LITMIR.BIZ

      Preface

      In years gone by, not a few university colleagues of mine have considered it below their dignity to engage in what the French call haute vulgarisation, the presentation of complicated issues of scholarship to a broad readership avoiding the use of technical jargon and requiring no prior familiarity with the subject. This attitude, in which obscurity parades as profundity and lack of perspicacity is assumed to indicate advanced learning, often derives from the inability of specialists to express themselves with clarity and simplicity. I would like to think that I was born with the gift of easy communication, being the son of a life-long journalist. The smell of the printer’s ink is among my early childhood memories and, at the age of 12, during the Berlin Olympics, I ran the sports column of my father’s paper. In 1971, when I began to edit the Journal of Jewish Studies, I felt I was reviving the family tradition tragically interrupted in 1944 by the murderous lunacy released on the innocent in Hitler’s empire. This background will explain why even my most creative works, like Jesus the Jew, were meant to be easily accessible to any educated person interested in the subject. Indeed, on retiring from my Oxford professorship, I expressly vowed to dedicate myself to sharing with the widest possible circles the insights gained

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