Jews: The Making of a Diaspora People.

• Author: Zeitlin, Irving M.
• Position: Book review

Jews: The Making of a Diaspora People

By Irving M. Zeitlin

Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, 298 pages, ISBN 9780745660172.

The subtitle of this one-volume overview of Jewish history presents its main focus as the notion of diaspora, but its twenty-eight chapters are more accurately grasped by dividing them into sub-themes. Chapters 1-9 discuss the development of "diaspora" as a social-historical concept in recent scholarship, and sketch the emergence of the Jewish diaspora from Biblical times (when Israelites and Judeans were exiled by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires), through the diaspora under Roman rule whose benchmark was the destruction of the (second) Jerusalem Temple in 70 of the Common Era. The next section (chapters 10-15) portrays medieval Jewish life, mainly within the context of Christian Europe. Chapters 16-18 are a history of ideas, touching upon major Enlightenment luminaries and some of the reactions of Romantic thinkers. It underlines the (often multivalent) ways that Jews appeared within these intellectual schemes. The emergence of racial ideas, feeding into Nazi ideology and policies, and a condensed history of the Holocaust are presented in chapters 1927. A final chapter discusses "Zionism, Israel, and the Palestinians," tailing off in the 1970s.

Zeitlin, a sociologist who has written on major political theorists and social thinkers, successfully sums up extensive and detailed historical data while keeping them within a framework of the ideas he seeks to get across. As an example of his orientation, Max Weber is important to him both in terms of "ideal types" that enable building a model of diaspora that is both analytic and responsive to the data of the case at hand, and with regard to features of modern bureaucracy that are indispensible for comprehending the efficient implementation of the Nazi goal of destroying the Jews. His first section deftly takes us through highlights of contemporary theorists who have contributed to the study of diaspora, sorting out valuable ideas from misleading ones.

This skill is evident in the second section too, which nevertheless is disappointing because the authorities he selects are dated. His method is to take a few major works and rely upon them for both data and some perspectives in forging his socio-analytic approach to each topic. Salient are the work of Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) whose History of the Jews in Russia and Poland was translated into English from Russian in 1916-20...