Author Description

"Leading authorities survey Jewish history from its beginnings down to the 20th century: the earliest days before the Exile; the Jewish polity in its encounters with the Great Powers of the ancient world; Jewish life after the destruction of the Jewish state under Christianity and Islam; the impact of the Enlightenment on Jewish thought and traditions; the Jewish experience in 19th- and 20th-century Europe; the rise and development of American Jewry; the appearance of Zionism and its culmination in the foundation of Israel. That is the 'outer' history. But there is another, 'inner' history without which the first is meaningless. Equal space in this volume is therefore devoted to the Bible, the Talmud, to Jewish philosophy and mysticism, to imaginative literature--both poetry and fiction-- in Hebrew, and to the challenge of modernity and the way in which Judaism as a system of thought and belief has tried to cope with it"--Jacket.