The Greek word “historie”, as is known, was coined in its modern meaning by the great Ionian historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, whom Cicero considered the father of history, and comes from an old Indo-European root related to “seeing” and “to know” or, better said, to know by having seen. “History” is a key verb both when telling evoked stories and recounting the story based on testimonial sources, in any investigation of the collective or personal past: since then, it has been a word and a notion inherited by almost all modern languages. In an ambivalent use, the Castilian “historia” does not differentiate between the nuances that English gives to the two directions that this word has taken: “history” and “story”. And the book that we are commenting on today has a lot of both, but, above all, of the second. “The Story of the Jews”, translated into Spanish as “The history of the Jews”, perhaps would have required a fine translational gloss to the title: it does not refer to that Herodothean universal memory that constitutes historiography, but rather to a story historical-narrative of enormous appeal that has to do with the evocation of history, yes, but also with personal memory and, if this is possible, with the collective reminiscence of an entire people. Perhaps the translation of the title into Castilian manages to clarify through the definite article what the English achieves by changing the word, in a very interesting word game for the purpose of this author, Simon Schama, historian and narrator at the same time, with agile prose and seductive in its two aspects. perhaps it would have required a fine translational gloss to the title: it does not refer to that Herodothean universal memory that constitutes historiography, but rather to an enormously attractive historical-narrative account that has to do with the evocation of history, yes, but also with personal memory and, if possible, with the collective reminiscence of an entire people. Perhaps the translation of the title into Castilian manages to clarify through the definite article what the English achieves by changing the word, in a very interesting word game for the purpose of this author, Simon Schama, historian and narrator at the same time, with agile prose and seductive in its two aspects. perhaps it would have required a fine translational gloss to the title: it does not refer to that Herodothean universal memory that constitutes historiography, but rather to an enormously attractive historical-narrative account that has to do with the evocation of history, yes, but also with personal memory and, if possible, with the collective reminiscence of an entire people. Perhaps the translation of the title into Castilian manages to clarify through the definite article what the English achieves by changing the word, in a very interesting word game for the purpose of this author, Simon Schama, historian and narrator at the same time, with agile prose and seductive in its two aspects. but rather to an enormously attractive historical-narrative story that has to do with the evocation of history, yes, but also with personal memory and, if this is possible, with the collective reminiscence of an entire people. Perhaps the translation of the title into Castilian manages to clarify through the definite article what the English achieves by changing the word, in a very interesting word game for the purpose of this author, Simon Schama, historian and narrator at the same time, with agile prose and seductive in its two aspects. but rather to an enormously attractive historical-narrative story that has to do with the evocation of history, yes, but also with personal memory and, if this is possible, with the collective reminiscence of an entire people. Perhaps the translation of the title into Castilian manages to clarify through the definite article what the English achieves by changing the word, in a very interesting word game for the purpose of this author, Simon Schama, historian and narrator at the same time, with agile prose and seductive in its two aspects.
The old and the new continent
This is not the case – the reader should not be deceived – of a history of the Jews to use, in the historiographical sense, but rather the author offers us a personal and literally fascinating journey through the historical trajectory of this great people, which constitutes one of the shared pillars of the civilization of the West and the East, and whose influence on the historical process of humanity is difficult to underestimate. Perhaps the most attractive thing about this first volume of “The Story of the Jews” is precisely the combination of narrative levels and the evocation in a continuous story that alternates times and places to tell us, through the creative word -certainly following a Hebrew leitmotif of a bookish culture par excellence– and of the updating in modern references to diverse later episodes, the unforgettable vicissitudes of the Jewish people. This first volume deals from the origins to the key date of the expulsion of the Jewish people from Spain –the loss of the longed-for Sefarad– in the year 1492, also the year of the discovery of a new world in which the Jews would have a prominent role ( but that is left for the next volume of this work).
The author, professor of art history and history at Columbia University in New York, is a renowned specialist in the Hebrew world who also stands out for his facet as a science popularizer. And this is precisely the aspect that could be highlighted the most in an agile and well-written book, with few footnotes, but with the essential references for the interested reader to expand their knowledge of it in each historical section. The author skilfully weaves together the historical account –rather than historiographical– evoking in a novelistic way the events of the ancient and medieval history of the Jews and taking some of its protagonists as a common thread. Following the historiographic trends of cultural history and the history of mentalities –also with nuances of microhistory or intrahistory–, Schama intertwines the lives of the particular protagonists of the story with the most relevant facts of ancient history –Egypt, Greece, Rome– and medieval –Byzantium and the West– and even some of the author’s own life and personal experience. Suggestive comparisons are drawn between the ancient and the modern, the medieval and the contemporary, throughout this half a thousand pages.
The most attractive idea, as an underlying thesis, is the tension between two sociopolitical forms of Judaism, «two modalities (says the author) –the exclusive and the inclusive, Jerusalem and Elephantine– have coexisted as long as there have been Jews»: one a more dogmatic and unequivocal Jewish way of being compared to a more open one, within another community, with an integrating and complementary vision. Such a dichotomy is seen in ancient Egypt, but also during Seleucid and Ptolemaic rule, with the diaspora following the Roman world and beyond.
Triumphs and failures
Wherever they went, the Jews oscillated between unidirectional devotion to the precepts of the temple and feeling both Jewish and Alexandrian or Jewish and Roman (and Spanish, and German, and North American, and a long etcetera), in a rich and creative dynamic. historical. Schama collects this epic, tragic and fundamental story of humanity in its triumphs and failures, its moments of intellectual glory and in the dramas of persecution and misunderstanding. This magnificent literary project, a complete fresco that provides a global and particular vision at the same time, thus unites all the nuances of history, just as the old Herodotus enunciated it: a historical narration with pretensions to truthfulness, yes, but indulgent with memories.
