Simon Schama explores how a distinct Jewish identity began to emerge more than 3,000 years ago. Drawing on a rich store of archaeological and historical sources, and accompanied by vivid location photography in Israel, Egypt and Jordan, Simon Schama traces the slow crystallisation of a people whose radical notion of a singular, faceless formless God found unforgettable expression in an equally radical artefact: the Hebrew Bible.
Simon Schama explores how medieval Jews struggled to preserve their identity, and sometimes their lives, under the rule of Christianity and Islam.
Simon Schama explores how the remarkably successful integration of Jewish talent into the mainstream of European culture and commerce stirred up the ghosts of ancient prejudice and paved the way for the Holocaust.
Simon Schama investigates the lost world of Shtetl; the Jewish towns and villages sewn across the hinterlands of Eastern Europe and the birthplace of Hasidism, that were wiped out by the genocidal mechanisms of the `final solution'.
Simon Schama examines how the Holocaust and the creation of Israel have fundamentally changed what it means to be Jewish.
Simon Schama
Host
Tim Kirby
Director
Nicolas Kent
Producer
Julie Anderson
Stephanie Carter
