The Sacred Chain: History of the Jews, The [Paperback]

Norman F. Cantor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 29, 1995

An important, controversial account of the history of the Jewish people that is both scholarly and compulsively readable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Full of unorthodox opinions, Cantor's searching, critical, captivating history of the Jewish people is bound to be controversial. He deems the biblical account of Jewish origins, featuring Abraham and Moses, "a romantic fantasy" in light of historical and archeological research. In chapters rich in sociological insight, he discusses the fate of Jews in the Roman empire and medieval Christendom; the symbiotic interaction of Jews and Muslim Arabs in Spain and the Mediterranean; the "Jewish Reformation" undertaken by Hasidism, Kabbalism and other movements; European Jews' emancipation and their key role in the vanguard of cultural modernism; the Holocaust and the creation of Israel. Building on the work of David Wyman and other historians, he indicts American Jewry for failure to take action that might have mitigated the Holocaust. Cantor, a prolific historian and professor at New York University, sets the achievements of Jesus, Maimonides, Buber, Spinoza, Freud and others in the context of Jewish and world history. Contemporary American Jews may be committing "racial suicide by intermarriage," opines Cantor; nevertheless, he maintains, "the Jews have fulfilled their role in history" by giving the world monotheism and puritanical ethics, and spawning Christianity and Islam.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is the most recent comprehensive history of the Jews in the English language. Cantor is his usual provocative self in delineating what he sees as the meaning of Jewish ethnicity and the significance of Jewish history. (LJ 11/15/94)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; First Paperback Reprint Edition edition (September 29, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006092652X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060926526
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #853,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This book is both really good and really bad., March 1, 2003

By 

zonaras (Jimbo's House of Pie) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sacred Chain: History of the Jews, The (Paperback)

SACRED CHAIN is a fun book to read for anyone interested in history, and especially the influence that religion and economics has had in it. The book is very well written and surprisingly lucid and easy to follow, not a single part of it was uninteresting. What the SACRED CHAIN represents is the pure, unmitigated view of Establishment history. There are few in the sea as hypocritical as this fish. Cantor's analysis and summary of 3,000 years of Jewish history is interpreted in only two ways: Marx's dialectic materialism and whether or not a social movement, religion, government, etc. was beneficial to the Jews economically.

Cantor explains everything in Marxist terms--that all events and ideas in history are shaped by an individual's or group's economic status. And anything is good as long as it helped the Jews in general. Communist leader Trotsky/Bronstein is lauded as being an avenger of the Jews upon the peasants of the pro-Czarist Christians of the Ukraine. But earlier on, it is acknowledged that these peasants actually had legitamate grievances against Jews in the region that provoked a pogrom in earlier centuries. Another example is where Cantor praises Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas as being the foremost propagator of the idealogy that all races and cultures of mankind are equal, but on the next page Cantor goes on about the Jews' "superior genes," and his belief that "Jews have to be better than everyone else." Cantor is in constant awareness of "anti-Semitism," and references to the Holocaust can be found on every page. He even accuses the authors of the New Testament Gospels of being hatemongers who would have had no problem if their writings inspired the Holocaust. As for the scattered Jewish communities around the globe in the latter half of the twentieth century, Cantor judges their worth by how much they did to stop the Holocaust.

For a social policy, he likes to see non-Jews following free-market capitalism and moral relativism. But as for Jews, he wants them to be racially conscious (he figures the intermarraige rate of Jews with non-Jews a type of "Holocaust"), and devoted to (some) of their old traditions and religion. Cantor's analysis of the Bible period is terrible, because he does not cite any sources to where he gets his information, so the book is one long Norman Cantor's opinion of everything. In fact, on the back cover, a review is quoted praising Cantor for not concealing his biases. This stands in sharp contrast to a writer from any other ethnic group. Imagine if someone were to write a biased history of the Anglo-Saxons of Britain and Germany, and after catalouging their history and speculating on their religious outlook, philosophy and technical achievements, said that white Anglo-Saxons were just "better than anybody else?" Again the liberal double standard applies in writing the history books.

