A History of Judaism

‘A definitive study’ (Financial Times) of Judaism, from its origins to the presentJudaism is by some distance the oldest of the three Abrahamic religions and, despite the extraordinarily varied forms it has taken and diverse beliefs it has contained over three millennia, it has been generally understood by both Jews and gentiles as a single entity. There have been many histories of the Jewish people but remarkably few attempts to relate the history and evolution of Judaism itself. In this book, the first comprehensive, single-volume work of its kind in English, Martin Goodman explains how Judaism came to be and how it has developed from one period to another, as well as the ways in which its varieties have related to each other. Ranging from the religion’s inception to the many denominations of contemporary Judaism, this book addresses one of the world’s great religions on a grander scale than any predecessor.

Martin Goodman is Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford and President of the Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies. He is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and the British Academy. His Rome and Jerusalem, published in 2008, was acknowledged as a landmark in the study of the Jewish people in the Roman Empire, and has been translated into six languages. In 2002 he edited the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship.