The history of the Jewish people stretches from before recorded time to our century, when everything is recorded. Nobody documented the slaughters that must have taken place when a bunch of disaffected slaves from Egypt conquered Canaan, bringing with them the crazy notions that there was only one God and too much skin at the end of a penis. Flash forward 3,000 years, and every ounce of blood spilled in the latest conquest of Israel, by descendants of those same monotheists, is documented, analyzed, propagandized.

In the three millennia between the unseen and the too-often-seen comes the story of a people first called Israelites, then Hebrews, and then, with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem 2,500 years ago, Jews. There followed the years of Exile (interrupted by a second go at running the Holy Land), during which the Jews wandered from country to country, from pogrom to humiliation, looking for a home away from home, and, not finding one, turning to the Torah for solace and inspiration. Until the Emancipation, that is, when Europe’s Jews were suddenly free to live in ghettos, and to begin the long climb to social respectability, never shedding the image of the avaricious outsider, an image rooted in such medieval practices as restricting Jewish occupations to money lending and international trade. We all know how the story nearly ends, and how it continues.

By the end of this book, if readers get to the end, they will know that the Jews have been conquered by Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Assyrians, Muslims, Turks, and Germans, among others; they will also know that the Jewish people may have a new conqueror – the Academics, a tribe of well-meaning but humourless people whose chief weapon is lulling their prey to sleep and then hitting them over the head with very thick books.

The eight contributors to this tome, as well as its editor, Nicholas de Lange, are professors of history, and each is given 50 pages to bore readers to distraction (they succeed too well). The prose is dryer than the desert sands whence sprang the people it wants to celebrate. Instead of 4,000 years of rich, vibrant, colourful history, of upheavals and triumphs, of mind-expanding ideas in art and religion, of a great people, and of courageous individuals, we are given plain facts in plain language that is plain dull when it isn’t plain confusing. The illustrations don’t help much either – a bit of a problem for a book that calls itself The Illustrated History. The plates, though beautifully reproduced, seem arbitrarily chosen, and few are used to good purpose. To the many words expended in this exercise, I should like to add just one more: Oi.