Following what may be conventionally called the Jewish ethno-cultural model and tracing its performance throughout history, Alexander Militarev s book is the first scholarly attempt to apply a synthetic, comprehensive approach to the Jewish phenomenon an alternative to the metaphysical and religious ones and to evaluate it in a comparative context. In highlighting the unique and disproportionately great Jewish contributions to human civilization, and the recent Russian Jewish contribution in particular, it poses as its main question, Why the Jews? Militarev dedicates his book to the analysis of the Jewish phenomenon, its manifold reasons and consequences. Laying bare the kitchen of scholarly research, Militarev embarks on a scholarly adventure akin to a film-noir who-dunnit, complete with intrigue, the need for stringent self-control, inexorable doubts, and the thrill of chasing after the enigma s solution.