Scattered Among the Peoples: The Jewish Diaspora in Ten Portraits

From Seville in 1492 to Kiev in 1967, Allan Levine’s dazzling new history brings to life ten defining points in the Jewish Diaspora in a series of moment-in-time portraits of individual people, their families and communities, and the cities they inhabited. The cities are all famous cosmopolitan centres at significant moments in history. In addition to Seville, where the story begins with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and Kiev, where the “refusenik” Jews fought for the right to emigrate to Israel, there is Venice in 1516 and the establishment of the first “ghetto,” Constantinople in 1666 and the Jewish physicians to the sultans, Amsterdam in 1700 and the glorious rebirth of Sephardic Jewish culture, Vienna in 1730 and the immensely powerful yet vulnerable court Jews, St Petersburg in 1881 and the pogroms inflicted on the shtetls, Paris in 1895 and the Dreyfus scandal, New York in 1913 and the tenement life and culture of the Lower East Side, and the dreadful plight of the Vilna ghetto in 1944. But the focus of each chapter is the personal and public lives of individuals. A few, such as merchant and poet Don Isaac Abravanel, soldier Alfred Dreyfus, and writer and editor Abraham Cahan, are well known; others, like doctor Moses Hamon, financier Samuel Oppenheimer, and underground resistance leader Abba Kovner, are now unjustly forgotten. Their successes or failures – as teachers, rabbis, merchants, writers, soldiers, and physicians – add a colourful and human dimension to the sprawling saga of the Diaspora.