They are the Christ killers, fit principally for the ghetto, unfit for citizenship. Degradation amounts to the Jews’ “perpetual punishment for the sin of the Crucifixion,” Schama writes. This is the standard lexicon of Jew hatred during the period Schama covers in “Belonging.” Loathing flares - from Mantua to Prague, from London to Lisbon, from the Vatican to Berlin - with scant variation. “They have clung to us like leeches,” wrote the French polemicist Georges-Marie Mathieu-Dairnvaell in the 1840s, and were no more than “vampires, scavengers of nature.”

Jews never belong enough anywhere to avoid vilification as parasites, vultures, usurers and traitors. Simon Schama’s “Belonging: 1492-1900,” the second volume of his panoramic study of Jewish life, “The Story of the Jews,” is in fact an account of serial exile. He lives outside New York City with his wife and children.THE STORY OF THE JEWS Volume 2 Belonging: 1492-1900 By Simon Schama Illustrated.

He is also the writer-presenter of historical and art-historical documentaries for BBC Television.

He is the prize-winning author of numerous books, including Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes and three volumes of A History of Britain. Simon Schama is University Professor in Art History and History at Columbia University in New York, and one of the best-known scholars in Britain in any field. 'Provides an unrivalled impression of the currents and contradictions which made up this terrible sequence of events' Antony Beevor, Express 'Dazzling - beyond praise - He has chronicled the vicissitudes of that world with matchless understanding, wisdom, pity and truth, in the pages of this marvellous book' Bernard Levin, Sunday Times 'The most marvellous book I have read about the French Revolution' Richard Cobb, The Times

provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful, informed and profoundly revisionist' Eugen Weber, The New York Times Book Review One of the great landmarks of modern history publishing, Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is the most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution ever produced.

Citizens by simon schama