One cannot resist the temptation to observe without being facetious that as a historian, Potok solidifies his reputation as a fine novelist. Claiming no credentials as a historian, using hundreds of eminent sources and texts in several languages which he appreciatively acknowledges, he has fashioned an intelligent, thorough and credible one-volume chronicle [Wanderings] that breathes with a passion that is more common to fiction than to history.

It takes a writer with a flair for imagery, for example, to view the Jewish creative forces in Islamic-dominated 11th-century Spain as "nightingales in a sandstorm," and to describe the enthusiastic—though ominous—entry of Jews into the high culture of the 18th-century European Enlightenment as "whirling and pirouetting in a pagan danse macabre." And it takes a certain dramatic perception to shape two simple sentences—"Who was king? Who was not king?"—into ubiquitous signposts along the historical route of...