Belonging
The Story of the Jews 1492-1900
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. And in our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews' search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever.
Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. It spans centuries and even continents: from the Jews' expulsion from Spain in 1492 it navigates miracles and massacres, wandering, discrimination, harmony and tolerance; to the brink of the twentieth century and, it seems, a point of profound hope.
It tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a…