This course explores major topics in Jewish history from antiquity to the post-World-War-II era. We will consider how Jews developed their own social, cultural, political, and religious practices and engaged with different societies and cultures in the times and locations where they lived. In the process, we will question what is “Jewish” about Jewish history, what “Jewishness” means, whether we can speak of a single history of the Jews, and the tension between history and memory. Jewish migration—from the decision to pack up and leave to arrival and settling in the receiving country—will constitute a central theme of the course, as we investigate the development of the diaspora and the many types of Jewishness we know today. We will start with formative works like the Bible and Talmud and continue with primary religious, political, literary, and journalistic sources, ranging from Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts, to political treatises, to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman. Throughout, we will examine issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and disability, and ask how these shaped Jews’ understandings of themselves, relationships to the people and places where they made their homes, and interactions with the governments, cultures, and societies they encountered along the way.