Detailed accounts of Jewish pain and suffering stretch back to the biblical book of Lamentations. Reading Jewish history can often seem like an exercise in pain management, and yet such works continue to shed light on the Jewish experience, and to explore how Jewish communities have fit into the larger contexts in which they lived. The difficulty lies in managing the vast quantities of information about these very different communities while still providing a study with some coherence and continuity.

In addition to writing and teaching history, Winnipeg author Allan Levine has penned a number of murder mysteries. At its best, Scattered Among the Peoples bears the mark of the novelist. Focusing on 10 cities during 10 important eras in Jewish history, Levine further narrows his lens to concentrate on the personal lives of one significant person or family from each highlighted period.

Levine’s vibrant cast of characters brings these often distant periods vividly to life. His description of the Dreyfus Affair in 1895 Paris, including a rather unflattering portrait of Alfred Dreyfus himself, transforms a complicated historical moment into a vivid evocation of the times. At its best, Levine’s novelistic methods raise Scattered Among the Peoples above most other works of the genre.

However, Levine’s strategy occasionally limits the book. The diversity of subject matter prevents him from going into depth about any individual subject, and he relies largely on the work of previous scholars, some of whom are not the most up-to-date in the field. Levine’s tangential remarks describing his own visits to the cities are sometimes more distracting than informative. Nevertheless he has provided readers with an engaging introduction to a broad range of time periods and, with an ample bibliography, provides rich paths for further reading.