Popular historian Simon Schama’s masterful new work depicts extraordinary Jews struggling with their surroundings more than the sweep of Jewish history as a whole

Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900

Simon Schama
Bodley Head, 2017
790 pages

Simon Schama’s magisterial Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492–1900 begins with a false messiah who blusters his way into meeting Pope Clement VII and world dignitaries before eventually being burned at the stake. It ends four centuries later with Theodor Herzl gazing out hopefully over Jerusalem.

This ironically titled book, covering a period in which Jews belonged nowhere, brings an unwieldy subject into focus by combining wide-ranging erudition with telling details. Moving breathlessly from the Spanish Inquisition to the rise of Zionism, we meet a glittering array of Jewish entertainers, warriors, furriers, apostates, robbers, and railway barons.

Schama lays out the spectacular variety of Jewish life. We meet Leone de Sommi Portaleone of Mantua, in northern Italy, a slightly older contemporary of William Shakespeare and a playwright in his own right, as well as a producer and author of a book on stagecraft – and spokesman of the local Jewish community. We encounter Daniel Mendoza, a Jewish boxing superstar in late-18th-century London whose career began, as he recalls in his memoir, when a bully thought, “It was a pity we were not sent to Jerusalem” (p. 348); Mendoza’s Jewishness became part of his stage persona. And then there’s Solomon Nunes Carvalho from Baltimore, photographer for John Charles Fremont’s “fifth and last disastrous expedition west in the winter of 1853–54” (p. 504). Carvalho nearly died of scurvy and dysentery, met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, and helped found a Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Association in the tiny Jewish community of Los Angeles before returning home. The reader comes away with extraordinary tales of individual Jews but not necessarily with the story of the Jewish people. Aside from the chapter on Poland, statistics are very sparse.

Schama best describes the Jews of western Europe. Middle Eastern Jewry appears almost entirely from their perspective. Perhaps there’s a certain irony in the rootless Jew’s adoption of a Eurocentric worldview. Schama has written widely on the Jewish history of England and Holland, so his emphasis is understandable, if not always suited to the material at hand. One might be forgiven for thinking that the majority of the world’s Jews lived in Amsterdam, in England, and on the Italian Peninsula, and were performers of some sort. Obviously history favors the well-documented, even if they’re not representative. We don’t learn how most Jews lived their daily lives and what, beyond meeting their basic physical needs, occupied their minds.