“Thoughtful, provocative, and lucidly written, this is a remarkably successful attempt to reconstruct the history of the Jews of Europe in a comparative perspective […] Foa focuses not only on the persecution of the Jews but also on the interaction between Jews and Christians—an interaction which, she claims, lasted notwithstanding the ghettos.” Carlo Ginzburg The advent of the new century, the generational changeover, the difficult process of working through the grief of the Shoah and the issues that arise from the crisis in the Middle East, all lead us to question the European roots of Jewish identity. This book narrates six centuries of Jewish history in Europe, from the fourteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth. The result is a remarkable history of the Jews in the Christian West, their life conditions, their relations with the external culture, their exile and migrations, their closure in the ghettos and last but certainly not least, their enduring social and cultural vitality.