Book Review - A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

 A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964

This is a handy little crib on the history of the Jewish people, rather than the Jewish faith. Of course, it can be difficult to separate the two; as Parkes writes in his introduction, "[t]he history of the Jews is the story of a people inextricably interwoven with that of a religion. Neither can be told apart from the other. It is obvious that there would be no story of Judaism if there were no Jews; but it is just as true that Jews would not have survived the long centuries of their total dispersion had there not been the cement of a religion moulded to their need either to transform or to tolerate the conditions of their corporate and individual lives."

Parkes' history shows a long tradition of a people trying as much as they can to accommodate themselves to the situation in which they existed at any one time. From the earliest days there were geographically diverse groups of people practicing the religion of Judaism, with more or less oppression from the powers of the time. There have only been very short periods of time when Jewish people have had the capacity to control their own polity - very early and very late in their history.

The story of the Jews after Classical times is one of interaction with both Christendom and Islam, and the changing fortunes of those relationships. Christendom very quickly began oppressing the Jews, as they saw them as a threat to the growth of their own religion. The Jews were, in Christian eyes, apostates, Christ-killers, and subverters of fellow Christians. Islam initially treated Jews much better than did Christians, but as the Muslim world shrunk in the face of Western Christian dominance of Europe and Africa, and Islam withdrew into itself, that relationship too became poisoned and died. During the secular age, rather than religious scares, the route of anti-Semitism runs along the lines of finance and conspiracy - the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi rantings about Jewish control of finance took the place of older tropes of Blood Libel and miscegenation.

Parkes explains how the Jews developed their faith and ideas in separation from each other - the Sephardic Spanish versus the Ashkenazi Central Europeans. While non-Jews were the people's biggest enemy, they were not averse to internecine conflict either. The destruction of the Temple and exclusion from Jerusalem meant that the old ways of Jewish worship had to change, through a "democratic" system of congregationalism, through to a "professional" structure of paid Rabbis. This is not gone into in great detail, but is fascinating to a non-Jewish reader such as myself.

The final section of the book deals with the horrors and hopes of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel. Parkes focusses on the British Mandate in Palestine, how something that began with such high hopes ended in disaster, with the British washing their hands (a la Pilate) of the problems they had created with a poorly thought-out plan to let Jews come back home. Written in 1964, this book doesn't cover much of the ongoing disaster that has come out of this recent history.

If you are a person who doesn't know much about Jewish history this book, although dated,  isn't the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell