Level of knowledge of Jewish history

[lethargic_man]

Part of the reason I've been reading Josephus, and the historical bits of the Bible, is because it's struck me that for most Jews today, our knowledge of our own ancient history is rather poor. If it's in the Torah, or a haftarah we read, or a megillah with historical content, we're likely to know it; outside of that, our knowledge drops off rapidly. There's a whole load of Judges in the book of that name most of us have never even heard of (including me a year ago); our knowledge of the First Temple period springs between the most important kings, missing out centuries and multiple generations in between, and the period between the end of the Bible and the Hasmonean revolt is just one huge gap.

Or so I thought.

So I set to find out, plotting level of knowledge of events in Jewish history in a completely subjective fashion against time, and came up with the following, which, I must say, gave me a few surprises:

That was how I originally drew it, but then I thought no one's going to tilt their head over on the side to read all those labels, so here's a larger version rotated ninety degrees for easier viewing:

(It may seem as if history here ends in 1666, but actually it ended at bedtime.) There's probably data points I've missed out there, and some I've put on which I think are important, but which are not so well known (in particular non-European/Middle-Eastern history); as I said, this is subjective.

What do you think; do you agree with my assessment? And does this graph leave you with the burning (or even just slightly smouldering) desire to go away and learn more about anything I've mentioned?

Comments

[liv]

This is really cool! I don't know how you go about estimating the levels of knowledge; I think it probably depends partly which part of the world you and your ancestors come from, and also to some extent on denomination. I have a reasonable overall sense of history from Potok's Wanderings and a couple of other reference books I was given for my bat mitzvah. But I'm always hopeless at dates, and don't have a clear overview of what was going on simultaneously in different parts of the world.

[bluepork]

You should do it on a spreadsheet, then you can attenuate the "level of knowledge scale" with external data, or make easy adjustments without tippex.

Also, have you seen this?:

http://books.google.com/ngrams

Not sure if its useful fo

[lethargic_man]

Yes, I did reflect that it could be done on a computer, but I couldn't be bothered to find out how, and working things out with pencil and rubber is more my style.