Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“Funds from a Swiss-German bank were made available for him through Jewish and Gentile entrepreneur-partners to build model (in the other sense)… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish comedy doesn't come out of nothing. Jewish music doesn't come out of nothing... I don't want to be part of a… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“Likewise, Augustine made the effort of historical imagination to register to the full the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles. And now,… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Walking on camera is damn hard. It's a Jewish problem. The rangy stride across the blasted moor is not really a Jewish… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“Judaic monotheism had deeply penetrated Arabia for almost a century before Muhammad declared his revelation in 610 in one of the towns… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
I do not want to be misunderstood that you need a dose of persecution in order, really, to have a sense of… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“As far as Matthew Arnold was concerned, Hellenes and Hebrews were oil and water.1 Both were ‘august’ and, in their respective ways,… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
“In Jewish memory it is as though Osea had written just yesterday. A worried father is a worried father. He can’t help… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation -… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I… — Simon Schama Copy Share Image
