It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain. Within these pages, the Talmud burns in the streets of Paris, massed gibbets hang over the streets of medieval London, a Majorcan illuminator redraws the world; candles are lit, chants are sung, mules are packed, ships loaded with spice and gems founder at sea. And a great story unfolds. Not - as often imagined - of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians.Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too.

A history of the Jews is possibly the greatest story that can be told. It is the story of mankind - at its most noble and at its most barbaric. Simon Schama believes that by the time of publication the Jewish epic will once again be the fulcrum on which the fate of the world turns - that a two-state solution brokered in the Middle East by the Obama administration will be under threat from militant fundamentalists, supported by two nuclear states, Iran and Pakistan, capable of inflicting catastrophic damage in the region and beyond. So that moment, loaded with peril for all humanity, will ultimately turn, as so often before, on the obstinacy and grandeur of Jewish history - on its will, against the odds, to endure.