, 1979) and From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees (New York, 1962); Christine Hayes, The Emergence of Judaism: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective (Wesport, CT, 2007); the many works of Erich S. Gruen, especially Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley, 1998), Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA, 2002) and Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton, 2011); Lee I. Levine, Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence (Seattle, 1998); Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore, 1997); Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Towards Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA, 2007) and The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World (London, 2003); Sara Raup Johnson, Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity (Berkeley, 2005); A. Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews and Christians (Middletown, CT, 1987); Victor Tcherikoer, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1959); Joseph Sievers, The Hasmoneans and their Supporters: From Mattathias to the Death of John Hyrcanus (Atlanta, GA, 1990); Steven Weitzman, Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 2005); William Buehler, The Pre-Herodian Civil War and Social Debate: Jewish Society in the Period 76–40 BC (Basel, 1974); Daniel Harrington, The Maccabean Revolt: Anatomy of a Biblical Revolution (Wilmington, DE, 1988); Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London, 2007); Susan Sorek, The Jews Against Rome (London and New York, 2008); Shaye Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His vita and development as an historian (Leiden, 1979); Jonathan Edmundson (ed.) Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (Oxford, 2005); Frederick Raphael, A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus (London, 2013).

  On the Dead Sea Scrolls: The classic scholarship is by Geza Vermes, An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls (Minneapolis, 2000) and The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (Philadelphia, 1981); but for a radically different view see Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Search for the Secret of Qumran (New York, 1995); see also Frank Moore Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran (Minneapolis, 1995); Michael E. Stone, Ancient Judaism: New Visions and View (Grand Rapids, MI, 2011); the excellent Michael Wise, Martin Abegg and Edward Cook, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (San Franciscso, 1996); Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls After Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment (Leiden, 1997). On the city itself there are wonderful recent books: Lee I. Levine, Jerusalem: Portrait of the City in the Second Temple Period (Philadelphia, 2002); Simon Goldhill, Jerusalem: City of Longing (Cambridge, MA, 2010) and The Temple of Jerusalem (London, 2004); and especially Simon SebagMontefiore, Jerusalem: A Biography (London, 2012). On the ossuaries: Pau Figueras, Decorated Jewish Ossuaries (Leiden, 1983); Eric M. Meyers, Jewish Ossuaries: Reburial and Rebirth, Secondary Burials in their Ancient Near East Setting (Rome, 1971); Rachel Hachlili, Jewish Funerary Customs, Practices and Rites in the Second Temple Period (Leiden, 2005).

  Jews and early Christianity: For brilliant provocative readings and interpretations, Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, 2007); also his A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, 1994). The great traditional authority on the parting of the ways is Jacob Neusner, see in particular, Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition (Binghampton, NY, 2001). The opposite view is presented by Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (London and New York, 1987). See also Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton, 2012). On Ebionites and Jewish Christians, see Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (eds), Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (Peabody, MA, 2007); see also Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (London, 1993). On the Mishnah see the fine introduction by Neusner to his superb The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven, 1988). Helpful explanation of the origination and ramification of rabbinic culture and its manifold commentaries can be found in Hyam Maccoby, Early Rabbinic Writings (Cambridge, 1988). On the Talmudic evolution, Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah and Written Tradition (Philadelphia, 2011), and, invaluably, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrabert and Martin S. Jaffee (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, 2007). On the ‘Augustinian dispensation’ see the brilliant work by Paula Fredericksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008). On the evolution of Jewish religious institutions and ritual, see the monumental, indispensable Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue (New Haven, 2005); Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues and Congregations (Augsburg, 2003); the immensely suggestive Baruch Bokser, The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism (Berkeley, 1984); Leonard Glick, Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America (Oxford, 2005); on the implications of sacrifice, the immensely persuasive David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 2007).

  Judaism and Islam: Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, 1984), is still the definitive, balanced survey of the relationship, especially at its beginnings; see also his The Multiple Identities of the Middle East: 2000 Years of History from Christianity to the Present (London, 1998). See also S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: A Concise History (New York,
1955); and Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain (Philadelphia, 1992). Bat Ye’Or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (Rutherford, NJ, 1985), is much more polemically pessimistic, but, all the same, in essentials, not altogether wrong. For many aspects of the complicated relationship, see Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev, The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific and Cultural Dimensions (Gainsville, FL, 2011), and for a comparative reading, Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994). On Jews and the beginnings of Islam see Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origin of Islam (Cambridge, MA, 2010), a lively work of scholarly synthesis that takes full account of the most recent scholarship. G. W. Bowersock’s Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (Oxford, 2013) alas appeared too late for this book to take account of its new scholarship but see the articles (in endnotes) by C. Robin and Paul Yule, Himyar: Spatantike im Jemen (Aichwald, Esslingen, 2007) and Iwona Gajdar, le royaume de Himyar a l’epoque monotheiste (Paris, 2009), especially for her sceptical reservation, and Reuben Ahroni, Yememite Jewry: Origins, Culture and Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1986). For the discovery of the Cairo Geniza see Peter Cole and Adina Hoffmann’s wonderfully readable account, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (London and New York, 2011). Shlomo Dov Goitein spent a scholarly lifetime exploring, editing, translating and interpreting the immense trove of the Geniza. His three-volume master work, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley, 1967–93), has been helpfully and sensitively abridged (Berkeley, 1999) and is the perfect introduction to the subject. See also his wonderful Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1974), From the Land of Sheba: Tales of the Jews of Yemen (New York 1973) and India Traders of the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2008). For specific aspects of the world uncovered by the Geniza see his Indian Traders. For a post-Goitein survey see the articles collected in Stefan C. Reif, The Cambridge Geniza Collections: Their Content and Significance (Cambridge, 2002). On the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain there is an abundance of fine but varied translations, most of them with excellent critical commentaries and biographical notes. Peter Cole’s Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain (950–1492) (Princeton, 2007) covers the entire range from the earliest work of Dunash ibn Labrat (and his wife) through to work produced in Christian Spain not long before the expulsion, including generous selections from the work of the other two giants of Hebrew poetry, Solomon ibn Gabirol and Moshe ibn Ezra. See also the collection edited by Raymond Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia, 1986). There is also an excellent – but very freely translated – selection in T. Carmi (ed.), The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (London and New York, 1981). Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh and Twelfth Century Islamic Spain (Princeton, 2002), is a brilliant reading of the weave of inter-cultural influences and conflicts in this literature. On Shmuel Naghrela (Shmuel Hanagid), see Hillel Halkin, Grand Things to Write a Poem On: A Verse Autobiography of Shmuel Hanagid (Jerusalem 1999); for a different style of translation, see Leon J. Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected poems of Samuel ibn Nagrela (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1973). For Halevi, Halkin has written a short but inspiring and evocative biography, Yehuda Halevi (New York, 2010). On his pilgrimage, there are two very fine books: Raymond Scheindlin, The Song of a Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage (Oxford, 2008), and Yosef Yahalom, Yehuda Halevi: Poetry and Pilgrimage ( Jerusalem, 2009). On Maimonides, see the excellent biography by Joel Kraemer, Moses Maimonides (New York and London, 2008); and a well-chosen and -edited selection from the work by Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (Springfield, NJ, 1972).

