Customer Reviews

The Sacred Chain: History of the Jews, The

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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.

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.

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.

I've read a lot of history, including history of the Jewish people, and this book is one of the best. Nuanced, honest, courageous.Cantor begins his book with his intention, saying that the field of Jewish history must, and is, maturing beyond a "victimization/celebratory" one. Cantor, as a true historian, looks at Jewish history with its highlights--and its lowlights--as is true of the history of any people. A truly refreshing, fascinating study of where the Jewish people come from and to where they may be going, asking deep and relevant questions in the final chapter. Cantor's writing is excellent as well, thoroughly enjoyable.

I found little or no facts in the book, mostly biased opinions. Some facts were totally off: Rav Nachman was from Breslav, not Bratislav; Trotsky made no effort to save the Jews from pogroms, etc...

I am a Norman Cantor fan. Few people would 100% agree completely with his views, but I think that most of the time there is some truth to what he said. On many controversial points, Cantor has presented a subjective one-sided view points. On the other hand, Cantor didn't pretend to be unbiased. Thus this book is about Cantor's personal veiw on Jewish history, presented in an highly entertaining and provacative manner. I would opt for reading a Cantor book, rather than watching a comedy movie.

I have to admit that Cantor is an incredible historian. The book happens to be a great book for information. And it is also an easy book to read, compared to most books on Jewish History.
The problem I had with this book is that he made me feel very uncomfortable. Whenever something happened in History he has his own ideology which happens to be terrible. It was so sad for me to see how a person can write a book on the Jews, and make us look pretty bad. One thing is forsure that Cantor must have a grudge on orthodox Jews. Acc. to him it seems that the orthodox were always the ones at fault.
To top it off, he couldnt find anything nice to say about the Bal Shem Tov. To me I dont understand why Cantor has such negative views on Jews. My favorite of course is the way he ends off his book with his suppositon synopsis of the Jewish future. It was pretty gloomy. Acc. to Cantor in fifty years bc of assimilation we will be pretty much finished off. I dont know where he lives, but this past Hannukah if he turned on the T.V. for a second he would have seen Jews celebrating the holiday like never before, all over the entire world.
Did i forget to write that when i finished the book i had a sick taste left in my mouth. ltennenhaus@hotmail.com

Here a book by a liberal Jew who is a renowned Prof. in the US. The book is proudly Zionist, having many passage that make you feel very proud of being a Jew and of our value and achievement. Also poetry, etc. spoke to the heart of my Jewish soul. However Cantor is a liberal who does not believe in our blessed fathers Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc. nor in our slavery and suffering in Egypt, etc. Well, then he can't say that we are God's only chosen people, God's elects. Instead of seeing us as a holy race set apart, Cantor has to ground his Zionism in the superiority of the Jewish race, using the fact of the superior Jewish Intelligence. This is clearly liberal Zionism and not orthodox. orst of all, he shows total disrespect to our Holy religion by everywhere using different names for G-D, and I dare not count these innumerable blasphemies. This is not a book for orthodox Jews. Not that I cannot read painful literature - I go through and mark out the antisemitic literature, yet to see a Zionist, proud Jew like Cantor who has in fact lost the essence of the Jewish soul and even defiles our Fathers, our religion and the Name... Sorry but I can only warn my orthodox brothers not to buy this book, it will hurt them, if not defile them.