The Birth of the Past by Zachary Sayre Schiffman, foreword by Anthony Grafton, Johns Hopkins UP '11, $65, 316 pages, ASIN #1421402785. Index, bibliography, notes, unillustrated.
In this thought-provoking new book, author Zachary Sayre Schiffman describes "how ancient historians could not distinguish between past and present because they conceived of multiple pasts. Christian theologians coalesced these multiple pasts into a single temporal space where past merged with present and future." Schiffman divides his narrative into four parts: Antiquity, Christianity, Renaissance, and Enlightment and writes that in their desire to resurrect classical culture, Renaissance humanists created a "living past," which "French enlighteners killed off....when they engendered a form of social scientific thinking that measured the relations between historical entities, thus sustaining the distance between past and present and relegating each culture to its own distinctive context." Zachary Sayre Schiffman teaches history at Northeastern Illinois University and has written or co-written two other books.
Out of Palestine -- The Making of Modern Israel by Hadara Lazar, Atlas & Co. $25.95, 290 pages, ASIN #1935633287. Chronology, participants, grouping of b&w images.
"When the territory known as Palestine fell under British rule in 1923, writes Hadara Lazar in her newest book, "it brought hope to a land that had been fiercely contested since Biblical times." Under a treaty drafted by the League of Nations, the southern part of the Ottoman Empire would become "a natural home for the Jewish people," with Arabs living peaceably by their side. Does anyone need reminding that things didn't turn out that way?
Here's a brief excerpt: "The Jews and Arabs had great dreams, but the carriers of those dreams, the British, woke up first. As the years passed and the reality became more difficult to ignore and the solution seemed further away, the British abandoned their special role as the carriers of the dreams and reverted to being rulers in the old Empire's tradition....They did not promise anything anymore but just maintained a status quo, while both Jews and Arabs wanted only to disrupt it."
Author Hadara Lazar was born in Haifa, Israel and has written five novels and two non-fiction books. She lives in Tel Aviv.
