Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5000-Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith - Tapa dura

Tracing five millennia of history of the Jewish people, an epistolary narrative follows the story of the Jews from Abraham's adoption of monotheism, through the biblical and Greco-Roman eras and the centuries of Diaspora, to the twentieth-century founding of the state of Israel, and chronicles diverse aspects of the Jewish faith, its rituals, festivals, and more. 25,000 first printing.

ilbert, renowned author of many authoritative works of history and biography, speaks in a charming, personal voice in this fascinating volume, the saga of five thousand years of Jewish life laid out in a series of intimate, storytelling letters to a lifelong friend.

Sir Martin first met “Auntie Fori” in 1958,when he arrived in New Delhi with a letter of introduction from her son, a fellow Oxford student. Their friendship flourished for forty years through correspondence and visits to the capitals where her husband, the diplomat B. K. Nehru, was posted. Then, at her ninetieth birthday celebration in 1998, Auntie Fori told her “adopted nephew” that she was not of Indian birth but was actually Hungarian–and Jewish. She did not know what this Jewish identity involved–historically or spiritually–and she asked him to enlighten her.

In response, Sir Martin embarked on the series of letters that have been gathered to form this book, shaping