4000 years of Jewish history
Rebecca Abrams in The Jewish Journey tells the history of Jewish people from the ancient Mesopotamia through time and space to modern European times through 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. From many of the little known treasures all 22 remarkable stories have been generated, spanning 4000 years of Jewish history covering 14 different countries,
Abrams recounts from a dazzling aquamarine perfume flask from the second millennium BC unearthed in Jericho to a potsherd from an island on the Nile; from a delicate glass fragment discovered in a 4th-century AD Cataxomb in Rome, to a ceramic bowl found in Iraq, from amulets in France to Wedding rings in Italy and from” Gertler’s painting “Gilbert Cannan and his Mill”(1916) to a camel figurine from the Chinese Tang Dynasty. Abrams brilliantly lists the material of dimension of Jewish life and what she calls “ a singular culture with myriad variations”. Her intelligent description of Jewish life in all its worldly enormity. The 22 objects include pottery, household artefacts, sacred items, musical instruments, coins, jewellery and paintings, and bring to life the experiences of the real men and women who owned, made and used them, from kings, courtiers and scholars to guerrilla fighters, musicians and market vendors. The objects vividly displays dark periods of persecution and forced migration, whilst highlighting the astonishing resilience and diversity of Jewish life, over past centuries of reciprocal interaction with other cultures and religions. This book further reveals Jewish history in its wider historical , social and cultural context including family, marriage, trade and travel.
Rebecca Abrams, a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and is longstanding tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, before which she was an Honorary Teaching Fellow on the Warwick University Writing programme and 2104 Gladstone’s Library writer-in-Residence. She has been appointed a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow and is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction, Her last book Touching Distance, won the MJA Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize for Literature. She is also a regular literary critic for the Financial Times and a former columnist on the Daily Telegraph, and a recipient of an Amnesty International Press Award.
The Jewish Journey: 4000 Years in 22 Objects from the Ashmolean Museum by Rebecca Abrams. Ashmolean Museum £25, 232 pages