Chronicles the life of the Jewish general-turned-Roman historian while appraising the roles of Jewish immigrants in the Diaspora centuries, covering such topics as Josephus's role as a religious and intellectual prototype and his relationship with the Roman emperor Vespasian.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew...