14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Coffee Table Book You'll Want to Read, January 9, 2006
This review is from: Diaspora and the Lost Tribes of Israel (Hardcover)
I took the book because of the awesome pictures, but I love the book because of the story the author has given to us. I'm a thirty something Catholic woman from the Midwest. I have had very little encounters with Jewish people. But after reading this book, I have a completely new understanding of what it means to be Jewish and the reasons behind the current conflicts in the Middle East.
The book is broken up into several categories that makes it easier to read and understand. I only wish that they had used maps in the book so I could see where the migrations started and ended. I ended up looking at my historical atlas along with reading the book.
After reading this book, no matter who you are, you will get the bigger picture of what life has been like for the Jewish people for the last 2500 years. These are people who truly have had no home where they could feel safe in for any lengthy period of time. Everywhere they went, they faced the cruelty of the local people and governments.
If you are at all interested in learning about the life of the Jewish people, this is a book you'll want to read.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What The Wall Street Journal (review March 17, 2005) says:, March 17, 2005
This review is from: Diaspora and the Lost Tribes of Israel (Hardcover)
Coffee-table booksd are usually notable for their pictures, and Amotz Asa-El's "The Diaspora and The Lost Tries of Israel" certainly does not disappoint in this regards, filled as it is by nearly 300 pages of photographs of Jewish life spanning six continents. But the accompanying text has a special claim on our attention. Mr. Asa-El, the executive editor of the Jerusalem Post, vividly captures both the creativity and the nomadic quality of the Jewish people. More important, he offers an engaging history of the Jewish experience by tracing he history of the Jewish Diaspora.
Mr. Asa-El's historical narrative begins with the post-biblical wanderings of the Jews from the first exile in 730 B.C.E., when thousands of Jewish refugees were forcibly relocated by ther Assyrians into what is today northeastern Syria. The second exile, some 150 years later, came in the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest of the First Temple. By the time of the Second Temple's destruction by Rome in C.E. 70 and the final rebellion against the Romans in 135-the dates most frequently cited as the beginning of the Diaspora-a majority of Jews were already residing outside the land of Israel.
Mr. Asa-el devotes most of the book to descriptions of individual Jewish communities in the Diaspora. He describes how, throughout the Middle Ages, Jewish merchants brought their traditions to the farthest corners of the world, establishing communities in the most remote parts of Africa and Asia, and also in major European and Middle Eastern countries. He chronicles the various legends and facts surrounding the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, whose communities were as far-flung as Kaifeng, China, and Djerba, an island off the Tunisian mainland. He notes that the greatest cultural and intellectual achievements of the Jewish people-the Babylonian Talmud, the philosophical writings of Maimonides and the biblical commentaries of R ashi-took place in the Diaspora.
As we begin the 21st century, Jews are faced with a situation that they have experienced for only brief periods in their long history-how to reconcile life in the Diaspora with the existence of a sovereign Jewish state. While Israel once against hosts the world's largest Jewish community, after more than two millennia of exile, Diaspora Jews are flourishing as never before. Among much else, the state of Israel and the Diaspora complement each other-with Israel serving not only as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecutiion but also, in the words of the early Zionist thinker Ahad Ha-am, as "a spiritual center for the Jews of the world." At the same time, the Diaspora has proved itself to be a durable place of Jewish vitality and accomplishment. [Review written by Jay Lefkowitz for The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2005, p. D10]
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scattered peoples, May 24, 2005
This review is from: Diaspora and the Lost Tribes of Israel (Hardcover)
Jerusalem Post / 21 April 2005
Scattered peoples
By DOUGLAS DAVIS
The Diaspora and The Lost Tribes of Israel
By Amotz Asa-El
Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc
300pp., $60
Jews were globalizers a couple of thousand years before the word was invented. Since the dawn of history, they have traversed countries and continents - sometimes willingly, often not - in search of safety, commerce, scholarship or out of simple curiosity.
Wherever they went they learned to juggle identities. They were loyal to their adoptive lands while retaining a transcendental commitment to their ancient homeland, whether notional or actual. With all this, they maintained an unbreakable tribal/national cohesion that derives from a shared history and heritage. The development of the Diaspora, and its persistence against all odds, is one of the great human dramas in the history of mankind.
