Lloyd Gartner provides a vivid description of the changing fortunes of the Jewish communities of the Old World--Europe, the Middle East, and beyond--and their gradual expansion into the New World of the Americas. The book begins in 1650, when the Jewish population had fallen to roughly 1.25 million, less than one-sixth of its peak at the start of the Christian era. Gartner leads us through the traditions, religious laws, communities, and their interactions with their neighbors, through the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and into Emancipation, the dark shadows of anti-Semitism, and the Second World War, bringing us up to the present with Zionism and the founding of Israel. Eminently readable and impeccably researched, the book is a superb introduction to one of the central threads of modern history.