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Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews

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Potok's history of the Jews is flat-out the best-written history of any people I've ever read. Some of it sprawling and vast, other parts poetically sparse -- the 100 word passage on the Holocaust is one of the most heartrending in the English language -- the work is a sweeping review of history.

Potok assumes truth in the scriptures, then goes to set the scene with copious bits of history. Even for those who reject Biblical stories, the scene-setting history is wonderful, and Potok's means of working in the thread of Biblical history gives a marvelous idea of what the history looks like to one who does believe.

The only major problem is that the book is not properly footnoted, so it is difficult to follow up on Potok's sources if you want to go more deeply into any of the many subjects he brings up.

This story reads like a novel despite many names, places, and years. The narrative worked best for me when he intersperses his own experiences, such as meeting his father-in-law, who fled Russia as a 16-year old boy. I would have benefited from more descriptions of how the Jews developed history into ritual, such as Channnuka and discussion of changing beliefs (e.g., the current Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox branches) (Rabbi Dosick's Living Judaism does this well).

This book presents common elements such as the contribution and personalizing of whatever community they are in, e.g., the development of Yiddish in Eastern Europe. There is often a strong intellectual development and reawakening, such as the "Sandhedrin", after the fall of Jerusalem. It is remarkable they have kept their identify despite wide spread dispersal and torture. The irrational hatred for the Jews is troubling both in its intensity as in the Crusades, but also among "learned people" such as Voltaire and Martin Luther.

Potok's History of the Jews is a powerful work that inspires, intrigues and challenges. He writes with graceful prose, has excellent research (footnotes would have helped but would have bogged down his natural style), offers sharp opinions, but keeps to his central theme. Catholic/Christian readers might object to its brutal description of countless persecutions without sufficient inclusion of Christian devotion and charity. The sections on Jesus and Paul are mostly good, but more could have been written about the Christian Gospels, especially John. Still, this is a history of the Jews, not the Christians. I learned a lot from this book, especially about the time periods after the common era. The book also does an excellent job in summarizing the stories given in scripture. Some of these stories are Potok's opinions, but most are reasonable interpretations. This is an excellent read.

Potoks begin the books by setting the stage for ancient Jewish history beginning with Abraham venturing out of the Sumerian city of Ur to come into the land of Canaan. I really appreciated the clarification of the various groups of people who lived in that area at the time including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, and Canaanites and how they related to one another. The first three chapters are divided by geographical regions including Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Babylon. These chapters are good and also serve as a good explanation of the historical groundwork of the Torah. The next few chapters are from the classical period and deal with the Jewish relationship with the Greek and Roman cultures.

After that, things become very slow and at times while I was reading I felt as though I was stuck in a quagmire of names and places. It was like a whirlwind tour of all the places and people to have ever been known as being Jewish or in some manner related to the Jewish culture. After the Classical period was described, I would have liked more of a conceptual breakdown on Kabbalism, Hasidism, and Reform and Conservative Jewish movements. All of this was sort of threaded together into an amorphous mass of disparate facts.

To sum, the first half of the book was great and can serve as a good historical basis for understanding the Old Testament, the second half was just a confusion of details, names, and places.

This book is Potok's history of the Jews - specualtion based on archaelogy before recorded history and then on recorded history. It tells the story of the Jews and their wanderings and persecutions pretty thoroughly. While there might be some bias on Mr. Potok's part, there is no way to argue that these things did not happen. There are too many written records in the world. I was saddened to read of it and glad to know. I wish my parents had taught me these things. It gives one an enlightened understanding of the Jews.

"Each time the light returns and we are able to see the new world that has been created on the ruins of the old, we discover familiar elements of the overthrown civilization in the creativity of the new" (p. 379). Although specifically referring in this passage to those Germanic tribes who conquered and assimilated the Roman empire, this comment is a succinct encapsulation of Potok's larger narrative about the Jewish people. *Wanderings* demonstrates that the history of the Jews and of Judaism is a palimpsest in which the central theme of covenant relationship with God has been regularly reinvented, overthrown as it were and creatively reconstructed, so that it may maintain its relevance in a changing world.

For those of us whose knowledge of the Jewish people and the religion of Judaism effectively begins with "Genesis" and ends with "Malachi," this book is indispensable. It seems equally indispensable for those raised within contemporary Jewry who wrestle, like Jacob, to reconcile the idea of a God who operates in history through his chosen people with a reality that is multi-faith and often seemingly without purpose. It does not hurt that Potok, an acclaimed novelist as well as an ordained rabbi, infuses his historical narrative with a pace and lyrical grace more in keeping with an epic novel than a work of nonfiction.