In The Diaspora and the Lost Tribes of Israel, Amotz Asa-El shines a piercing light on the Diaspora, from its birth to the present. Appropriately, it is a distinguished journalist (the executive editor of this newspaper) who has chosen to chronicle one of the most important stories of all time. And ironically, it is an Israeli who has brought the story of the Diaspora - and the "lost tribes" - to a worldwide audience.
Through the ages, great empires have risen and fallen, tyrants have come and gone, but the Jewish people have endured. Wherever they settled, they brought with them a cultural ecosystem suffused with morality and imbued with an intellectual energy that transmitted its message far and wide. As Asa-El notes, "Jewish books, ideas, and movements traveled during the Middle Ages through Diaspora communities thousands of miles away from each other and sank roots so deep they still bear fruit today."
These disparate, dispersed Jews have been in the vanguard of innovation in science and the arts, in commerce and philosophy. They were, and are, the cashpoints of kings, the tutors of intellectuals, the ideologues of political movements, the fiddlers of concert halls. In recent history, illustrious names of the Diaspora have, for good and ill, been at the very cutting edge of politics, culture, science and the arts - the Einsteins, Freuds, Mendelssohns, Menuhins, Chagalls, Salks, Marxes and Trotskys, among many others.
But the vast majority of Diaspora Jews have passed their time in quiet, anonymous endeavor. They are the ordinary folk who are now woven into the tapestry of the societies in which they dwell, but have never forgotten who they are.
Along with their intellectual and material treasures, the Jews also gave the world the words to describe the tragedies that have marked their exilic existence: ghetto, holocaust, genocide - and, of course, Diaspora itself. But this account of Jewish wandering is not just a story of destruction; nor is it a tale of mere survival. It is the account of a people that have endured massive oppression but also achieved the ultimate triumph. For despite their trials and tribulations, they proudly retain their ancient identity.
ASA-EL USES a large canvas to trace the routes of the dispersal and to describe the communities of Jews that have grown up around the world. He also takes his readers down a fascinating tributary that follows the claims of the "Lost Tribes" - in Africa, Asia and South America - who observe some Jewish rites and claim Jewish descent. These include Afghan Pathans, who claim lineage from the tribe of Gad, and Afghanistan's largest tribe, the Pashtun, whose origins have been attributed by some to King Saul.
The Diaspora today defines itself largely in terms of its relationship with Israel. While this relationship retains elements of tension, it has matured into an attitude that is, by and large, marked by tolerance, if not actual acceptance, and mutual respect. It is ironic that modern Israel, which Theodor Herzl envisaged as a refuge for the world's scattered, vulnerable Jews, arguably poses greater danger for Jews than much of the Diaspora.
Two millennia after Haman plotted to eliminate the Jews, the people of Persia once again deny Israel's right to exist and direct their nuclear weapons program toward the Jewish state. In this regard, notes Asa-El, the position of Israel's Jews is "much more precarious than that of the rest of the Diaspora, practically all of which lives in predominantly Christian lands."
Asa-El ends his tour de force with two questions that will delineate the contours of the ongoing conversation between Israel and the Diaspora: "Will the future vindicate the classical Zionist view that the Jews' salvation lies in their becoming a normal nation, one that will shed its sprawling Diaspora and thrive in its ancestral home? Or will, perhaps, the Jews manage to prove that a flourishing Jewish state and vibrant Diaspora are not mutually exclusive?" Only time, he says, will tell.
The saga of the Jewish people is told in vivid, elegant prose which derives from Asa-El's profound knowledge of the subject, his understanding of the dramatis personae and his journalistic experience. The sumptuously illustrated result is a magnificent book that is accessible to readers of varied bacggrounds, both Jewish and non-Jewish. To the home library of Jewish families that want to know where they came from and how they got there - Diaspora is an indispensable addition.
The writer, London correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, is co-author, with Helen Davis, of Israel in the World, published in London this month by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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