Chosen People: Study of Jewish History from the Time of the Exile Until the Revolt of Bar Kocheba

The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish History from the Exile until the Revolt of Bar Kocheba was published in cloth by Hodder & Stoughton in '71 & in paper by Panther Books in '73. It tells the history of the Jews from the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 587BCE to the 2nd Jewish Revolt of 132CE. John bases his account on traditional texts–-books of the Old Testament, Josephus, Philo Judaeus, Dio Cassius etc-–& sets out the complicated parade of plots, counterplots, betrayals & insurrections in a brisk & readable sequence. His main theme is how the conception of the Jewish nation as a divinely chosen race was planted as a political ambition among the exiled Jews. Bringing together old customs & stories, the idea was fired by the longing of the Babylonian Jews for their traditional homeland. Many of them grew prosperous outside Palestine & their wealthy communities manipulated the wish for identity into the idea of an exclusive Judaism embodied as a political state & fighting for autonomy against local & imperial neighbors–-more dream than fact. He wrote: "When the ‘new Judaism’ came to be hammered out after the return from captivity, it was around these ancient customs & a historicized mythology that it was fashioned. & the mainspring for this romantic movement came not from the bleak, desolated Jerusalem of reality, but from the emotions of Babylonian Jews feeding their imaginations on unhistorical traditions about their origins & paying fervent homage to an exclusive religious cult very largely of their own devising." (p.39)
The Chosen People was published by:
Hodder & Stoughton, London, '71-Hardcover 1st Edition
Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY, '72-Hardcover 1st US Edition
Panther Books, St Albans, UK, '73-Paper