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Looking for a good book on Jewish history?
Jews are the People of the Book, and part of this book has always been a
historical consciousness that dwarfed other peoples'. It's an interesting
question: does our rich tradition of historiography (writing history, that is)
give us our historical awareness, or does the fact that we have one ear attuned
to the call of Jewish history predispose us to recording history more than other
peoples did?
Or maybe it's just that during the long period of Exile, when Jews have
had to keep on the run from place to place, the one thing we have had to
sustain us has been an awareness that there is more to human existence than the
moment. And in this awareness, precisely because of it, we have recorded our
history.
If you love Jewish history, where do you start? As far as we know, Jews have
been in every country of the world (and of course many times they moved from one
country to another without leaving their houses). And with 4,000 years of Jewish
history and counting, Jews have lived through period after historical period.
Internal Jewish history, if you will, is in itself rich and detailed. So, too,
is the history - the histories, really - of Jewish interactions with other
societies in all the various places and times they have lived.
Thousands of years of Jewish history - and lots of books, scholarly and
popular, for you to delve into. We've put a representative few below (from
various times and places) to whet your appetite. There are many more, and if you
finish these, or want to see more, you can
click here to search Amazon for more books on Jewish history.
The Course of Modern Jewish History |
The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315-1791
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Blood Brothers |
Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism |
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara |
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How
Goodness Happened There |
The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust |
The New Complete Works of Josephus |
The Jews of Khazaria |
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the
Creation of the Modern Middle East |
Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the
Jewish Religion, Its People and Its History |
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict |
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict
over Palestine |
The Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side
to the Jewish Daily Forward |
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict,
1881-1999 |
Bashert: A Granddaughter's Holocaust Quest |
Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel (In
Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel) |
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness |
The Jews in America |
A History of the Jews |
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians
Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain |
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History |
Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews |
A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the
Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair |
Holocaust: A History |
The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the
Way Everyone Thinks and Feels |
The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of
Modern Anti-Semitism |
As a Driven Leaf |
A Jew in America: My Life and a People's Struggle for
Identity |
Jew Vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry |
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land |
The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History |
Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (Routledge
Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages, V. 7) |
Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the
Temple |
The Works of Philo |
The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and World
War II |
Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict |
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil |
The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East
Conflict |
Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the 13th Century |
Jewish Stars in Texas: Rabbis and Their Work |
History in Their Hands: A Book of Jewish Autographs |
The Fighting Rabbis: Jewish Military Chaplains and American
History |
Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman & Philosopher |
The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain |
Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval
France |
Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab Worlds
As Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Economic Foundations |
Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. |
Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages |
A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time |
'Our Crowd': The Great Jewish Families of New York (Modern Jewish
History) |
Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th to
20th Centuries |
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle
East |
The Two O'Clock War: The 1973 Yom Kippur Conflict and the Airlift
That Saved Israel |
Fustat on the Nile: The Jewish Elite in Medieval Egypt |
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