8.2 /10 1 Votes
Language English Country United Kingdom | 4.1/5 Goodreads Originally published 3 November 2014 Subject Jewish history | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Story of the Jews is a two-volume book by British historian Simon Schama. The first volume, entitled Finding the Words 1000BCE – 1492CE, was published in the United Kingdom in September 2013. The second volume, entitled When Words Fail: 1492 – Present, was published in November 2014.
A television series, based on Schama's book, was broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two in September 2013 and in the United States on PBS in March and April 2014.
Reception
In his review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote:
"Mr. Schama’s 'The Story of the Jews' is exemplary popular history. It’s engaged, literate, alert to recent scholarship and, at moments, winningly personal... Mr. Schama is Jewish, but not especially religious... His loyalty is obviously to the hard evidence. At the same time, he declares that “the ‘minimalist’ view of the Bible as wholly fictitious, and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede."