Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492 - 1900, by Simon Schama

Staff review by Chris Saliba

Simon Schama's Jewish history is warm, witty and life affirming.

Simon Schama’s Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492 – 1900 is the second instalment of his esteemed Jewish history, following Finding the Words 1000-1492.  The story starts with David the Reubenite, a fifteenth century Jewish mystic who believed himself to be a member of the original Biblical tribe of Reuben and ends with Theodor Herzl, the political activist and writer who is considered one of the founders of the Jewish state in Palestine. In between there is a cast of men and women –  business people, philosophers, writers, political activists, religious leaders – who have shaped the extraordinary history of the Jews. It’s a story of survival, both physical and spiritual, against thousands of years of deeply ingrained oppression.

Jews did not have a nation state to call home, where they could properly defend themselves and seek asylum, until 1948. Until that time, the Jews had to live on the goodwill (of which there was next to none) of their host countries. They led precarious lives, especially in Christian Europe, where the Catholic Church’s Inquisition was in full flight. Being Jewish, you always had to be one step ahead of political developments. Nothing could be taken for granted. Basic rights could be taken at any time, humiliations meted out at any Christian’s whim or arbitrary expulsion from the host country.  When the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa decided to expell the Jews out of Prague, some 30,000 souls had to leave and find asylum in a hostile Europe.

To read this history of the Jews is to also read a history of anti-Semitism. The facts alone of how Jews were treated makes the reader draw breath in astonishment. The Christian imagination was deeply immersed in lurid fantasies of the Jews as demons and hobgoblins. The most persistent Christian belief was in a blood libel – the accusation that Jews kidnapped and killed Christian children, using their blood in Jewish rituals. Such ridiculous beliefs were upheld and promoted not just by the church’s hoi polloi, but by its leaders, priests and popes. No wonder pogroms against the Jews were so vicious.

Despite this, in the centuries leading up to the twentieth, Jews did make breakthroughs (although there was always the feeling that these advances were on shaky ground as irrational anti-Semitism could flare up at any time). Jews found some liberation in the ghettos of Venice, in 1616 the Dutch republic relaxed its rules and allowed the building of synagogues and in England Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries found some degree of acceptance. Of course one of the greatest countries for Jews would be the United States of America, with its guarantee of religious freedom.

Simon Schama writes a bustling, generous and witty history. He covers the general sweep of Jewish progress, but also has a fascination, even love, for the great characters of that story. His vivid descriptions of congested, busy life in the ghetto, its jostle of Jewish culture, food, dress and religious practice, brims with humanity. A book that weighs the triumph and tragedy of the Jews in equal measure, that celebrates as much as it commiserates.

Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492 - 1900, by Simon Schama. Published by Jonathan Cape. ISBN: 9781847922816 RRP: $35

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