The Sacred Chain : History of the Jews, The

Rating:
Summary: Liberal Zionism
Review: Here a book by a liberal Jew who is a renowned Prof. in the US. The book is proudly Zionist, having many passage that make you feel very proud of being a Jew and of our value and achievement. Also poetry, etc. spoke to the heart of my Jewish soul. However Cantor is a liberal who does not believe in our blessed fathers Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc. nor in our slavery and suffering in Egypt, etc. Well, then he can't say that we are God's only chosen people, God's elects. Instead of seeing us as a holy race set apart, Cantor has to ground his Zionism in the superiority of the Jewish race, using the fact of the superior Jewish Intelligence. This is clearly liberal Zionism and not orthodox. orst of all, he shows total disrespect to our Holy religion by everywhere using different names for G-D, and I dare not count these innumerable blasphemies. This is not a book for orthodox Jews. Not that I cannot read painful literature - I go through and mark out the antisemitic literature, yet to see a Zionist, proud Jew like Cantor who has in fact lost the essence of the Jewish soul and even defiles our Fathers, our religion and the Name... Sorry but I can only warn my orthodox brothers not to buy this book, it will hurt them, if not defile them.

Rating:
Summary: Sometimes insightful,sometimes infuriating, usually both
Review: I found this book riveting, and the personal, narrative style of Dr. Cantor's writing addictive. I'm no scholar so I can't criticize Dr. Cantor for misinterpreting the Caballah, or incorrectly tracing the lineage of Esther. While at times, this free-ranging book wanders into areas of opinion that don't seem entirely relevant to Jewish history, these wanderings were a very small price to pay to hear this powerful and deeply learned voice.

Rating:
Summary: I was so dissapointed,
Review: I have to admit that Cantor is an incredible historian. The book happens to be a great book for information. And it is also an easy book to read, compared to most books on Jewish History.
The problem I had with this book is that he made me feel very uncomfortable. Whenever something happened in History he has his own ideology which happens to be terrible. It was so sad for me to see how a person can write a book on the Jews, and make us look pretty bad. One thing is forsure that Cantor must have a grudge on orthodox Jews. Acc. to him it seems that the orthodox were always the ones at fault.
To top it off, he couldnt find anything nice to say about the Bal Shem Tov. To me I dont understand why Cantor has such negative views on Jews. My favorite of course is the way he ends off his book with his suppositon synopsis of the Jewish future. It was pretty gloomy. Acc. to Cantor in fifty years bc of assimilation we will be pretty much finished off. I dont know where he lives, but this past Hannukah if he turned on the T.V. for a second he would have seen Jews celebrating the holiday like never before, all over the entire world.
Did i forget to write that when i finished the book i had a sick taste left in my mouth. [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: A very neccessary title to add to anyone's collection
Review: Professor Cantor does not hold his opinions back and that makes for a problematic yet rewarding read. He takes us through the life of a culture, exclusive in its outlook, yet all too human in its worldview. The only criticism I have of this important work is when he uses the phrase "genetic intellectual superiority" (p.424) which I found disturbing in a work that includes a discussion of the holocaust. But the Sacred Chain is history and ideas well worth attempting to understand.

Rating:
Summary: This book is both really good and really bad.
Review: SACRED CHAIN is a fun book to read for anyone interested in history, and especially the influence that religion and economics has had in it. The book is very well written and surprisingly lucid and easy to follow, not a single part of it was uninteresting. What the SACRED CHAIN represents is the pure, unmitigated view of Establishment history. There are few in the sea as hypocritical as this fish. Cantor's analysis and summary of 3,000 years of Jewish history is interpreted in only two ways: Marx's dialectic materialism and whether or not a social movement, religion, government, etc. was beneficial to the Jews economically.

