Got any best one book recommendation(s) that put the Jews and their problems in good proper historical perspective?

No, I'm afraid not. Most of what I've written above is from being taught in Sunday school as a kid, augmented with some wikipedia look-ups to get the dates right; and obviously the history of the Jews is much broader than just what took place in this specific part of the world. As a diasporic minority that's been around for thousands of years, and expelled from more countries than you can shake a stick at, there's a lot of history to put into perspective.

BTW - sure we got poor publicity in The Merchant of Venice - but we had already been expelled from England (and France and Hungary and Austria and Spain and Portugal and other places) centuries before Shakespeare was born. Shylock is a reflection of, not the genesis of, prejudice against Jews that was centuries old and spread across the world by then.

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