First illustrated edition, ‘edition de luxe’, no. 264 of 1,000 copies signed by the author. The historian Cecil Roth (1899-1970) was born in London and educated at the City of London School, before serving on the Western Front in World War I. At the end of the war Roth studied history at Merton College, Oxford, where he was awarded an undergraduate degree (1922) and a doctorate in 1924. ‘Roth soon turned to Jewish studies, his interest since childhood, when he had a traditional religious education and learned Hebrew from the Cairo genizah scholar Jacob Mann. Roth supported himself by freelance writing until in 1939 he received a specially created readership in post-biblical Jewish studies at the University of Oxford, where he was also mentor and host to Jewish students’ (ODNB). ¶¶

The first edition of A Short History of the Jewish People was published in 1936 and was intended for a popular audience (Roth’s definitive History of the Jews in England was published some years later in 1941). A second edition of A Short History of the Jewish People appeared in 1943, which had been revised and slightly enlarged to include the years to the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and this first illustrated edition was published in both de luxe signed and trade issues in 1948. ¶¶

In his ‘Preface to the Illustrated Edition’ dated 1947, Roth writes that ‘[t]his work was originally published only ten years ago, but in a world entirely different from the world of today. At that time, it was possible to regard the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany merely as an exceptionally unpleasant episode. It was impossible to foretell that the result was to be the utter overwhelming, and almost extermination, of European Jewry. For this new edition, a further section has been written epitomising the unhappy history of the past few years. [...] The whole text has been revised and corrected in the light of ten years’ reading and research. There are some stylistic changes, a few additions, an entirely new Bibliography’ (p. vi). ¶¶

The preface records that ‘the revision has been a bitter task. The work was written in the first instance in an optimistic spirit, reflected in an Epilogue (now omitted) which at present seems grotesquely antiquated. For the author was brought up to believe that persecution belonged to the past; that Jewish emancipation in the Occident was final; that notwithstanding local relapses the world had progressed out of barbarism; that a monument preserved from antiquity might be considered, barring accident, safe for all time; that massacres were out of the question in modem society; that the great mass of European Jewry was settled in Europe for good, unless it were slowly dissolved by emigration or assimilation. [...] It was bitter for the Author to find that he had referred to medieval massacres of the Jews as unexampled in history, when in recent years they have been exceeded a hundred- or even a thousand-fold. Centuries-old tranquillity in country after country has proved to be the prelude to unmitigated disaster in our own day. The martyrdom of the Jews in the Ghetto period was paradise as compared with the indescribable horrors of the decade of Nazi domination’ (loc. cit.). ¶¶

After explaining that to treat the preceding decade fully would require ‘a volume many times greater than the whole of this work’, Roth concludes with the words ‘[t]he happenings in German-occupied territory from 1939 to 1945 are not an episode, but the most important event in all Jewish history during the past nineteen centuries at least. When I wrote of European Jewry ten years ago, I was dealing with a healthy living organism; today it is a charnel-house. Jewish history must be regarded henceforth, unhappily, in a completely different light. Perhaps nevertheless this volume benefits from its deficiencies; for the full history of the Jews in our time is too agonising to tell’ (pp.vi-vii). ¶¶

O.K. Rabinowicz, ‘A Bibliography of the Writings of Cecil Roth’ in J.M. Shaftesley, Remember the Days (1966), no. 328. ¶¶¶