What do you know about the Jews ?

Torah Scroll 

From generation to generation — l’dor va dor, as the Good Book says (in Hebrew) — there arises a historian who bequeaths unto the world yet another door-stopping history of the Jews. Forty-one years ago, a young history professor at Cambridge named Simon Schama agreed to complete one such work, left unfinished by the great British Jewish historian Cecil Roth when he died. Schama tried to do the job, he really did, but “for whatever reasons the graft wouldn’t take,” as he writes in the foreword of his own “The Story of the Jews.” Now we know why. Roth was a splendid writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of his field, and Schama is a splendid writer with an encyclopedic acquaintance with a wide range of fields. But Roth wrote history from above, chronicling the doings of great men entangled in great events, whereas Schama writes history from below, and from the middle and from other unexpected angles, resurrecting the unrecorded and long-­forgotten, and analyzing the social and cultural forces that shaped his subjects’ lives. Roth’s and Schama’s approaches to history are at least two generations apart, and Schama’s is the more user-friendly (to this reader, anyway). Although his book, which ends in the 15th century, is destined to become part of a two-volume set big enough to prop anything open, there’s nothing thudding about it.

Most of the book celebrates Schama’s main thesis: that Jews were not the rigidly pious and self-segregating people Christian invective as well as the theologically dominated research of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made them out to be. On the contrary. From the beginning of their known history and for centuries thereafter, Jews commingled with Canaanites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, pre-Muslim Arabs, Muslim Arabs and Christian Europeans. It was only when the Christians and Muslims turned on the Jews, singling them out for humiliation and, in the case of the Christians, grotesque insult and slaughter, that Jews began to withdraw or be pushed into their own separate spheres.

During the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., for instance, Jewish colonists on Elephantine flourished in the company of their Egyptian neighbors. The Elephantine Jews built their temple of Yahu across the street from the Egyptian temple of ­Khnum — even though, technically, the Bible forbade Jews to build a temple outside Jerusalem. The Jewish soldiers and their families were chided by their betters in Jerusalem, who disapproved of the Elephantines’ high rate of intermarriage and their lax standards of Passover observance, but Schama is charmed by their easy­going urbanity. Like “so many other Jewish societies, planted among the Gentiles,” he writes, Elephantine was “worldly, cosmopolitan, vernacular (Aramaic) not Hebrew, obsessed with law and property, money-minded, fashion-conscious, much concerned with the making and breaking of marriages, providing for the children, the niceties of the social pecking order and both the delights and the burdens of the Jewish ritual calendar. And it doesn’t seem to have been especially bookish.”

Schama is a mostly secular Jew who has devoted the bulk of his career to non-Jewish history, which may be why he enjoys flaunting the evidence that Jews were heterodox and syncretistic and embraced the foreign cultures (Persian, Hellenist, Andalusian) that absorbed them through conquest or exile or just by luring them to their thriving cities. He writes most ebulliently about the hybridism that resulted. “Houses and villas of surprising size and splendor” from the Hellenistic Hasmonean era were built in and around Jerusalem, Schama says, “boasting spacious rooms with fresco-decorated walls. Vines curl, lilies unfurl, pomegranates press against the calyx.”

In the third to sixth centuries, while the rabbis were codifying the stringent laws that would end up in the Mishnah, the first layer of the Talmud, congregations were decorating their synagogues with mosaics in the Greco-Roman style. For the floors of their houses of worship, Jewish artists designed bestiaries, religious iconography and a lot of portraits. The best of these, according to Schama, are the four moody beauties meant to personify the seasons, who stare up from the floor of a synagogue in Sepphoris, a town in the Galilee. “This was not evidence of backsliding,” Schama explains. Early Jewish iconoclasm took aim at the representation of idols, not decorative menageries and “calendar girls,” as he calls the young women. “About painted images the rabbis have nothing at all to say and silence was obviously taken as assent.”

You can’t dismiss Schama’s account of Jewish pluralism as anachronistic or tendentious. It draws on scholarship going back half a century, which has demolished the stereotype of the postexilic Jew cut off from the poetry, art and mores of his — and her — place and time. Still, a synoptic historian of the Jews has no choice but to address the age-old question of how they managed to keep their religion and identity intact through the destructions of two temples, multiple exiles, repeated attempts at conversion and extermination, and the sheer passage of time. Schama has a theory about that, too. It’s more familiar than some of his other ones, but he brings to it his considerable powers of cultural appreciation. The answer is the Word. By the Word he means, as you might expect, the Book, or Torah, which began to be read aloud every week after the return from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C., functioning as a “compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel.”

But Schama also has in mind the words that unusually widespread literacy kept at the center of Jewish life, possibly as early as the 10th century B.C. In the ninth century B.C., a farmer south of Jerusalem is known to have consulted his almanac. A century and a half after that, any Jerusalemite willing to crawl underground could read the inscription memorializing the engineering feat that is King Hezekiah’s water tunnel, designed to keep his desert city drinking if it came under siege. Amulets stuffed with little prayer scrolls could be hung on the body. Around the first or second century of the Christian Era, readers could entertain themselves with Greco-Judaic novels. The history-minded could turn to the account of the Roman-Jewish wars written by the Jewish general turned Roman accomplice, Josephus.

And then there’s the “oral law,” the dynamic interpretation and reinterpretation of the Torah begun by the Pharisees more than 2,000 years ago that to this day unites learned Jews across time and space in an unstoppable flow of argument, sarcasm and raconteurship. (The Talmud and subsequent commentaries contain nearly as much parable as legal discussion, also much arch rabbinical wit.) For the record, Schama does not subscribe to the “minimalist” school of archaeology that considers the Torah entirely fictitious. Recent analyses of Biblical Hebrew and new archaeological findings bolster the likelihood that, though the Bible is by no means a history, it has credible history in it.

In the four decades since Schama first tried his hand at Jewish history, its study has burst out of seminaries and tiny, marginalized departments and become an extraordinarily fertile collective endeavor, in part because there were so many religiously tinged or frankly anti-Semitic misconceptions about Jews on hand for debunking. You’d think that the task of synthesizing the available information would be harder today than it was back then. But Schama has pulled it off with opinionated flair and literary grace, thereby discharging his debt to Roth and taking his own place among the generations.

By Judith Shulevitz