Jews

Zeitlin traces how Jewish communities came to live dispersed across the world, from the ancient period to the modern day. The narrative opens with the loss of the ancestral homeland and moves forward through the centuries, ending with the Holocaust and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author uses the word diaspora, which originally described the scattered Jewish settlements that formed outside Israel-Judea during the Babylonian exile, to explore what has set the Jewish historical experience apart.

A central claim of the book is that Jewish religious identity gave the community the resources to endure the severe and repeated crises it faced. Zeitlin also examines how the peoples among whom Jews lived responded to them, with particular attention to the views of influential thinkers including Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wagner, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the Left Hegelians and Marx, several of whom stated their opinions about Jews openly.

The book is intended for students and scholars of Jewish studies, diaspora studies, history and religion, as well as general readers who want to understand the Jewish past more deeply.