Customer Reviews

The Illustrated Atlas of Jewish Civilization: 4,000 Years of Jewish History

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This book is similar to The Atlas of Jewish History; Martin Gilbert. I love maps. This is the first time I see antient maps in one place. This book adds colour and text to the original Atlas. I would recommend this one for non-historians (I gave one to my 12-year old son), the Atlas is for a more serious reader.

In any case, both atlases are very informative and pleasure to have.

This is a great overview of the history of the Jewish people with excellent maps. It leaves out a lot about the history of the conflict and the root causes of Arab rejectionism and the Arab narrative that rewrites history. It also does not deal with America's efforts to re-establish the Jewish state. (That is covered in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, by Michael Oren) Of course, events after 1969 are not included as that is the year the book was published.

I bought the book to learn how Jewish culture began and understand the past of Palestine (or now called Israel), but I was greatly disappointed to read biased information such as "There is hardly another people on earth who can trace a continuous history that covers 4000 years. It can be argued that Chinese civilization is just as old, but the Chinese have always been geographically remote."

What the hell? Did the author forget that right next to the region he wrote about was Persian Empire which has a 5000 year history? And the Chinese have always been geographically remote? Compared to whom??? And by the way, they've been around quite a bit longer than 4000 years.

The author also tries to sneak in that Egypt was founded by Jewish ancestors...even though there is no other righting of this in history.

Maybe the author should have just stuck to his great illustrations instead of trying to beef up history with an agenda. I was looking forward to learning from the book but I couldn't trust anything else in it after reading those misrepresentations.