This may have been true from time to time, but as often as not, Jews felt very
much at home in the places where they lived, especially in those places where
they lived for centuries.
This sense of rootedness may seem odd, especially for those who approach
Jewish history from what Salo Baron called a “lachrymose view.” Baron cor-
rectly noted a prevailing yet erroneous view that contends that Jewish history
is a history of endless suffering and persecution. This view was validated in
retrospect by the fact that every center of Jewish life eventually came to an
end, and more recently by the Holocaust.
The notion of perpetual Jewish adversity in the diaspora is at the heart of
several different approaches to Jewish history. The traditional rabbinic
approach regards the worship or acknowledgment of God, the observance of
Jewish laws, and the study of the Torah as the common thread of the Jewish
experience. This approach equates good for and bad for Jews with good for
Judaism and bad for Judaism (“Jewish history is Rashi and the Rambam
[Maimonides]”). Jewish suffering and the persecution of Jews were seen as
divine retribution for religious laxity and indifference. Zionist historians,
though downplaying the role of religious observance and divine providence,
embraced the lachrymose view of Jewish history to underline the futility of
Jewish life in the diaspora and the overriding need to move to Israel.
Those who have sustained this lachrymose point of view have had to resort
to connecting the dots between a series of adverse situations: the Crusades,
the Black Death, the Age of Expulsions, the Italian ghettos, the Chmielnicki
massacres, pogroms in Russia, and the destruction of European Jewry by
Hitler. Yet these events were separated by centuries and by hundreds of miles.
Between these events were less dramatic moments when Jews lived comfort-
ably in the diaspora for extended periods of time. This point should not be
overstated, yet while persecution is an undeniable feature of Jewish history, it
was not the only feature. The situation for Jews in the diaspora was neither
perfect nor perfectly awful.
The book is divided as follows: Chapter 1 will explore the world of the
ancient Israelites as recounted in the Hebrew Bible, one of the pillars of west-
ern civilization, and how Judaism was forged from the matrix of ancient
Israelite traditions and institutions. Chapter 2 will then consider how this
society was challenged by the experience of exile and by its encounter with
the Greco-Roman world – the other pillar of western civilization – and trans-
formed from a territorial, cultic religion into a melange of Jewish sects vying
to be the authentic heir of ancient Israel. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will explore the
tortuous crystallization of Rabbinic Judaism into the dominant and definitely
authentic form of Judaism under Roman, Byzantine, Persian, and finally
Islamic and Christian rule. They will show how it expanded into an all-com-
passing way of life by the end of the Middle Ages, regulating and governing
all facets of Jewish life, and how it managed the growing complexity of
Jewish identity under the rubric of a system of religious beliefs, practices,
Introduction: dimensions of Jewish history 3