  Medieval Christian Europe and the Jews: On Judaism’s evolution in this period see Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit, 2013); Lawrence Fine (ed.), Judaism in Practice from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 2001). The most prolific scholar in this field of Judeo-Christian relations is Robert Chazan, who in a recent work, Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2010), has called for a more balanced, less tragically determined account of the place and experience of Jewish life in Latin Christian Europe, thinking perhaps of the still readable history of Judeophobia by Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, 1944). For the definitive long history of the phenomenon see Robert Wistrich, The Longest Hatred: Antisemitism and Jewish Identity (London, 1991). See also Leonard Glick, Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages (Syracuse, 1999). For more recent, richly researched scholarship see Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian–Jewish Relations 1000– 1300 (London and New York, 2011) and Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West 1000–1150 (Aldershot, 1998). And for another comparative reading, David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996). And also the texts in Kenneth Stow, Popes, Church and Jews in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and Response (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2007). For an inescapably tragic moment see Chazan’s In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Berkeley, 1996); God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley, 2000); and his European Jewry in the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987). The texts of the narratives are collected and edited by Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison, WI, 1977). On the most grievous aspect of both literature and experience see Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, 2004); also his Living Letters of the Law: The Idea of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999). For Worms see the powerful centuries-long history by Nils Roehmer, German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (Waltham, MA, 2010). On Eleazar and the pietists see Ivan Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden, 1997), and for France see the work of Susan Einbinder, in particular Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002). For medieval England, Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews of England (London, 1964), is still valuable, but the great work of synthesis is Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010). Brilliant accounts of invariably depressing Judeophobic myths are Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia 1999), and Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London, 2010). For the literary stereotypes, Marianne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England (New York, 2011). And on social and economic history: Suzanne Bartlet, Licoricia of Winchester (London, 2009); Robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion 1262–1290 (Cambridge, 1998) and The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre and Exodus in Medieval England (London, 2010). For the history of Jewish women and families: Elisheva Baumgarrten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004); Simha Goldin, Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages: A Quiet Revolution (Manchester, 2011); Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, MA, 2004); Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut (eds), Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakha and Contemporary Realities (Philadelphia, 1992); Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood (New Haven, 1996).

  Jewish art, architecture and manuscript illumination: The most stimulating interpreter of this extraordinary body of work is Marc Michael Epstein, Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature (University Park, PA, 1997), and his The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination (New Haven and London, 2013). See also Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art Between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden and Boston, 2004), and her profoundly enlightening A Mahzor from Worms: Art and Religion in a Medieval Jewish Community (Cambridge, MA, 2012). For a
comprehensive survey organised by subject, Thérèse and Mendel Metzger, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages: Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries (New York and Fribourg, 1982). And there are helpful essays in Piet van Boxell and Sabine Arndt (eds), Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures (Oxford, 2009), and in Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick and Jerillyn Dodds, Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York, 1992). The catalogue raisonné of British holdings is Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles (Oxford, 1982). For architecture see C. H. Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (New York and Cambridge, 1985).

  Disputations, Persecutions and Expulsion in Spain: On the mostly ominous direction of Christian theology and preaching: Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, 1982); Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish–Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Rutherford, NJ, and London, 1982); Robert Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud, Paris 1240 (Toronto, 2012). See also the mighty and still important work by Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995). The classic account of the denouement in Spain is Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1982) but Cecil Roth, Conversos, Inquisition and the Expulsion from Spain (London and Madison, 1995) is still important, as is Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (New Haven, 1997). There is a constantly challenging and richly researched account of both the background and aftermath of the expulsion in Yirmiyahu Yovel’s The Other Within: The Marranos – Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton and Oxford, 2003); and also in the most powerful of Baer’s students, Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (trans. Jeffrey M. Green), (Oxford and Portland, OR, 2002). On the terrible unfolding of events in Portugal there is now a masterly and moving work, François Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (Leiden, 2007).