Potok's narrative begins, in a manner similar to contemporary accounts, with those first great Mesopotamian civilizations, Sumer and Akkad. Against this background of cuneiform and clay, Bronze Age technology, extraordinary civilizational creativity, and the constant threats of catastrophic flood and drought, wanders Abraham of Ur, first of the Hebrew patriarchs. Even in the earliest recorded tales of this wanderer and his descendants, we are told, "the basic themes of the Hebrew Bible-covenant, liberation, redemption; the search for insight into a world assumed to be meaningful-remain essentially the same..." (P. 40) . The wandering tribes descended from Abraham-called Hapirus-mingled with their new Canaanite (aka Phoenician) neighbors; slowly made their way into the Black Land of the Nile to escape famine; were enslaved by the native Egyptians when their Semitic relatives, the Hyksos, were driven from the pharaoh's throne; were liberated when one of their own, a man named Moses, received a call from their God; returned to the land of Canaan, their "Promised Land," with the goal of conquest; established a kingdom under Saul, and then the shepherd boy David; built a magnificent temple under the reign of David's son Solomon; watched all these accomplishments fade under one weak and corrupt king after another; and finally found themselves taken captive by the Babylonians. In short, we follow the rise and fall of the first great Jewish civilization, all while keeping in sight the religious thread that connects these victories and calamities. "The Israelites saw each of these crucial encounters between God and man through the filtering vision of covenant relationships" (p. 141). While all of these stories are familiar to those who have read the Old Testament, Potok ingeniously retells them with a novelist's sensibility and a scholar's insight, making the oftentimes two-dimensional characters of scripture come to life and resonate with the contemporary reader.

The Babylonian captivity was not the end of the Jewish people or their religion, although that is all too often assumed by those whose only knowledge of the Jews and Judaism comes from the Christian Bible. Instead, those who were allowed to return to their homeland after almost a century in captivity began the slow transition to the second great Jewish civilization, that of Rabbinic Judaism. Potok discusses the influences of Greek philosophy and Roman political domination on Jewish thought and practice; the origins of the conservative Sadducees and liberal Pharisees; the destruction of the Temple and, later, of Jerusalem by the Romans; the expulsion of the Jews from Judea; the creation of the Talmud in Palestine and Babylon; the high Sephardic civilization of Al-Andalus in Muslim Spain; the difficulties and discrimination faced by Jews on the margins of Christendom; and the ultimate unraveling of the 1,500-year old rabbinical civilization with the coming of the Enlightenment. All along the journey, Potok discusses the regular reinvention of what it means to be one of God's chosen people: from the early days of the doctrine of dual Torah and the Pharisaic emphasis on ethics; to the Kabbalistic notion that keeping God's commandments is a way of restoring the cosmos to its original sacred integrity; to Isaac Luria's conception of God sharing Israel's exile in the process of creation; to the joyous celebration of life itself expounded by the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov; to the Enlightenment's questioning of the very need for a sense of Jewish identity.

In short, *Wanderings*, in brilliant and engaging, even page-turning, prose, reveals Judaism to be a dynamic and fluid faith whose drive to find meaning in the world and willingness to change even that which seems most essential has allowed it to survive, and even to thrive, on the margins of civilizations whose views of the Jewish people have vacillated between begrudging respect to genocidal hatred. This book (I almost wrote "novel") is a remarkable achievement.

This was a used small paperback version. If you have never read this, I would suggest paying for a full-sized hard cover edition complete with all the original artwork. And, if you haven't read this you must. This is one of those wonderful once in a lifetime books that makes you see the world in an entirely new light. Like the Ascent of Man, and others.

Chaim Potok, as an excellent story teller, provides a detailed history of judism from Adam to Present, written in a flowing, story-teller fashion. The easiest way I know to get an interesting history of the Jewish people. An Excellent Book

Potok does an amazing job providing an eloquent history dating back to the earliest civilizations. His focus on Judaism provides serious insight into culteral mores dating back centuries. A scholarly work, Potok stays interesting and seems to relate intimately with the historical portrayals.

