In 1523 a slight, dark-haired man named David Ha-Reuveni appeared in Venice claiming to be the commander-in-chief of the army of the 10 lost tribes of Israel on a divine mission to liberate the holy land from the Muslims. Having won the cautious backing of Jewish leaders and obtained a letter of introduction from Pope Clement VII, he made a triumphal voyage to Lisbon where he very nearly persuaded King João III of Portugal to provide him with weapons and a fleet of warships to reclaim Jerusalem. Ha-Reuveni overplayed his hand, however, and, condemned for promoting Judaism among the Iberian peninsula’s forced converts to Christianity, he was burned at the stake in Spain.

His adventures are one of the many points of overlap in these two histories, one religious and the other cultural, of Judaism and the Jews. Martin Goodman’s A History of Judaism approaches Ha-Reuveni as a false prophet who stands in a long tradition of Jewish messianism; for Simon Schama, in the second volume of The Story of the Jews, Ha-Reuveni’s improbable claims and the credulity they initially elicited offer a window on to the religious politics of early modern Europe and the mounting desperation of European Jewry as the Inquisition tightened the screws.

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Goodman’s narrative begins with the emergence of Judaism amid the polytheistic religions of the Graeco-Roman world. He argues that the destruction of the Second Temple in AD70 proved a “watershed in the history of Judaism”. The intellectual response of religious leaders to this loss of their unifying centre of worship was to codify in the six centuries that followed the rules governing all aspects of Jewish life, from diet to charity, culminating in the great interpretative text of the Talmud. The Torah and the Talmud could be taken anywhere on earth and, woven into the fabric of daily life and prayer, their combination of theology, history and law proved far more resilient than the stone walls and pillars of the Temple. If you had to design a religion specifically to withstand millennia of exile, dispersal and persecution, Judaism was it.

Yet despite the integrity of its scriptural core, Judaism, as Goodman emphasises, was never monolithic. At different points in time, it rubbed up against other faiths, influencing and also borrowing from them. Taking in three millennia of religious thought and practice, Goodman’s scholarship is formidable. It ranges across the theological writings of the first-century Roman historian Flavius Josephus through the mounting religious doubts of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza to Joseph Soloveitchik’s encouragement of Orthodox Jews in the 20th century to participate fully in the secular world.

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Context matters in this narrative of a dynamic religion, open to the world and in a permanent state of renewal. The problem is that Goodman’s brief forays into historical background – the book gallops through the 200 years that separate the Enlightenment from the foundation of the state of Israel in a mere 20 pages – too quickly fade from view as the various prophets, sects, rabbis and philosophers make their voices heard in an unrelenting and boisterous discussion about how to live and how to worship. We learn of the emergence of Hassidism in Galicia in the 17th century and of Reform Judaism in Germany in the 19th, but the social and cultural forces that gave rise to those movements remain too sparingly sketched out. Fierce arguments about religious authority, changes to liturgical practice, the limits of acceptable engagement with the Roman/Christian/Islamic/secular worlds often appear to float above the shifting contexts in which they were embedded.

Goodman argues that for all the debates, rifts and hostilities that have opened up among Jews throughout their history, Judaism has never experienced the brutal ruptures of the Christian wars of religion in early modern Europe or the deep hostility that has bedevilled relations between Sunni and Shia in Islam. Instead, Jews have somehow muddled along, tolerating each other “in a spirit of open acceptance or with grudging animosity”. Less clear is whether Goodman believes Judaism to be inherently more tolerant than its Abrahamic counterparts or simply that a uniquely unkind fate has foisted theological and ceremonial malleability on Jews struggling to preserve their religion and identity in the diaspora.

That struggle is the subject of the dazzling second part of Schama’s epic history. Ambiguously entitled Belonging, this volume starts with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and it traces their history through to the birth of Zionism at the end of the 19th century. While the heart of Schama’s story lies in Europe, it soars across the globe from India to Brazil and from the Yemen to the US, showing how the dynamic religious culture detailed by Goodman proved the astonishingly resilient bedrock of Jewish identity.

Schama’s narrative should be a bleak one: a people scattered throughout the world experienced centuries of discrimination and persecution, punctuated only by brief spells of respite as it found refuge in the more tolerant cultures of Ming China, the Ottoman empire, the 16th-century Dutch republic and 19th‑century Britain. And of course, no telling of this tale can escape hindsight; we all know that Auschwitz looms beyond the horizon of the final chapters.

Yet Schama never sinks into the “lachrymose history” about which Salo Baron, the great scholar of Jewish history, complained. The book refuses to present its protagonists first and foremost as victims. Instead, they blaze with vitality – resourceful adventurers who step forth as if from the pages of a Romantic novel. The 16th-century Portuguese “New Christian” heroine Doña Gracia Mendes, who commanded the resources of a financial empire, organised a secret network of ships, carriages and safe houses to spirit fellow Jewish conversos out of the clutches of the Inquisition. The English boxing legend Daniel Mendoza combined prodigious pugilistic skills with a natural showman’s flair for self-promotion. In Georgian London he understood how “that newborn but ravenous monster, the English Public, needed feeding not just with gory spectacle but with a gripping Story. In the very improbability of a Fighting Jew he knew he had a thriller.”

Schama's book refuses to present its protagonists first and foremost as victims

Schama’s writing is immersive; he plunges the reader into the thronged markets of Amsterdam, the aromas of the Topkapi Palace kitchens in Constantinople, the dank slums of the East End of London and the opulent majesty of the great metropolitan synagogues of Berlin and Budapest. The pogroms ravaging Odessa smell of the burnt goose feathers hacked and stabbed from mattresses and upholstery that billow through the fires engulfing Jewish property. And then there is the funereal train journey from Paris to Berlin of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer in 1864: “Bringing the daily traffic of two great European cities to a halt; mobilising the nobility of court and concert house, academics, institutes, operas; the whole sword-clanking, epaulette-heavy clip-cloppery of the event, all in honour of a dead Jew was astounding and, to some, appalling.”

The attempts of successive generations of Jews to carve out a space in which to practise their religion either alongside or within Christian society were met, in most places and most of the time, with hostility. True, religious persecution during the Renaissance gave way to the hopeful emancipatory logic of the Enlightenment and the civic freedoms and liberalism inaugurated by the French Revolution. But secularism and nationalism also spawned racialised antisemitism. The Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn might have stuck to his deep conviction that it was possible to be both a good German and a practising Jew, but his children thought their father “deluded”, converted and changed their names. Those Jews who sought integration and advancement in modern Europe, even at the cost of casting off their religion, could never shed the vulnerabilities of their heritage. If formerly their separateness had been assailed, now it was their invasiveness.

The framing in 1894 of the assimilated and devoutly patriotic French-Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of spying for the Germans was for many a “dark epiphany”. Multiple Jewish attempts over the centuries to belong in Christian Europe had definitely failed. Theodore Herzl concluded that the only way out was to convert Jews’ timeless religious attachment to their ancient homeland into a modern political project: Zionism. Having begun his tale with the charismatic appeals of the religious prophet Ha-Reuveni, Schama ends it with this secular prophet seeking to persuade another Christian monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to endorse a Jewish state in Palestine. Schama’s clear-eyed dissection of the tensions, the optimism and the self-delusion of Herzl’s vision ends on an ironic note: “all would be well”.

• A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman (Allen Lane, £30). To order a copy for £25.50, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99. Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492-1900 by Simon Schama (Bodley Head, £25). To order a copy for £21.25, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.