The Illustrated History of the Jewish People

This history, written from the vantage point of the late 20th century, incorporates quantities of new information from archeological findings and fresh scholarship. As De Lange, a reader in Jewish studies at Cambridge University, writes, ""recent research has underlined the distance that exists between the real beginnings of the Jewish people and the story as it is recounted in the Bible."" Thus, although the outlines of the familiar story remain unaltered, this engrossing interpretation amplifies and elucidates such matters as the earliest identifiable tribal beginnings; the defining of the Hebrew God; the wars and kingdoms; the Essenes; the defeat by the Romans; the Diaspora into Europe, Asia and Africa; the importance of Babylon as a center of that dispersion; and the Jewish people up through the Holocaust to the present. In the treatment of each subject, where new data or interpretations have come to light, myth is transformed by political, religious or sociological insight. Throughout, the Jews remain the wandering people whose millennial dreams were of a return home to Jerusalem. Illustrations. BOMC selection.(Nov.)