Friday, July 14, 2017

Review of Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews

BOOK REVIEW: No easy answers in the search for Jewish origins (Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal).
... Of all the issues that perplex the Jewish people and the wider world, none is so troubling is the primal one — what, after all, links us to the people, the land and the faith of distant antiquity as described in the Bible?

An answer is proposed in “The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age” by Steven Weitzman (Princeton University Press), the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He has studied and mastered the scholarship of Jewish origins, and he seeks to explain exactly what “connects all Jews into a single people, religion, or community; the very beginning of their collective story.”
Some past posts on Professor Weitzman's research are here, here, here, here, here and links. His work on genetic studies is particularly relevant to this book.

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