The story of the Jews : finding the words 1000 BCE - 1492 CE

Simon Schama's Story of the Jews will be one of the most discussed books of 2013. It is a landmark history of a culture, a people, a world from the time of Moses to our own, and is accompanied by a major BBC television series. The Jewish story it tells reaches from Brooklyn to Berlin and includes passages to India, slow boats to China, and sojourns is Greece, Glasgow, Montreal and beyond. And its richly-peopled intellectual territory stretches from the Hebrew's invention of a single God to Jewish responsibility for killing the saviour, to currents of dispossession, destruction and diaspora, and ever onwards to the birth of modernism and the horrors of the twentieth century. But this is also a raucous, characterful history taking in the Jewish joke, Jewish sportsmen, Yiddish theatre, painting and music. The Story of the Jews is an indispensable work of world history by one of our most distinguished, versatile and electrifying historians.