SACRED CHAIN is intentionally biased, praised for it. It is well worth reading, because some the massive influence of the Jews upon the West is catalouged, but take every statement Cantor makes with a couple grains of salt.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes insightful,sometimes infuriating, usually both, February 10, 1999

By 

G. Mogel "xrad2" (Newbury Park, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sacred Chain: History of the Jews, The (Paperback)

I found this book riveting, and the personal, narrative style of Dr. Cantor's writing addictive. I'm no scholar so I can't criticize Dr. Cantor for misinterpreting the Caballah, or incorrectly tracing the lineage of Esther. While at times, this free-ranging book wanders into areas of opinion that don't seem entirely relevant to Jewish history, these wanderings were a very small price to pay to hear this powerful and deeply learned voice.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A provocative book from a "candid friend" of Judaism., March 14, 2006

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Sacred Chain: History of the Jews, The (Paperback)

This stimulating and provocative book will irritate a large number of its Jewish readers both through its contents and probably also through its manner. The book's title, to begin with, is misleading if it suggests that there is a central tradition which runs through the History of the Jews. The title of one of the chapters, "Jewish Diversity" corresponds more closely with the theme of the work; but few of those diversities escape without some reprimand from Professor Cantor, Judaism's "candid friend". Thus the orthodox rabbinate is repeatedly criticized for erecting, from Hellenic times onwards, a high barrier between Judaism and the more advanced cultures surrounding them: Jews must bear some responsibility for ghettoization, for to an extent they ghettoized themselves. On the other hand, he refers several times to Emancipation as a Faustian bargain; and the efforts of Reform rabbis in the 19th and 20th centuries to promote acculturation without assimilation are described as "feeble and inconsequential". The "marvellous varieties of Jewish responses [to the modern world] which have so enriched Western culture" are due to the fact that orthodox and reform rabbis alike have failed to provide adequate intellectual leadership. Only a few Jewish religious thinkers - like Martin Buber, Gershom Sholem, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig - have, in Professor Cantor's view, made an effort which could compare to the attempts of Catholic theologians to meet the challenges of modernity.

Cantor is throughout illuminating on Jewish historiography, and he frequently takes issue with its one-sided view of Jewish History. Thus Graetz is criticized for being "insensitive to the Christian side of the story". Writing about the Chmielnicki Massacres, Cantor comments, "the Ukranians had a right to resent the Jews, if not to kill them". A similar line is taken in explaining Tsarist policies with regard to the Jews between the 1820s and the 1860s: the rabbis and tsaddikim had after all done nothing to get the Jews "out of their stinking and impoverished domiciles and into an improved systemic situation."

Some readers may be startled to have some received ideas challenged by the revisionist historians whom Cantor quotes. Some examples: the Maccabean War is better understood as a civil war between orthodox and Hellenized Jews than as a national uprising. Jewish historians have stressed how much Aquinas borrowed from Maimonides: here we read that "Maimonides' Guide is simply not comparable as an intellectual achievement with Aquinas's Summa Theologica." Contemporary scholarship drastically reduces the size of the Diaspora of the Sephardi Jews after 1492: so far from the traditional 150,000 Jews having had to leave, there were only some 80,000 professing Jews in Spain before 1492, and of these about half refused to convert and were therefore expelled.

Coming to the present, Cantor is very critical of Israeli policy; and he thinks that much Catholic anti-Semitism in France, the United States and Canada (Quebec) stems from the unwise alliance between Jews and secular liberals against State funds going to religious schools.

But it is Cantor's last chapter, on the Future of the Jews, which has drawn most criticism in reviews I have read. Like many others, he sees intermarriage as "a one-way ticket to disappearance as a distinct ethnic group" (leaving only the 15% or so of orthodox Jews unassimilated); and he suggests that the likely peace and economic cooperation in the Middle East will in due course lead to a similar cultural and ethnic blending between Jews and Arabs. (Any such prospect now looks remote indeed; but the book was first published in 1994, just after the end of the First Intifada and the signing of the first Oslo Accord). But whereas all religious and quite a number of non-religious Jews would regard this as a catastrophe, Cantor suggests that perhaps "the Jews have fulfilled their role in history... The Jews served their own purpose, and God's purpose, and mankind's purpose. Pragmatically, they are no longer very much needed as a distinct race." They have given so much to the world (from monotheism to shaping modernist and post-modernist culture) that "the Jewish heritage would endure if the Jews disappeared as a major group in the world in the twenty-first century." That disappearance could be avoided only by a revival of Jewish education on a scale and of a quality which he does not think will happen.

It is impossible to do justice to this meaty and vigorous book in a short review; and I have concentrated on a few of those aspects which are unusual in Jewish writing. Whether you like it or dislike it, agree or disagree with it, this is a book which will make you think and anyone interested in the History of the Jews should read it.