Synopses & Reviews
The distinguished historian of the Jewish people, Howard M. Sachar, gives us a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of the achievements and traumas of the Jews over the last four hundred years.
Tracking their fate from Western Europes age of mercantilism in the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet and post-imperialist Islamic upheavals of the twenty-first century, Sachar applies his renowned narrative skill to the central role of the Jews in many of the most impressive achievements of modern civilization: whether in the rise of economic capitalism or of political socialism; in the discoveries of theoretical physics or applied medicine; in “higher” literary criticism or mass communication and popular entertainment.
As his account unfolds and moves from epoch to epoch, from continent to continent, from Europe to the Americas and the Middle East, Sachar evaluates communities that, until lately, have been underestimated in the perspective of Jewish and world history—among them, Jews of Sephardic provenance, of the Moslem regions, and of Africa. By the same token, Sachar applies a masters hand in describing and deciphering the Jews unique exposure and functional usefulness to totalitarian movements—fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist. In the process, he shines an unsparing light on the often widely dissimilar behavior of separate European peoples, and on separate Jewish populations, during the Holocaust.
A distillation of the authors lifetime of scholarly research and teaching experience, A History of the Jews in the Modern World provides a source of unsurpassed intellectual richness for university students and educated laypersons alike.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Dr. Sachar received his undergraduate education at Swarthmore and took his graduate degrees at Harvard. He has taught Modern European, Jewish, and Middle Eastern history, and lived in the Middle East for six years, two of them on fellowship, the rest as founder-director of Brandeis University's Hiatt Institute in Jerusalem. Dr. Sachar has contributed to many scholarly journals, is the author of numerous books, and the editor of the thirty-ninevolume The Rise of Israel: A Documentary History. He serves as Charles E. Smith Professor of history at George Washington University, is a consultant and lecturer on Middle Eastern affairs for numerous governmental bodies, and lectures widely in the United States and abroad.
Table of Contents
Foreword
I The Jew as Non-European
II A Glimmering of Dawn in the West
III An Ambivalent Emancipation in the West
IV Incarceration: The Jews of Tsarist Russia
V The Triumph of Emancipation in the West
VI Jews in an Emancipated Economy
VII The Impact of Western Culture on Jewish Life
VIII A Sephardic-Oriental Diaspora
IX The Rise of Jewish Life in America
X False Dawn in the East: Alexander II and the Era of “Enlightenment”
XI Russian Twilight: The Era of Pogroms and May Laws
XII A Migration of East European Jewry: 1881-1914
XIII The Onset of Modern Antisemitism
XIV The Mutation of Racism
XV The Rise of Zionism
XVI The Evolution of Jewish Radicalism:Tsarist Russia
XVII Socialist “Internationalism” in Western Europe: The Trauma of World War I
XVIII The Triumph of Bolshevism
XIX The Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home
XX The Legacy of Progressivism: Immigrant Jewry in the United States
XXI Successor States and Minority Guarantees: 1919-1939
XXII The Triumph of East European Fascism
XXIII A Final Symbiosis of Jewish and Western Culture
XXIV A Climactic Onslaught of Postwar Antisemitism
XXV The Triumph of Nazism
XXVI The Quest for Sanctuary: 1933-1939
XXVII The Holocaust of European Jewry
XXVIII The Final Solution and the Struggle for Jewish Survival
XXIX The Birth of Israel
XXX Eastern Jewry in the Postwar: A Failed Convalescence
XXXI A Precarious Revival in Western Europe
XXXII The Jews of British Commonwealth
XXXIII A Latin Israel in the Southern Hemisphere
XXXIV The Efflorescence of American-Jewish Community
XXXV The Jewish State and World Jewry
XXXVI Israel, the United States, and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry
Afterword
Bibliography
Index