Howard Morley Sachar

Traces four hundred years of Jewish history from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and discusses the anti-semitism facing European Jews, the Jews of czarist Russia, their struggle for civil rights in the 1830s and 1840s, Jewish life in America, the effects of World War One and the Holocaust of World War Two, and much more.

From the late fifteenth century onward, in exile from their Spanish and Portuguese homelands, the Sephardim made their mark as viziers and intimate advisers of Ottoman sultans, as vastly esteemed physicians of Renaissance dukes and popes, and as dynamic importers and exporters in the Dutch maritime traffic. Whether as professing Jews or converted "New Christians," it was this protean minority that functioned as a self-contained international trading network, spanning the seas and oceans, pioneering the gem industry of Europe and the sugar and tobacco plantations of Brazil, and flourishing as merchant ship captains amid pirate-infested Caribbean waterways. Farewell Espana transcends conventional historical narrative. With the lucidity and verve that have characterized his numerous earlier volumes, Howard Sachar breathes life into the leading dramatis personae of the Sephardic world. In its breadth and richness of texture, Sachar's account sweeps to the contemporary era of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, poignantly traces the fate of Balkan Sephardic communities during the Holocaust - and their revival in the Land and State of Israel. Not least of all, the author offers a tactile dimension of immediacy in his personal encounters with the storied venues and current personalities of the Sephardic world.

Chronicles three and a half centuries of Jews in America.

From back cover HarperPrism paperback November 1999: It is the thirtieth century. The "world" has evolved into a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the solar system into one scape from the outer planets to the sun. Humanity, too, has reconfigured itself. Most people have chosen immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others have opted for disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world. A few holdouts stubbornly remain fleshers struggling to shape an antiquated existence in the muck and jungle of Earth. And then there is the Orphan, a genderless digital being grown from a mind seed. WHen an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers, it awakens the polises to the possibility of their own extinction from bizarre astrophysical processes that seemingly violate fundamental laws of nature. It is up to the Orphan and a group of refugees to find the knowledge that will save them all -- a search that will lead them on a quantum adventure to a higher dimension beyond the macrocosmos....

A comprehensive history of Israel from the rise of Jewish nationalism in the early 1800's until the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war in the late 1970's. the book presents a detailed factual history of Zionism.