• The historical context of Judaism—Shows how the overall political and social milieu and the spiritual climate have shaped, sometimes subtly and sometimes conspicuously, the Jewish condition, and how, at the same time, how Judaism has exerted a reciprocal influence, direct or indirect, on the general course of historical development.

  • Allows students so see the larger context in which each new phase of Judaism emerged out of previous phases.

• A continually changing social profile and institutional structure—Stresses that no single definition of the Jews is possible. It shows that at different periods in time, 1) Jews have been a collectivity of seminomadic clans and tribes, peasants and fighters, urban artisans and merchants—sometimes widely scattered in small villages and towns, sometimes concentrated in a few geographical regions, or in the major cities of the world; 2) Jewish identiny has ranged from an unquestioned matter of descent to a matter of personal choice; 3) discrimination, hatred, and violence against Jews have alternated with times of relative security when there were some tangible, as well as psychological, advantages of belonging to the Jewish minority; 4) Jewry was rooted in its original homeland, yet there is hardly any part of the world that has not seen one or more waves of Jewish settlement; and 4) the Jewish people have had various, quite different political and intellectual elites: monarchs and ethnarchs, priests and sages, scholars and elected communal officials.

  • Shows students how the survival of the Jewish group has been the triumph of continuity over periodic, sometimes drastic, change.

• An equally complex intellectual history—Describes most of the principal modes of thought that have been called Jewish by Jews—showing 1) that the character of Jewish thought (whether it was innovative or conservative, whether it took a collective or individualistic form of expression) has been a function of the nature of Jewish society at the time, of the presence or absence of internal sectarian or political controversy, and of the roles that Jewish writers, sages, and intellectuals projected for themselves with respect to the people and God; 2) that Jewish intellectual history embraces periods of conscious encounter with the most sophisticated general modes of philosophical and scientific thought and eras of relative intellectual isolation when Jewish legal, theological, and mystical preoccupations do not correspond in any obvious way to those of adjacent cultures; and 3) that there is, nevertheless, a unity within the diversity of Jewish thought—it is not merely a sequence of writings produced by Jews, but a consideration of issues arising out of the biblical world view, augmented and reshaped by later concerns, and partaking in a self-transforming unity of themes, symbols, and beliefs.

  • Gives students an overall and representative conception of the subtraditions of Judaism and their outstanding individual exemplars.

• An account of a people intertwined with an account of a religion.

  • Shows the overarching unity of the societal and the ideational poles of Jewish historical experience, and how each shaped the other in surprising ways.

• The Bible according to its traditional format—Not according to the preliminary oral or literary phases that were absorbed into the final text.

  • Shows that it was the Bible as a whole, not its earlier components, that became the groundwork for the development of Judaism in subsequent periods.

• Modern Jewish secular thought.

  • Shows that Jewish secularism has features that differentiate it from secularism in general and make it a re-examination, from a new perspective, of the meaning of Jewish existence.

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Robert M. Seltzer is an associate professor of history at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he teaches Jewish history and is coordinator of the interdisciplinary program in Jewish studies. He taught previously in the department of Religious Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds degrees from Washington University, Yale University, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Columbia University, and has studied at Harvard University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has published scholarly papers on the rise of Jewish nationalism, on the eminent Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, and on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe.