Jewish people, Jewish thought : the Jewish experience in history / Robert M. Seltzer.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Ancient Near Eastern period: History of Israel from its origins to the sixth century BCE, Biblical heritage, narratives, law, and pre-exilic prophecy; Biblical heritage, later developments and other streams of thought --
From the Hellenistic period to late antiquity: Hellenistic diaspora and the Judean commonwealth to 70 CE; Varieties of Judaism in the late second temple period; Efflorescence of rabbinic Judaism, second to seventh centuries --
Middle ages and early modern times: Medieval Jewry to 1500; Medieval Jewish theology and philosophy; Medieval Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah; Jews and Judaism in the early modern period (sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) --
Modern period: European state and the Jews, 1770-1880; First encounters with modern thought, from Spinoza to Krochmal; Questions of Jewish religious reform in nineteenth-century Germany; Onslaught of modernity, Jewish history from 1880 to the present; Secular Jewish thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries --
Concluding remarks: Some features of recent Jewish theology.

Standing both within and without the mainstream of Western culture, Judaism offers ... insights into the genesis and elaboration of powerful religious ideas and into the determined survival of a small, vulnerable people repeatedly forced to confront and adjust to conditions beyond its immediate control. In this [book, the author] have attempted to survey the Jewish historical landscape and orient the reader to its main features, opening up ... on Jewish history, theology, philosophy, mysticism, and social thought that has been produced in the last century and a half.-http://www.booksinprint.com.