Non­fic­tion

A Brief His­to­ry of the Jew­ish People

Moshe Weiss
  • Review
By – August 14, 2012
The his­to­ry of the Jew­ish peo­ple is any­thing but brief — so many cen­turies, so many coun­tries, so many lan­guages, so many move­ments and per­son­al­i­ties and so much source mate­r­i­al, both pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary. Squeez­ing all this into a slim vol­ume that is read­able, con­cise, accu­rate, and that bal­ances com­pre­hen­sive scope with rich details is quite a chal­lenge. For the most part Rab­bi Dr. Weiss man­ages to do just that. One may quib­ble with what was omit­ted and how many para­graphs were allot­ted to cer­tain top­ics, as one may dif­fer on cer­tain inter­pre­ta­tions of events. How­ev­er, this vol­ume is a very good and effi­cient sum­ma­ry of many major ele­ments of Jew­ish his­to­ry. 

It is dif­fi­cult for an his­to­ri­an to crit­i­cal­ly eval­u­ate anoth­er historian’s work. There will always be dif­fer­ences of opin­ion. In this case there were 16 such points of con­tention — not too bad for a vol­ume that cov­ers all of Jew­ish his­to­ry! One point is that an objec­tive his­to­ri­an should nev­er mix his­to­ry with the­ol­o­gy. Tra­di­tion­al Jews writ­ing about the Bib­li­cal and Rab­binic peri­ods of Jew­ish his­to­ry have dif­fi­cul­ty view­ing events and texts in an unbi­ased man­ner. Rab­bi Dr. Weiss gives away his bias­es for the first 80 pages of this oth­er­wise well-writ­ten book. His treat­ment of the Has­moneans and their con­nec­tion to the Sad­ducees, neglect of the fact that the Tal­mud was still being edit­ed into the Geon­ic peri­od, and state­ments on the ori­gin of the Karaites and of cer­tain terms such as mara­no, are some areas which do not reflect con­tem­po­rary schol­ar­ship. Addi­tion­al­ly, that Shlo­mo Car­lebach is giv­en cred­it for the ba’al teshu­va move­ment, is as sur­pris­ing to see as the term occu­pied” ter­ri­to­ries used in place of dis­put­ed” territories. 

This book is well suit­ed as an intro­duc­to­ry text of Jew­ish his­to­ry, and the Glos­sary and Index are quite useful. 
Wal­lace Greene, Ph.D., has held sev­er­al uni­ver­si­ty appoint­ments, and cur­rent­ly writes and lec­tures on Jew­ish and his­tor­i­cal subjects.

Discussion Questions