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 historyamong 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 movementsfascist, 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.
About the Author
Howard M. Sachar is the author of fifteen books and the editor of the thirty-nine-volume The Rise of Israel: A Documentary History. He is Professor of Modern History Emeritus at George Washington University.
Table of Contents
ForewordIThe Jews as Non-European
IIA Glimmering of Dawn in the West
IIIAn Ambivalent Emancipation in the West
IVIncarceration: The Jews of Tsarist Russia
VThe Triumph of Emancipation in the West
VIJews in an Emancipated Economy
VIIThe Impact of Western Culture on Jewish Life
VIIIA Sephardic-Oriental Diaspora
IXThe Rise of Jewish Life in America
XFalse Dawn in the East: Alexander II and the Era of “Enlightenment”
XIRussian Twilight: The Era of Pogroms and May Laws
XIIA Migration of East European Jewry: 1881–1914
XIIIThe Onset of Modern Antisemitism
XIVThe Mutation of Racism
XVThe Rise of Zionism
XVIThe Evolution of Jewish Radicalism: Tsarist Russia
XVIISocialist “Internationalism” in Western Europe: The Trauma of World War I
XVIIIThe Triumph of Bolshevism
XIXThe Balfour Declaration and the Jewish National Home
XXThe Legacy of Progressivism: Immigrant Jewry in the United States
XXISuccessor States and Minority Guarantees: 1919–1939
XXIIThe Triumph of East European Fascism
XXIIIA Final Symbiosis of Jewish and Western Culture
XXIVA Climatic Onslaught of Postwar Antisemitism
XXVThe Triumph of Nazism
XXVIThe Quest for Sanctuary 1933–1939
XXVIIThe Holocaust of European Jewry
XXVIIIThe Final Solution and the Struggle for Jewish Survival
XXIXThe Birth of Israel
XXXEastern Jewry in the Postwar: A Failed Convalescence
XXXIA Precarious Revival in Western Europe
XXXIIThe Jews of the British Commonwealth
XXXIIIA Latin Israel in the Soutern Hemisphere
XXXIVThe Efflorescence of American-Jewish Community
XXXVThe Jewish State and World Jewry
XXXVIIsrael, the United States, and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry
Afterword
Bibliography
Index