Lloyd Gartner provides a vivid description of the changing fortunes of the Jewish communication of the old world- Europe, the Middle -East, and beyond - and their gradual expansion into the New world of 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 starts of the Christian era. Gartner leads us 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 moderm history.