A History Of The Jews, by Abram Leon Sachar

This particular author was once president of Brandeis University and it shows in several ways, some of them subtle and some of them not.  For one, the author praises Brandeis University for its speedy accreditation process by Phi Beta Kappa and makes it an important element of his discussion of Judaism in the United States in the 20th century.  For another, this book reeks of the kind of hypocrisy that one expects from people of the left.  The author views enlightenment as being dependent on a critical and hostile attitude towards the truth claims of scripture yet simultaneously fails to recognize this as being hostility towards Judaism (and any other revealed religion, for that matter) on the same level as the anti-Semites the author is continually harping on.  This book is not worthless, but certainly has a lot wrong with it and it is hard to appreciate a book that is written with such stridency and such arrogant presumptions to knowledge, including a leftist political bias that is deeply offensive.  A little less hypocrisy and a lot more graciousness would have made this book easier to appreciate, but the author failed to realize that conservatives read books too, and that is a common problem it would seem.

This particular volume is nearly 500 pages long and is divided into three parts and 33 chapters.  The book begins with a look at Palestine before the Hebrews (1) and then moves on to discuss the supposed origins of the Hebrews (2), their entry into the promised land (3), the growth of their national consciousness (4), the divided kingdom (5), as well as the prophets (6), the rise of post-exilic Judaism (7), the social history of Biblical Israel (8), the meeting of Judaism and Hellenism (9), the end of the Jewish state (10), and the rise of Christianity (11).  Part two then continues with a discussion of the development of the Talmud (12), the Muslim world (13), the golden age in Muslim Spain (14), four centuries of bloody history in Europe for the Jews (15), the decline and fall of Jewish life in Spain (16), havens of refuge (17), degeneration into superstition (18), and the Jew in the Medieval world (19).  Finally, part three contains chapters on the end of the Jewish Middle Ages (20), the fall of the Medieval citadel (21), the supposed triumph of liberalism (22), factors in American Jewish history (23), the pogroms of Russia (24), cultural and religious changes (25), the revival of anti-Semitism (26), Zionism (27), World War I (28), Europe between the world wars (29), Jewish history in the 20th century in the Western hemisphere (30), the epic founding of Israel (31), World War II and after (32), and the new state of Israel (33), after which there is a selected bibliography and index.

Ultimately, this book contains a great deal of information about Jewish history, but that information comes from an anti-biblical stance with a strongly anti-Christian bias as well.  The author appears to be proud of Israel as a nation but has a dim view of religion and fails to see that his anti-religious attitude is as threatening to the well-being of his people as were the efforts of those Jews who had converted to Christianity and then sought to debunk their former co-religionists.  Much of what the author supposed to be enlightenment is in fact a mirage, and the author’s failure to recognize this makes this book more than a little bit insufferable.  If the reader is able to correct the biases of the author, add some outside knowledge to provide perspectives the author neglects, and generally provide the balance that this book is lacking, there is some profit that can be gained from reading this.  For many readers, though, this book will only confirm the fact that secularists are just as bigoted as any people of faith, a factor they appear not to be able to recognize in themselves, even if it is in evidence in spades here.