Video: The ENTIRE History
The history of the Jews spans nearly four thousand years — from the highlands of ancient Canaan to the modern State of Israel. It is the story of a people who outlasted every empire that tried to erase them: Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman.
This documentary traces the origins of the Jews in the ancient Near East, where archaeology and genetics suggest the early Israelites emerged largely from within the Canaanite population around 1200 BC. It covers the Exodus and the covenant at Sinai, the period of the Judges, and the history of Israel as a kingdom — the united monarchy under Saul, David, and Solomon, its division into Israel and Judah, and the Assyrian conquest that erased the ten northern tribes in 722 BC.
The Babylonian destruction of the Temple in 586 BC produced the transformation that defines the history of the Jews: in exile, the Torah was compiled and the synagogue invented. A people without land or Temple moved their homeland into a book.
From the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD through nearly two thousand years of diaspora — the Talmudic academies of Babylon, the golden age of Al-Andalus, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the Holocaust — the story returns to where it began. The history of Israel resumes as a modern state in 1948, closing a circle three thousand years in the making.
How does a people remain itself after losing everything, more than once? This is that story