The Advantage of Living on the Edge

...The Jews of Russia, however, after the disappointing "false dawn" under Tsar Alexander II in the mid-19th century, suffer pogroms and leave the country en masse...

...To be sure, Sachar's book does not stint on defamations, discriminatory legislation, pogroms, and the Holocaust, but his inclusion of Jewish accomplishments and creative adaptation to difficult circumstances serves as a counterweight, ensuring that the reader will not come away voicing any equivalent of the old, cynical (and lachrymose) Jewish saying, "It's hard to be a Jew...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Co-editor, "American Jewish Year Book...

...This is secular history with a vengeance...

...There is only one anecdote that Sachar tells twice—once in his chapter on "A Final Symbiosis of Jewish and Western Culture" and again in an Afterword to Jews in the Modern World...

...What Sachar calls the "Sephardic-Oriental Diaspora" is not emancipated until the 20th century...

...A recently retired longtime member of the History Department at George Washington University, he has published many works, including A History of the Jews in America...

...Either prescient or lucky, Sachar wrote The Course just before the explosion of interest in Jewish studies on college campuses across the country...

...But Sachar has little interest in the Jewish religion in any of its forms...

...The analyzer is a kind of detective who ferrets out new sources and reinterprets old ones in order to develop original explanations of past events...

...The enthusiastic admiration for Israel evident in The Course of 1990 is also considerably diluted in the new work, and not only because of the deletion of material about it...

...Seeking to dissuade a friend from having his son converted to Christianity, Freud told him, "Do not deprive him of that advantage," meaning, Sachar explains, "the unique source of Jewish energy" that would dissipate with joining the majority religion...

...Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered...

...Neither is Jews in the Modern World in the tradition of what the 19th-century German scholars called Heiligengeschichte, history of the spirit...

...To make room for these additions Sachar has excised considerable chunks of material on the internal development of the State of Israel...

...It concerns Sigmund Freud, a paragon, for Sachar, of Jewish greatness...

...Given his interest in the strengths of Diaspora Jewish culture, he rejects the notion—increasingly falling out of favor in Israel too—that the "return" to Zion and the rebirth of a Jewish state means the mainstream of Jewish history now runs, as it did in ancient times, between the Jordan and the Mediterranean...

...The widespread perception that Israel persecutes Palestinians, he says, has largely assuaged European guilt feelings about the Holocaust and legitimated anti-Zionism...

...Indeed, it is interesting to place Sachar's picture alongside those drawn by other prominent historians...

...Sachar himself, though, shows how integrated Jews have become in Western society in the early 21 st century, surely vitiating the social marginality upon which he bases Jewish distinctiveness...

...But truncating the treatment of Israel in a presentation of modern Jewish history has serious implications, to which we shall return...

...associate director of research, the American Jewish Committee PROFESSIONAL HISTORIANS come in two varieties, analyzers and synthesizers...

...The last eight cover the period from Israel's founding in 1948 to the present...

...The synthesizer masters these writings, weaves their narrow discoveries and reinterpretations into a broader coherent narrative, and writes books intended for the educated public...

...Howard M. Sachar is the undisputed dean of synthesis in the field of modern Jewish history...

...Sprinkled throughout the book are numerous passages detailing the entrepreneurial and intellectual breakthroughs Jews have achieved since their emancipation...

...and Israel...

...and Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War...

...He justifies this in his Foreword with the argument that "the history of an independent nation deserves independent treatment" (and modestly refrains from adding that he has already written such a book...

...It begins by introducing the reader to the separate corporate status of "the Jew as nonEuropean...

...Eight of the book's 36 chapters recount the background, execution and implications of the Holocaust...

...Even a cursory comparison of the older volume and this one shows he was right...

...Even Israel's most implacable Arab neighbors," Sachar wrote, "and surely its well-wishers, appeared to be coming to terms with the significance of that longevity...

...But if one reads Jews in the Modern World straight through, as most readers are likely to do, certain consistentthemes surface that amount to a particular vision of modern Jewish history...

...The decision to adopt a new title for the latest version of his classic reflects Sachar's judgment that the changes made in the new book are too extensive to call it simply another revision...

...Much space is given to the evolution of American Jewish life, the rise of modern anti-Semitism, Jewish involvement in socialism and radical politics, and the emergence of Zionism...

...The author's relationship to Zionist historiography is more complicated...

...Their ability to do this, he posits, lay in a combination of their tradition of intellectualism and their marginal social position, which encouraged skepticism toward conventional wisdom and a willingness to chart new paths of thought...

...Will only a resurgence of antiSemitism, perhaps linked to the current anti-Zionism he describes, maintain Jews as a community over the coming decades, enabling historians years from now to write yet newer versions of modern Jewish history...

...A History of the Jews in the Modern World replaces the best known of his works, The Course of Modem Jewish History, originally published in 1958 and revised in 1990...

...Despite its changes, if the new book is read as a college student would, chapter by assigned chapter, the basic story remains intact and familiar...

...Sachar circa 2005 is far more pes simistic, however...

...His or her findings are generally presented to the scholarly world in the form of learned articles and monographs...

...Although not a textbook in the conventional sense, but rather an engaging history for the general reader, it was adopted as the required text on many campuses because it covered Jewish events and personalities since the 18th century comprehensively and clearly...

...Starting with the Bible and continuing into modern times, there have been those who saw Jewish history as dominated by the unfolding of monotheism, or the "God idea," in the world...

...A History· of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time...

...Further, he argues, the anti-Semitic spillover effect of hostility to Israel as a "rogue state" raised the question of "whether the birth of Israel had not exacerbated, rather than mitigated, the Diaspora's historic vulnerability" And in a chilling sentence that concludes the book, he speculates about the Jewish people of the future, "with or without a state of their own___' The great theme of modern Jewish history, for Sachar, is not Jewish suffering, or the Jewish religion, or Zionism— in fact, not anything intrinsic to the Jewish community...

...He is certainly no proponent of what Columbia University's Salo W. Baron, who died in 1989, famously termed the "lachrymose" view of Jewish history...

...Besides covering the developments in Jewish life since 1990 (and updating the excellent bibliography), the narrative has been restructured to provide space for previously neglected topics...

...The earlier book closed with several "hopeful auguries"—political, economic and social—that boded well for the Jewish state, not the least of them being its very survival over more than four decades...

...There follows an account of the halting steps whereby Jews in Western and Central Europe enter modern culture and secure the rights of citizenship—largely through the long-term impact of Enlightenment thought, the French Revolution and Napoleon...

...That looked upon the Jewish experience primarily as a record of suffering and persecutions...

...Sephardi (non-Central and East European) Jewry, consistently ignored by the largely Ashkenazi historical establishment and therefore unknown by most Americans, finally receives its due...

...Instead, it is the Jewish contribution to world civilization...

...So do the postwar Jewish communities of South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, overlooked by historians who, explicitly or implicitly, assumed all that counted were the two great centers of contemporary Jewish life, the U.S...

...As Sachar sees it, the Jews collectively gave the Western world the cultural values and standard of living that make it the most advanced society in human history...