The Illustrated History of the Jewish People

Plot

A wonderfully accessible, beautifully illustrated chronicle of Jewish life through the ages, based on the best recent scholarship. With essays by Jane Gerber, Oded Irshai, Ora Limor, Michael Marrus, Derek Penslar, Seth Schwartz, David Sorkin, and Bernard Wasserstein. Maps; black-and-white illustrations; 48 full-color pages.

Amazon.com Review
By most accounts Jewish history begins with the Babylonians' destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. This well-made compendium, written by many hands, is in agreement. However, The Illustrated History of the Jewish People departs from traditional history in many ways, most notably in its attempts to understand figures who have been reduced to symbols. Herod, for example, "deserved his reputation for ruthlessness, cruelty and paranoia," but was also a product of his time, caught in a complex web of politics only partly of his own making. Editor Nicholas De Lange and the volume's contributors do a fine job of gathering the many strains of Jewish history into a single narrative, which ends with a discussion of the ongoing search for peace in the Middle East. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
In the 13 years since the appearance of the best-selling documentary and popular history Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (Summit), much has happened in the Jewish world. Translator and author De Lange (Atlas of the Jewish World, Facts on File, 1992) has edited a collection of eight essays by respected scholars in the field that chronologically survey Jewish history from biblical times to Prime Minister Rabin's assassination. Understandably, no topic is fully explored, but this work does provide a well-illustrated, balanced format to encourage historical exploration. This will definitely become a major Bar/Bat Mitzvah and Chanukah gift item and will be of interest to the general public, but its lack of citations might discourage students from using it as a place to begin research. The lack of a glossary is also a major omission for the general reader, since the essayists freely use a variety of useful but otherwise undefined terms.