When this encyclopedic history of the Jews was first published in 1958, it was hailed as one of the great works of its kind, a study that not only chronicled an assailed and enduring people, but assessed its astonishing impact on the modern world. Now this scholarly and comprehensive book has been massively revised and updated by its author, a professor of modern history at the George Washington University and one of the most respected authorities on the lives and times of the Jewish people. The new edition casts additional light on the milestones of the Jewish saga from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth: the Jews' emergence from the ghetto and into the heart of Western society, the debate between the voices of tradition, assimilation, and Zionism; virtual destruction during the Holocaust; and troubled rebirth in Israel. Here, too, are evocative portraits of today's disapora, from the Jews of America to the embattled communities of the former Soviet Union and the Third World.

"The miracle and meaning of Jewish history."

From the original legends of the Bible to the peace accords of today's newspapers, this engaging, one-volume history of the Jews will fascinate and inform. 30 illustrations.

The distinguished historian of the Jewish people, Howard M. Sachar, gives us a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of the achievements and traumas of the Jews over the last four hundred years. Tracking their fate from Western Europe’s age of mercantilism in the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet and post-imperialist Islamic upheavals of the twenty-first century, Sachar applies his renowned narrative skill to the central role of the Jews in many of the most impressive achievements of modern civilization: whether in the rise of economic capitalism or of political socialism; in the discoveries of theoretical physics or applied medicine; in “higher” literary criticism or mass communication and popular entertainment. As his account unfolds and moves from epoch to epoch, from continent to continent, from Europe to the Americas and the Middle East, Sachar evaluates communities that, until lately, have been underestimated in the perspective of Jewish and world history—among them, Jews of Sephardic provenance, of the Moslem regions, and of Africa. By the same token, Sachar applies a master’s hand in describing and deciphering the Jews’ unique exposure and functional usefulness to totalitarian movements—fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist. In the process, he shines an unsparing light on the often widely dissimilar behavior of separate European peoples, and on separate Jewish populations, during the Holocaust. A distillation of the author’s lifetime of scholarly research and teaching experience, A History of the Jews in the Modern World provides a source of unsurpassed intellectual richness for university students and educated laypersons alike.

The last two centuries have witnessed a radical transformation of Jewish life. Marked by such profound events as the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, Judaism's long journey through the modern age has been a complex and tumultuous one, leading many Jews to ask themselves not only where they have been and where they are going, but what it means to be a Jew in today's world. Tracing the Jewish experience in the modern period and illustrating the transformation of Jewish religion, culture, and identity from the 17th century to 1948, the updated edition of this critically acclaimed volume of primary materials remains the most complete sourcebook on modern Jewish history. Now expanded to supplement the most vital documents of the first edition, The Jew in the Modern World features hitherto unpublished and inaccessible sources concerning the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, women in Jewish history, American Jewish life, the Holocaust, and Zionism and the nascent Jewish community in Palestine on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel. The documents are arranged chronologically in each of eleven chapters and are meticulously and extensively annotated and cross-referenced in order to provide the student with ready access to a wide variety of issues, key historical figures, and events. Complete with some twenty useful tables detailing Jewish demographic trends, this is a unique resource for any course in Jewish history, Zionism and Israel, the Holocaust, or European and American history.