A history of the Jews in the modern world cannot be like a history of any other people in the modern world, or of the Jews in any previous era. Ever since the time of the French Revolution, when the West began to think of itself as modern, the Jews have played a role in its cultural imagination out of all proportion to their numbers. Jews and Judaism became metaphors, ways of thinking about the most explosive challenges of modernity: liberalism and equality, nationalism and foreignness, capitalism and communism. This divorce between a group of actual human beings and their purported meaning is what accounts for the terrible fascination of modern Jewish history. Forced to become symbols, the Jews were deprived of the elementary humanity every people needs, and made conspicuous in a way no people could bear.

In telling this story in “A History of the Jews in the Modern World” (Alfred A. Knopf, 832 pages, $40), Howard Sachar, the dean of American Jewish historians, lightens the burden of meaning by resorting to narrative. Instead of telling what Jewish history signifies, he simply shows what it was, through a comprehensive chronicle of names, dates, and events – everything from BILU to ILGWU. Mr. Sachar has this material at his fingertips, having already written many books on Israeli, American, and European Jewish history, and he retells it in fluent and vigorous prose. Over some 800 densely packed pages, broken up into chapters by chronology and geography, he tells the reader at least something about virtually every Jewish community on the planet. But inevitably, his major focus is on Eastern Europe, America, and Israel, where the major episodes of modern Jewish history played out for good and ill.

In Mr. Sachar’s vision of that history – conventional, but not for that reason incorrect – the major plot is the struggle of the Jews to share in the advantages of modern life, to achieve their fair share of equality, security, and prosperity. Mr. Sachar has no sympathy for, or even interest in, the Jewish life led in the ghettos and shtetls of premodern Europe. More broadly, it might be said that he has no interest in Judaism as a religion: Piety appears in these pages mainly as chasidic obscurantism, and Mr. Sachar treats the assimilation of American Jews as a cultural, not a spiritual, phenomenon. This lack of inwardness with what is, after all, the historical core of Jewish identity means that for Mr. Sachar, the Jews don’t really begin to exist until they step onto the stage of wider Western and secular history.

Once this happens, however, Mr. Sachar is uncomplicatedly enthusiastic about Jewish achievements in the realms of business, politics, and culture. Paradoxical as it may seem given the nature of the subject, he is a sort of Whig historian of the Jews, telling a story of progress interrupted only by tragedy. In “A History of the Jews in the Modern World,” Mr. Sachar traces a broken upward line from the benighted, ghettoized Jewry of medieval Europe to a happy vision of Jewish life circa 1980: an achieved state of Israel, and a vibrant Jewish community in America.

The manifold evils encountered along the way are treated primarily as obstacles to this happy consummation. Mr. Sachar is less interested in the sources and nature of anti-Semitism than in its sheer obstinacy, which made Jewish emancipation in Western Europe irregular and fragile, and barred it altogether in the East. The result, by the late 19th century, was a Jewish population divided by the style of its suffering. In France and Germany, Jews outbid one another to prove their loyalty to states that looked on them with mistrust at best, violent hatred at worst. The anguish and self-loathing that resulted are attested in the famous exclamation by Rahel Varnhagen, the early 19th-century Berlin salonniere: “I imagine that just as I was being thrust into this world a supernatural being plunged a dagger into my heart with these words: ‘Now, have feeling, see the world as only few can see it, be great and noble … but with one reservation: be a Jew!'”

In the East, however, things were far worse. The majority of European Jews lived in Russian Poland, where their poverty and marginality were aggravated by Tsarist persecution. (It is worth remembering that, as late as World War I, Jews largely sided with Germany against Russia, seeing the tsar as their greatest enemy.) After 1881, when new discriminatory laws and government organized pogroms made life in the Pale of Settlement unbearable, a huge number of Jews immigrated to America. Those who remained gave their allegiance to new movements that held out the hope of social transformation, Zionism and socialism.

Mr. Sachar succeeds in communicating very clearly a truth that our post-Zionist moment too easily forgets: Even before the Holocaust, it was obvious that there was no future for the Jews in Europe. In the interwar years, as their situation grew worse and worse – caught between war and famine in Poland and Russia, and Nazi hatred in Germany – Eastern European Jews looked desperately for a way out, but no country would take them. The creation of Israel, whose growth Mr. Sachar lovingly charts from the first Yishuv down to the Six Day War, came too late to save European Jewry. But as he vividly reminds us, it remains the indispensable guarantor of Jewish survival.

The other haven for Jews, of course, was America. Here too, Mr. Sachar notes, there was anti-Semitism and discrimination, but there was also a tradition of religious and political liberty, and abundant economic opportunity. In fact, Mr. Sachar’s own work can be seen as a product of the best of mid-20th-century American Jewish culture, confident in its patriotism and Zionism, its affluence and its secular identity. If the times have changed, so that “A History of the Jews in the Modern World” now seems slightly old-fashioned, the change is probably not for the better.