| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

David Biale, editor. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken Books. 2002. Pp. xxxiii, 1196.
The globalization of Jewish studies in our time has probably never been given better expression than in this comprehensive and impressive volume edited by David Biale. The book contends that globalization exists mainly in two dimensions: "Jewish culture has always evolved on a global stage" and has spread to nearly every corner of the globe (p. 1,149), and "Jewish studies as a field has become globalized" (p. xxix). This is indeed an extraordinary historiographic endeavor, unprecedented in its scope and multidisciplinary approach, but also in its revisionist goal of presenting a "New History."	1
The aspiration at the start of the twenty-first century to present, in a single volume containing more than 1,000 pages, a picture of Jewish history from ancient Israel up to present-day Israel, is an enormous challenge. Biale has assembled an international group of twenty-three experts in the history, literary criticism, archaeology, and folklore of the Jews in various periods. From the outset, the editor decided to forego any pretension to a total history, covering all possible spheres and discussing all the events and all the Jewish communities. He also deliberately refrained from telling one consecutive narrative. Each of the collaborators on the book contributed his/her own chapter, which stands on its own, but also took part in the deliberations about the book's special emphases and trends. The editor's prefaces build the bridges between the various chapters and provide a common bedrock of assumptions and concepts that strive to give the book its cohesiveness.	2
The book is divided into three parts, more or less according to the traditional periodization to the ancient era, the Middle Ages, and the modern age. The chapters of the first part, whose topic is the Mediterranean roots of the Jews, open with the culture of biblical Israel and propose the Bible as a combination of literature and history. In particular, they stress how the birth of the Jewish people was imagined in the biblical narrative, which represents the earliest collective biography of the Jews. In this part, stress is placed on one of the elements that underlie the theme that permeates the book: the close interaction of ancient Jews with the cultures in which they lived, first the Canaanite, then the Hellenistic, early Christian, and Muslim, alongside the religious and ethnic traits that are peculiar to the Jewish identity. The second part covers the period between the seventh and the eighteenth centuries, about a thousand years of "The Jewish Middle Ages," and the third is dedicated to the modern era, which posed a double, even contradictory challenge to the Jews: the promise and unprecedented possibility of individual assimilation, and the threat of secular antisemitism. The contributors to this third part present modern Jewish experience from many viewpoints, with an emphasis on differentiation, local difference, the vast number of culture varieties, and the difficulty of separating Jews from their ambient environments.	. . .

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