From what I've read
As reviewed by the WSJ
(snip)
So vast that the present volume, which spans roughly 2,500 years, ending with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, is only the first of two. Mr. Schama's history flashes by with entertaining velocity, though whether it is, strictly speaking, history at all is another matter, one the author himself raises with his decision to call his book a "story."
(snip)
He begins cheekily enough: "In the beginning—not the imagined beginning of patriarchs and prophets, and certainly not the beginning of the whole universe, just the documented beginning of ordinary Jews—in that beginning a father and mother were worrying about their son." The son in question is a mercenary living in Persian-ruled Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E., a member of the Judean Troop posted to Elephantine, an island in the Nile in southern Egypt.
Thanks to the 20th-century discovery of a cache of papyri, a remarkable amount is known about life in Elephantine. A remarkable amount is also unknown, but Mr. Schama's imagination works like the plaster bones fitted in with the real ones when paleontologists put their skeletons together. Using what might be called the "historical speculative," he writes of the mercenary that "perhaps he had been assigned to caravan convoy, guarding the tribute of elephant tusks, ebony and Ethiopian boys." If not, it is still a colorful possibility.
(snip)
The real appeal of Elephantine to Mr. Schama as a starting point seems to be its role as an alternate version of familiar Jewish history. Not only is there someone with his name, there is a Jewish settlement of "happy banality" in, of all places, Egypt, the land Jews stepped out of when they entered history. Although Jerusalem and its rebuilt temple are in Jewish hands, in Elephantine "ordinary" Jews work as hired spears and worship in their very own temple, where, despite Jerusalem's religious monopoly, they offer animal sacrifices. Working in his speculative mode, Mr. Schama conjures a world "where it was possible to be Jewish and Egyptian, just as later it would be possible to be Jewish and Dutch or Jewish and American."
(snip)
For Mr. Schama, Jerusalem and Elephantine embody two "ways," one exclusive and the other inclusive, that represent the twin pillars of Jewish possibility. Though he presents them not as an either/or proposition, his heart, as the book begins, is clearly in Elephantine, which he posits not as the end of Jewish history—though the community vanished—but as "another beginning."
(snip)
By the time Mr. Schama reaches the expulsions from Spain and Portugal that end the volume, Elephantine is a distant memory indeed. Calling his final section "Exile From Exile," Mr. Schama collapses even golden-age Spain back into the traditional Jewish understanding that any place not Israel is mere "exile."
(snip)
The volume closes with Abraham Zacuto, a rabbi and astronomer, fleeing Spain. Mr. Schama imagines this historical figure "perhaps" reciting a psalm. No longer a Scheherazade of Jewish history talking as if to silence the consequences of the very story he is telling, Mr. Schama ends his book with a portion of Psalm 19. It is a culminating act of self-effacement; the author falls silent and allows the tradition to speak for him at last.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303426304579405133758314124
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