Cantor explains everything in Marxist terms--that all events and ideas in history are shaped by an individual's or group's economic status. And anything is good as long as it helped the Jews in general. Communist leader Trotsky/Bronstein is lauded as being an avenger of the Jews upon the peasants of the pro-Czarist Christians of the Ukraine. But earlier on, it is acknowledged that these peasants actually had legitamate grievances against Jews in the region that provoked a pogrom in earlier centuries. Another example is where Cantor praises Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas as being the foremost propagator of the idealogy that all races and cultures of mankind are equal, but on the next page Cantor goes on about the Jews' "superior genes," and his belief that "Jews have to be better than everyone else." Cantor is in constant awareness of "anti-Semitism," and references to the Holocaust can be found on every page. He even accuses the authors of the New Testament Gospels of being hatemongers who would have had no problem if their writings inspired the Holocaust. As for the scattered Jewish communities around the globe in the latter half of the twentieth century, Cantor judges their worth by how much they did to stop the Holocaust.

For a social policy, he likes to see non-Jews following free-market capitalism and moral relativism. But as for Jews, he wants them to be racially conscious (he figures the intermarraige rate of Jews with non-Jews a type of "Holocaust"), and devoted to (some) of their old traditions and religion. Cantor's analysis of the Bible period is terrible, because he does not cite any sources to where he gets his information, so the book is one long Norman Cantor's opinion of everything. In fact, on the back cover, a review is quoted praising Cantor for not concealing his biases. This stands in sharp contrast to a writer from any other ethnic group. Imagine if someone were to write a biased history of the Anglo-Saxons of Britain and Germany, and after catalouging their history and speculating on their religious outlook, philosophy and technical achievements, said that white Anglo-Saxons were just "better than anybody else?" Again the liberal double standard applies in writing the history books.

SACRED CHAIN is intentionally biased, praised for it. It is well worth reading, because some the massive influence of the Jews upon the West is catalouged, but take every statement Cantor makes with a couple grains of salt.

Rating:
Summary: This book is both really good and really bad.
Review: SACRED CHAIN is a fun book to read for anyone interested in history, and especially the influence that religion and economics has had in it. The book is very well written and surprisingly lucid and easy to follow, not a single part of it was uninteresting. What the SACRED CHAIN represents is the pure, unmitigated view of Establishment history. There are few in the sea as hypocritical as this fish. Cantor's analysis and summary of 3,000 years of Jewish history is interpreted in only two ways: Marx's dialectic materialism and whether or not a social movement, religion, government, etc. was beneficial to the Jews economically.

Cantor explains everything in Marxist terms--that all events and ideas in history are shaped by an individual's or group's economic status. And anything is good as long as it helped the Jews in general. Communist leader Trotsky/Bronstein is lauded as being an avenger of the Jews upon the peasants of the pro-Czarist Christians of the Ukraine. But earlier on, it is acknowledged that these peasants actually had legitamate grievances against Jews in the region that provoked a pogrom in earlier centuries. Another example is where Cantor praises Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas as being the foremost propagator of the idealogy that all races and cultures of mankind are equal, but on the next page Cantor goes on about the Jews' "superior genes," and his belief that "Jews have to be better than everyone else." Cantor is in constant awareness of "anti-Semitism," and references to the Holocaust can be found on every page. He even accuses the authors of the New Testament Gospels of being hatemongers who would have had no problem if their writings inspired the Holocaust. As for the scattered Jewish communities around the globe in the latter half of the twentieth century, Cantor judges their worth by how much they did to stop the Holocaust.

For a social policy, he likes to see non-Jews following free-market capitalism and moral relativism. But as for Jews, he wants them to be racially conscious (he figures the intermarraige rate of Jews with non-Jews a type of "Holocaust"), and devoted to (some) of their old traditions and religion. Cantor's analysis of the Bible period is terrible, because he does not cite any sources to where he gets his information, so the book is one long Norman Cantor's opinion of everything. In fact, on the back cover, a review is quoted praising Cantor for not concealing his biases. This stands in sharp contrast to a writer from any other ethnic group. Imagine if someone were to write a biased history of the Anglo-Saxons of Britain and Germany, and after catalouging their history and speculating on their religious outlook, philosophy and technical achievements, said that white Anglo-Saxons were just "better than anybody else?" Again the liberal double standard applies in writing the history books.

SACRED CHAIN is intentionally biased, praised for it. It is well worth reading, because some the massive influence of the Jews upon the West is catalouged, but take every statement Cantor makes with a couple grains of salt.