The survival of Jewish identity and culture is one of the great enigmas of history. Faced with persecution, dispersal, pogroms and Hitler's Final Solution, the future of the Jewish people was far from secure. The Jewish Enigma seeks to discover what made survival possible. In seven chapters, scholars trace the history of the Jewish people from the first Babylonian exile to the current state of Western and American Jewry. Topics covered include Jews in Islamic lands, the Emancipation, the history of anti-Semitism, the history of East European Jewry as well as the troubled history of Zionism and the Palestinians.