...Simon Schama’s latest book, The Story of the Jews, Volume Two: Belonging, 1492-1900, will be a revelation. It is an engaging and electrifying read by a skilled literary craftsman, cultural historian and tour guide, traveling through 500 years of history to such far-flung places... Schama enchants his readers by introducing colorful characters worthy of a Charles Dickens novel, if Dickens had decided to focus on the not-so-great expectations and bleak houses of the Jewish diaspora ...with the art and alchemy of an adventure novel. Dashing between nations and centuries, Schama assembles an all-star team of largely unsung Jewish heroes who inject humanity and spunk into what might otherwise have been morbid tales of endless persecution ...weaves a tapestry of interlocking themes that illuminate the advances and setbacks of life in the diaspora.
Simon Schama’s Belonging: 1492-1900, the second volume of his panoramic study of Jewish life, The Story of the Jews, is in fact an account of serial exile ...book begins around the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ends with the Dreyfus case, a 400-year round trip back to the same Jewish question ... Belonging is not, then, an ironic title. It was the core dilemma of the Jews across these four centuries. It was their constant quest (and equally constant worry), neither quite attainable nor, it seemed, definitively out of reach ...a remarkable storyteller. His approach is cinematic. He sets scenes with great vividness and writes, from street level, with an unflagging verve ...cascading, virtuoso narrative. The effect is kaleidoscopic, if occasionally disorienting ...is a riveting picture, gorgeously rendered, of the stubborn, argumentative miracle of Jewish survival against the odds.
Schama’s great gift as a historian is his ability to tell the big story through the individual stories of remarkable people like Beatriz and Brianda ... As Schama recounts David’s fantastic, sometimes hilarious, ultimately doomed journey, he paints a vivid picture of the hazardous lives and messianic longings of the Jews of Europe, and the gullibility, perfidy, and greed of their rulers. As expected, Volume II is a thoroughly engrossing, worthy sequel to Volume I. But, also as expected, it is not a happy story.
Simon Schama’s latest book, Belonging: The Story of the Jews, betrays no trace of that transcendent force. His volume, the second of two that cover 3,000 years of history, is a decidedly earthly chronicle of the Jews’ innumerable encounters with Gentile hosts... a magisterial account that grasps the global sweep of Jewish history through an intense, micro-historical inquiry into the local settings in which Jews made their homes ... product of a world-class historian at the peak of his creative powers ...encounters there vivid portraits of fascinating Sephardi figures... At work here is a great historian’s fertile and even artistic imagination, drawing out from and filling in where the documentary record begins and ends ...with astonishing range and extraordinary synthesising powers, Schama captures the drama of Jewish history.
Belonging, which covers the period from 1492 to 1900, is concerned with the Jewish search for security and the efforts – both coerced and voluntary – at assimilation in Europe... Although this is an ambitious doorstop of a book, Schama is not interested in history writ large. His signature method is to recount the plight of individuals against the swirling backdrop of events. It’s a high-wire approach that can leave the reader wondering if the extended anecdotes...maintains the attention with the vividness of his writing and his talent for unearthing gripping figures full of human contradictions ...a narrative that could easily be rendered as a stirring tale of noble victims overcoming mindless victimisation ... Schama is too subtle a writer and historian to succumb to that temptation ...profoundly illuminating book.
The narrative moves via elegant minibiographies as Jews expelled from Spain and elsewhere struggled with dispersion and assimilation ...pursues the uneasy story of the Jews’ dispersion across the globe after 1492, occasionally finding a haven, such as in Amsterdam or even China, but frequently suffering persistent persecution. In his engaging, stylistic prose, the author proceeds chronologically and delves into fascinating personal stories that reveal the Jewish experience beyond its significant religious figures... A fluid history lesson from an always engaging guide.
Belonging is less a history than a portrait gallery. Mr Schama, who teaches art history as well as history, often prefers interesting Jews to the most famous ones ...also an allegory of the present. The modernising forces that freed Jews from old impediments also provoked unease and anger ... Mr Schama, as both a historian and a Jew, closes his wonderful book the only way he could: with love shot through with melancholy and foreboding.
While well-known figures, such as Baruch Spinoza, Alfred Dreyfus, and Theodor Herzl, appear in the narrative, much of the story is recounted through the experiences of more obscure people... Despite the book’s ambitious scope, Schama keeps the reader rooted in the lives of the individuals whose choices brought Jewry from the trauma of their expulsion from Spain to the dawn of Zionism. He does so by adopting a novelist’s storytelling approach ... He also presents unique details to bolster the narrative.
