That the book quickly comes to encompass so much more about Jewish cultural history than Jewish "humor" proves the richness of the material and justifies the ambiguity of its title — No Joke indeed. There are times when we feel we are reading a history of Jewish secular thought, though the Jewish joke is one place where it's dangerous to separate the secular from the divine. Here, anyway, Jewish writers we are familiar with rub shoulders with Jewish writers most of us won't have heard of. To call it an anthology of Jewish "humor" would be to underestimate its ambitions, but there are pleasures to be found in anthologies and we find many of them here.

Wisse is right to have seen that Jewish "humor" — I must stop going on about that word — is a way of accessing questions of Jewishness itself, that a discussion of Jewish comic writing in 19th-century Russia, say, must end as a discussion of Zionism. It would be to go too far to say that for some Jewish thinkers the major purpose of Zionism was to liberate Jews from wit and their "reliance" on it. But when Chaim Weizmann declared that the "central purpose of the entire Zionist experiment was to cure the Jews of precisely those wounds and neuroses that only their enforced rootlessness had bred in them", he surely had partly in mind the sorts of wounds and neuroses discerned by the Lithuanian Yiddish literary critic Ba'al Makhshoves in his devastating description of the shtetl Jew: "Among his atrophied senses there remained vivid only the sixth one: an overly sharp intelligence which tended to laugh and jeer at the contradictions of the life he was leading . . . In Jewish wit one can hear the voice of self-contempt, of a people who have lost touch with the ebb and flow of life. In Jewish mockery one can hear . . . the sick despair of a people whose existence has become an endless array of contradictions, a permanent witticism."

Is that the inevitable condition of being a diaspora Jew? To resolve his contradictions must a Jew escape the conditions that made mockery the only mode of survival and return to Israel? Will he then forgo his wit? Or will that act of return, as witness the joke about Anat in Auschwitz, only compound the contradictions of old, giving them, in the face of the continuing resistance to Israel and the ongoing precariousness of Jewish life, a more bitter edge than ever?

Wisse never doubts the seriousness of her subject. If every Jew is a joker then every Jew is a prophet warning of catastrophe too. Wisse sounds a note of caution early, and by the end her concern is plain. "If Jews truly consider humor to have restorative powers they ought to encourage others to laugh at themselves as well. Let Muslims take up joking about Muhammad, Arabs satirise jihad, British elites mock their glib liberalism . . ." Her conclusion: "One side laughing is not as harmless as one hand clapping."

How good a joke will it be when Jews are the only ones left laughing? I fear — and I think she fears it too — that it will be the best and bleakest Jewish joke of them all.