The Jews A History

The Jews: A History, second edition, explores the religious, cultural, social, and economic diversity of the Jewish people and their faith. The latest edition incorporates new research and includes a broader spectrum of people - mothers, children, workers, students, artists, and radicals - whose perspectives greatly expand the story of Jewish life.

John Efron holds the Koret Chair in Jewish History at the University of California-Berkeley, where he is a specialist in the cultural and social history of German Jewry.  A native of Melbourne, Australia, he has a B.A. from Monash University in Melbourne, has studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, took his M.A. at New York University and earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Steven Weitzman is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, much of his work focusing on literary and religious practice in the centuries following the biblical period. Drawing heavily on comparative evidence from ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman literature, his research has sought to rethink the relationship between texts and contexts in the Hebrew Bible/early Judaism and to pose new questions about ritual, religious violence, early Jewish literary practice, and the history of biblical interpretation.

Matthias B. Lehmann is an historian of early modern and modern Jewish history with a special interest in the history of the Spanish Jews and the Sephardi diaspora in the Mediterranean world. After studying in Freiburg, Jerusalem, Berlin, and Madrid, he earned his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 2002 and is an associate professor of History and Jewish Studies at Indiana University. His is the author of Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Indiana University Press, 2005), runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award in 2006. His articles have appeared in Jewish History, Jewish Social Studies, Sefarad, and Jewish Studies Quarterly. He is currently working on a book entitled Networks of Benevolence: Philanthropy and Identity in the Sephardi Diaspora, looking at rabbinic networks and networks of support for the Jewish communities of Palestine in the Sephardi diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Chapter 1: Ancient Israel and other Ancestors    

Chapter 2: Becoming the People of the Book

Chapter 3: Jews and Greeks, Jews in Greek

Chapter 4: Between Caesar and God

Chapter 5: Rabbinic Revelations       

Chapter 6: Under the Crescent         

Chapter 7: Under the Cross               

Chapter 8: A Jewish Renaissance       

Chapter 9: New Worlds, East and West                           

Chapter 10: The State of the Jews, Jews and the State    

Chapter 11: Modern Transformations                                                           

Chapter 12: The Politics of Being Jewish                                                      

Chapter 13: A World Upended                                                                      

Chapter 14: The Holocaust                                                                             

Chapter 15: Difficult Freedoms       

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