Elie Kedourie, CBE, FBA was a British historian of the Middle East. He wrote from a liberal perspective, dissenting from many points of view taken as orthodox in the field. He was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1953 to 1990, becoming Professor of Politics.
As a coffee table book, The Jewish World contains a plethora of beautiful pictures. But the accompanying articles for each time period are all written by university professors. Although informative, they are academic and a bit hard for the layman to understand. In an article on Jewish mysticism, for example, they author writes, "Lurianism had been the dominant form of Jewish piety from the 16th Century until the Sabbatean outburst, with its antinomistic excesses combining forms of antinomianism that are well known to students of both mystical and Messianic movements."