民族の存続にとっては重大な危機を意味する「差別」と「同化」、この二つのキーワードでユダヤ人の受難の歴史を読み解きます。追放による移動を繰り返し世界に拡散したことで絶滅を免れ、離散先では社会との一体化を試みたユダヤ人。しかし差別が消えなかったことで他民族と同化をすることもありませんでした。つまり、その苦難の歴史ゆえにユダヤ人は絶滅することも民族性を失うこともなかった…という逆説的な構造を帯びているのです。
 

• An exceptionally concise, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the long history of the Jews
• Offers a new theory to explain the Jews' survival, based on the relationship between antisemitism and assimilation
• While identifying continuities, it notes variation in the local customs, social status, and self-perception of Jews across time and space

How have the Jews survived? For millennia, they have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their annihilation. Many have attempted to explain this singular success as a result of divine intervention. In this engaging book, David N. Myers charts the long journey of the Jews through history. At the same time, it points to two unlikely-and decidedly this-worldly—factors to explain the survival of the Jews: antisemitism and assimilation. Usually regarded as grave dangers, these two factors have continually interacted with one other to enable the persistence of the Jews. At every turn in their history, not just in the modern age, Jews have adapted to new environments, cultures, languages, and social norms. These bountiful encounters with host societies have exercised the cultural muscle of the Jews, preventing the atrophy that would have occurred if they had not interacted so extensively with the non-Jewish world. It is through these encounters—indeed, through a process of assimilation—that Jews came to develop distinct local customs, speak many different languages, and cultivate diverse musical, culinary, and intellectual traditions.

Left unchecked, the Jews' well-honed ability to absorb from surrounding cultures might have led to their disappearance. And yet, the route toward full and unbridled assimilation was checked by the nearly constant presence of hatred toward the Jew. Anti-Jewish expression and actions have regularly accompanied Jews throughout history. Part of the ironic success of antisemitism is its malleability, its talent in assuming new forms and portraying the Jew in diverse and often contradictory images—for example, at once the arch-capitalist and revolutionary Communist. Antisemitism not only served to blunt further assimilation, but, in a paradoxical twist, affirmed the Jew's sense of difference from the host society. And thus together assimilation and antisemitism (at least up to a certain limit) contribute to the survival of the Jews as a highly adaptable and yet distinct group.