This is an excellent and very helpful book which I wish I had come across earlier in life. It is a classic rather than a new book, having been published nearly 40 years ago. It is superbly well written and highly informative, telling us just about everything we might want to know about the remarkable Jewish people.

Phillips takes a largely chronological approach, starting with a survey of the Old Testament from Abraham to the time of Jesus. This is far from yet another tedious historical review. It only occupies about 20 per cent of the book and is a good starting point for what is to come. There is also a comprehensive and extremely useful historical time chart at the back of the book (32 pages long!).

The religious Jew

After this comes a chapter on ‘The wandering Jew’, but the heart of the book is a section of five chapters under the heading ‘The religious Jew’. Here the author explores the origins and development of the Talmud, showing how the religious Jew departed from a simple following of the Torah to the creation of a complicated substitute which led them further away from God.

This section also explains the Jewish attitude towards Jesus as Messiah and provides an account of the pseudo-Messiahs which naturally followed their rejection of Jesus. This chapter starts with Theudas just ten years after Jesus and continues historically to the more recent claims of certain rabbis. This chapter is definitely one of the highlights of the book and puts together an important topic in a concise but comprehensive way that isn’t always easy to find.

Continual treasures

Chapters follow on ‘The persecuted Jew’, including anti-Semitism, and ‘The brilliant Jew’, specifying the many achievements of the Jews in world affairs and across so many fields of human endeavour.

Four chapters on ‘The repatriated Jew’ take us through the Zionist cause and Herzl through to the establishment of Israel and the importance of Jerusalem.

The final chapter, ‘The future Jew’, aims to explore what will happen at the end of time, starting with what he calls the exit of the church (another way of describing an early rapture) which leaves the Jews on earth to face the resulting chaos (again, his phrase). For some this will not fit their understanding of how scripture explains such matters, but please don’t let this put you off the rest of the book.

This is a book where the treasures keep coming. Overall it is a remarkable tour-de-force, concise and yet full of detail. It deserves to be better known.