History of Israel Informal Bibliographic Analysis

Methodology for an informal evaluation of sources cited in Howard Sachar’s bibliography.

To show “insufficient history” in action, I conducted a brief analysis of citations provided in the bibliography to A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by Howard Sachar (3rd Ed).

I counted the total number of citations listed. This includes repeats — every citation was counted, in order, as listed in the bibliography from the beginning through Section V: The Growth of Israel’s Defense Forces: The 1956 Sinai War. The total number of citations (including repeats) was 1122.

Counted separately was any reference that was: a) by an author known to be writing from an Arab perspective (eg George Antonius, Albert Hourani); b) had an obviously Arabic name or was obviously an Arab (eg King Hussein, Abdul Tibawi); or c) had a title that was suggestive of an Arab-sympathetic perspective (eg The Meaning of the Disaster). Each was checked to make sure that they were in fact representative of an Arab perspective. These references totalled 34.

A complete list of these references:

There are 30 unique references, four of them were cited more than once.