In this work, Potok outlines the narrative of Jewish history against the canvas of world history. The Jewish people have influenced and been influenced by the world in equal measure.
Book One outlines the struggle of the Hebrew Nation, against the backdrop of ancient paganism. He discusses the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia, before introducing Abraham, the patriarch of the Hebrew Nation, who migrated from Ur in southern Mesopotamia, to Canaan, as recorded in the Biblical narrative.
Each chapter explains the history of the dominant civilization of the time, in which the struggles and contributions of the Nation of Israel took place, before describing the role played by the Jews and their specific history. There are chapters on the struggles of the Jews under the Mesopotamian , Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman and Islamic Empires, and the long exile of a large portion of the Jewish people in Christian Europe.
There is other ancient documentation, as sources for the ancient history of Israel, describing how the word 'Hapiru' was first used in Egyptian records during the reign of Amenhotep II, who ruled Egypt from about 1440 to 1415 BCE.
Much of this epic account deals with the unique contribution of the Jewish people to world civilization. Hence we discover that the Biblical recognition of a slave as an individual with rights, though he still lacks the status of a free man, has no parallel in the laws of Mesopotamia or any other ancient civilization, and was indeed a Judaic initiative.
Egyptian accounts record the presence of the Israelites in Canaan, around the year 1220 BCE.
The town of Shechem (now called Nablus by the Arabs) is nowhere claimed to have been conquered by the Israelites under Joshuah, and was most likely a Hebrew enclave all through the centuries of the enslavement in Egypt.

One's attitude to the Jews and Israel is a very good litmus test for the character of people, entities and nations.
In some instances, their general actions have preceded their actions against the Jews, and in other instances what has begun with the Jews has not ended with them.
A foretaste of the cultural genoicide of the Moslem Arabs, against the cultures of lands they invaded, was the burning of the ancient libararies of Alexandria, Egypt by Arab Moslem invaders in 647 CE, described by the author.
The Land of Israel retained a Jewish majority long after the destruction of the Second Temple, by the Romans in 70 CE, and probabely until the Arab invasion of the Land of Israel in 634 CE. Like all the lands that came under the Arab Moslem domination, attempts were made by the Arab Moslem invaders to eradicate all presence of the indigenous cultures.
Hence on the site of the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism, the Moslems erected the Dome of the Golden Rock, in 691 CE.
The author explains the roots of Christian and Islamic anti-semitism, and the massacres that took place against Jews, during the crusades, across Europe through the ages, the horrific genocide of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, by the marauding Cossacks of Bogdan Chmielnicki, in 1648 and the Kishinev massacre of Jews in 1905.
The Chmielnicki massacre is recounted by a letter written during that period about the capture of some Jewish towns by the Cossacks: "They slaughtered eight hundred noblemen, together with their wives and children as well as seven hundred Jews, also with their wives and children. Some were cut into pieces, others were ordered to dig graves into which Jewish women and children were thrown and buried alive. Jews were given rifles and ordered to kill each other."
The author also discusses the numerous repeated blood libels and accusation of host desecration: "Mystery plays depicted the Jews as Christ killers, demonic allies of Satan, and blood-sucking moneylenders".-libels being repeated under new guises in the early 21st century, in the climate of the new anti-semitism-vicious anti-Israel hate and hysteria.

The book details the life of Jews in exile in mediaeval Spain, Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe. We learn about great Jewish thinkers and writers like Judah HaLevi, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Ben of Tudela, and the great religious influences of such luminaries as the Baal Shem Tov the Vilna Gaon, and Moses Mendehlson.
The final chapter deals with the blight of Secularism on the Jewish people. The author aptly describes secular humanism (or modern paganism) as thus:"
It is probabely the most creative, the most liberated, the wealthiest, most dehumanizing and most murdeous civilization in the history of our species. Among those who suffered the most from it's excesses is the Jew. Ironically Jews helped to mould this civilization"
Most secular humanists today display the most breathtaking hypocrisy on issues such as human rights, especially under it's offshoot-the cult of political correctness.
Under the enlightenment a new form of anti-semitism came into being, shaped by the likes of Voltaire and Karl Marx-the mother of the new anti-semitism of today, prevalent at university campuses , media houses and leftist NGOs.
Finally the author writes about the founders of modern Zionism the return of Jews to the Land of Israel, and the struggle for the rebirth of a Jewish State.
It is inpiring to read of Herzl's journey to the Land of Israel in 1898: "Beneath the hot Medittaranean sun he was greeted by Jews who established the new settlements in the land. He saw tanned Jewish children, and men at ease on galloping horses. He saw groves of trees and new houses and grass on sand dunes..."
Potok deals too briefly with the subjects of the Holocaust and the rebirth of the Jewish Nation, with the refoundation of the State of Israel.
But he succeeds in putting across how Israel is a warmth for Jews, everywhere , how we fear for her, tremble when her people are hurt and support her.
The world lost a third of it's Jewish population during the Holocaust, and now almost half of world Jewry live in Israel (including hundreds of thousands of the descendants of holocaust survivors). The survival of Israel is the survival of the Jewish people.