Simon Schama, the prolific and protean British historian whose topics have included the French Revolutionand the history of art, arrives now with a history of the Jewish people, and it’s a multimedia happening: two books and a five-part television documentary being broadcast on the BBC and PBS.
The first volume, “The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD,” is before us. The second, out this fall, takes us up to the present day. It bears a rather more somber subtitle: “When Words Fail: 1492-Present.”
It’s no accident that the subtitles alight on language. Mr. Schama is a wordy, frequently witty writer about a wordy, witty culture. Considering the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, he can’t help summarizing a bit of the implied content in one of them this way: “We are going to write the enemy into capitulation! Surrender to our verbosity or else!”
Mr. Schama’s own verbosity offers deep pleasures. If he occasionally writes the reader into capitulation — there are more zealots and harlots, uprootings and assaults, curses and hymns, doves and asses, and parched throats and sacrificed goats in this book than you can easily keep in your head at one time — he mostly wears his erudition lightly.
This story has, to be sure, been related many times before. “Anyone venturing into Jewish history has to be dauntingly aware,” Mr. Schama observes, “of the immense mountain ranges of multivolume scholarship towering behind him.” His is the kind of book that more academic historians sometimes disparage as paddling in a genre that’s been described as, “read 10 books, write an 11th.”
But 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. Observing the ancient jugs and amphorae and other kitchenware unearthed during an archaeological dig, for example, he spies a beautiful baking tray and comments, “I am suddenly at home in this kitchen, preparing a meal, reaching for the oil.”
Jewish history has survived, thanks to its people’s intense literacy. “From the beginning of the culture’s own self-consciousness, to be Jewish was to be Bookish,” Mr. Schama writes. Jews carried the Torah everywhere, sometimes in miniaturized versions on their persons. Burning it was little use; these people had it memorized.
The Torah had everything a mentally omnivorous culture needed. Mr. Schama describes it as “compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel.” Yet that the Jews have come so close to annihilation so many times also demonstrates the limits of words alone. As Mr. Schama writes elsewhere, “There are certain things poetry can’t do: prolong the life of doomed states, for example.”
Mr. Schama’s history commences around the time Jews began to be thought of, by scholars, as a unified people; it ends with the Spanish Inquisition and the Jews’ expulsion from Spain. In between, the author swivels among civilizations, depicting Jewish life in the ancient Near East, in the Roman and Hellenistic world, and mingled with early Christianity and Islam. His narrative stresses that Jews have not been, as is often imagined, a culture apart; their culture has busily intermingled with many others.
Mr. Schama mediates between historians. He lingers on the “procession of pink-faced Anglos — Bible scholars, missionaries, military engineers, mappers and surveyors, kitted out with their measuring tapes, their candles, notebooks, sketchbooks and pencils, accompanied by their NCOs and fellah-guides,” who have crisscrossed biblical lands, searching for relics.
The author himself combs through all manner of historical evidence, and is winsome about much of it. “So much classical history can be written in its plumbing,” he says. We realize that Josephus is the first real Jewish historian, Mr. Schama comments, “when, with a twinge of guilt, he introduces his mother into the action.”
At moments, this volume breaks into broad comedy. There is an extended riff on the surreptitious pickling that surely occurred on the Sabbath (“Woe betide you, O illicit pickler!”) that is nearly worth the price of admission alone.
But comedy “The Story of the Jews” is not. To study Jewish history is to study what it means to be hurt, to be despised, to be considered filthy and homicidal. Mr. Schama is thorough on the vindictive paranoia that has run rampant through history. He pauses to detail, in particular, the Judeophobic mobs in 12th- and 13th-century England who slaughtered and expelled Jews on the slightest of pretexts, a bit of history his country pretends, he suggests, did not occur.
Mr. Shama writes: “How can God permit such a thing to happen to His People? That’s what we always ask when cinders smart the eyes and we begin to spit soot.” Jewish faith and resilience are awesome to observe in this volume.
Mr. Schama is Jewish, but not especially religious. (I find it impossible to apply the term “nonobservant” to someone who observes so well.) Yet he is aware that there are essentially two Jewish stories running parallel to each other: “one from the archaeological record, one through the infinitely edited, redacted, anthologized, revised work that will end up as the Hebrew Bible.”
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.”
As much as Mr. Schama revels in the language of Jewish religious texts, it’s the secular commentary he more often thrills to. He pauses to praise the medieval philosopher Maimonides’s “lip-smacking, fist-punching relish for detail.” Finding a scrap of text on a pottery shard, Mr. Schama suggests, is like discovering “the equivalent of a Hebrew tweet.” Sometimes, he writes, “the tweets turn into true texts: stories of grievances, anxieties, prophecies, boasts.”
It’s a point this pungent book makes over and over: “In this story you don’t escape the words.”
THE STORY OF THE JEWS
Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD
By Simon Schama
Illustrated. 496 pages. Ecco. $39.99.
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