Four thousand years of Jewish history, told across five episodes that move from the Middle East's ancient kingdoms through the Babylonian exile, the rise of Christianity and Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the founding of the State of Israel. Director Nina Koshofer builds the series around archaeological excavation sites and interviews with historians, archaeologists, and religious scholars, using physical evidence and written sources from the Jewish Diaspora rather than a single narrator's summary. The series deliberately sidesteps the two subjects most documentaries default to, the Holocaust and contemporary Israeli politics, and spends its time instead on centers of Jewish culture and learning, the communities that formed across exile and migration, and the contributions to art, literature, science, and philosophy that came out of them. The structure is chronological but not narrow: each episode treats a different stretch of that four-thousand-year span, tracing how a small Middle Eastern people became a set of dispersed, distinct communities that still trace themselves back to the same origin.