THE JEWS A Treasury of Art...

“The Jews” is a stately and sumptuous celebration of the Jewish experience that resembles a stroll through a library or a museum. The texts are elevated in tone; the art, consisting of 140 color plates and 100 black-and-white, is elegant. Appropriately but predictably, “The Jews” starts with the words of the Bible and the artifacts of antiquity: the text of Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning . . .”) is presented with a silver coin of the Bar-Kokhba revolt, an ivory vase of the 8th Century BC, a fresco from an ancient synagogue.

But Keller offers some surprises as she leads us through these exquisite galleries: the edict by which Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492; a circumcision set in silver filigree from 19th-Century Holland; a fragment of Primo Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz paired with a stark black-and-white photograph of George Segal’s wood-plaster-and-wire tableau, “The Holocaust.” To Keller’s credit, “The Jews” is more than something beautiful to display; it’s one coffee-table book that is intended to be read and not merely beheld.

The “Historical Atlas” is considerably more kinetic. With 200 high-tech color maps by cartographer Michel Opatowski--and more than 500 illustrations--the pages are literally crammed to the very edges with data that has been done up in an eye-catching and thought-provoking collage. To illustrate and explain the Exodus, for example, the editors give us not only a fact-filled text block and a detailed time line but also an Egyptian mural from the 19th Century BC, a pair of Egyptian sarcophagi, a 17th-Century painting of Pharaoh’s army crossing the Red Sea, and a truly remarkable map that describes the wanderings of the Israelites by superimposing the routes of their journey through the desert on a satellite photograph of the Sinai.

“Too much history, not enough geography” is how Isaiah Berlin once characterized the plight of the Jews; “A Historical Atlas” allows his aphorism to come fully and vividly alive.