Schama's story, though, is not only about the divine Word; human words also play a large part, and this is another strength of this history, which is not only about power politics and religious struggles, but also about ordinary life. "Jewish life is Jewish words," from the everyday babble preserved in papyri and Genizah fragments, to the wide-ranging conversations of the Talmud, to the sublime and often erotic poetry of Samuel Ibn Nagrela and Judah Hallevi. And when the words run out there are also pictures, although, as Schama astutely remarks, the pictures are often adorned with words, and sometimes are even made from words. The space given to pictures — whether synagogue frescoes and mosaics, manuscript illustrations or micrography — is one of the admirable features of the book, but Schama is careful to stress that Judaism, "the religion of the word", never became a culture of icons: "picturing was the handmaid of words."

There is a third dimension, too, to the subtitle Finding the Words: Simon Schama's own quest to find the right words in which to couch the story of the Jews. Schama has a real gift for narrative, and at his best he has the direct simplicity that I admire in the poet Peter Levi. Schama can be poetic too, and has powers of vivid description.

The only stylistic feature that mars the prose for me is his occasional descent into an exaggeratedly jokey New York Yiddish vernacular, which seems quite inappropriate both to Schama himself and to the story he is telling. It is vain, I suppose, to speculate about what this quirk is meant to achieve.

The Story of the Jews is told as a personal story, and it often has the exalted, lyrical quality of a declaration of love. This is the impression above all that stayed with me as I came to the end of my reading. I do not know any other Jewish history that has this haunting quality. There are others that rehearse the story more reliably but more prosaically; Simon Schama enchants and captivates.