History of the Jews in Modern Times

by Lloyd P. Gartner

Lloyd Gartner provides a vivid description of the changing fortunes of the Jewish communities of the Old World--Europe, the Middle East, and beyond--and their gradual expansion into the New World of the Americas. The book begins in 1650, when the Jewish population had fallen to roughly 1.25 million, less than one-sixth of its peak at the start of the Christian era. Gartner leads us through the traditions, religious laws, communities, and their interactions with their neighbors, through the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and into Emancipation, the dark shadows of anti-Semitism, and the Second World War, bringing us up to the present with Zionism and the founding of Israel. Eminently readable and impeccably researched, the book is a superb introduction to one of the central threads of modern history.

Genres: History, Jewish, Judaism, Religion, Nonfiction

482 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2000

Reviews

[Alex]

Classic little free library find :/

We were ticking along quite nicely until the last chapter (1950-1980), when the writing shifts from standard semi-pop history writing to broad cultural assertions with a minimum of citations and alarmingly charged rhetoric with not even an illusion of neutrality. The book as a whole is not a complete waste of time, although comically Eurocentric and with some cringe choices throughout (explain to me what "oriental Jew" meant in the year 2000) (as far as I can tell it meant "mizrachi" according to Gartner). But if we narrow his subject to European Jewry 1700-1945, it's a decent introduction.

[Melissa]

This book is excellent until Gartner reaches the twentieth century, and then for me, he loses the thread. I came to this subject as a student taking a class in Modern Jewish History because I felt I didn't know enough about the subject. He treated the founding of Israel as an inevitability and the role of the Palestinians is completely absent from the final chapters. When they are mentioned, he is dismissive. To me, it reads as one-sided and heavy-handed. I've been trained as undergraduate in history to consider all sides in an objective view because what emerges is always a richer and complex story. Gartner published a new edition in 2001, but failed to update the story of Israel past 1980, which I think was a massive mistake. In an age where Israel is crucial to the world, Gartner's book could fill an important role. For an edition to be missing at least twenty years of history (which is no excuse for having published in 2001, I can excuse no third edition in the last decade), I find it to be unfortunate.

[Daniel Mason-D'croz]

An interesting look at the history of the Jewish people over the past 500-600 years. The writing style was a bit dry, but there was a lot of information in this book. I expected it to focus much more on the 20th century, and while there obviously were several chapters dedicated to the rise of Nazism, the holocaust and the founding of Israel, most of this book was dedicated to Jewish history during the 1700s and 1800s.

Because of the dry character of the narrative I am not sure I would recommend this book to everyone. However, for those interested in learning more about the history of Jews in Europe and the Mediterranean basin before the 20th century this book would be a good place to start.

[Greg]

This is a fairly typical book on modern Jewish History. On the plus-side: the language is fairly easy reading; it lacks a lot of historiographic jargon; never mentions Foucault; and is a reasonable length. On the minus side: it is almost exclusively focused on the Jewish experience in Europe and the founding of the State of Israel. Gartner's is a teleological view of history: modernity produced anti-semitism, anti-semitism produced the Holocaust, the holocaust produced the State of Israel.