THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.<i> Edited by Nicholas de Lange</i> .<i> Harcourt Brace & Co., 434 pp., $36</i> : THE JEWISH SPIRIT: A Celebration in Stories and Art.<i> Edited by Ellen Frankel</i> .<i> Stewart, Tabori & Chang: 240 pp., $50</i>

“The People of the Book” is an honorific bestowed by Muhammad upon Jews and Christians alike in the traditions of Islam, but it’s one that the Jewish people have embraced with a sure sense of ownership. The book that Muhammad had in mind, of course, was the Bible. Nowadays, the bookshelves of Jewish families across America are decorated with much more eclectic and mostly secular titles. Indeed, the coffee-table book may have replaced the Bible as the touchstone of Jewish identity.

Whether presented as a history, anthology, atlas or art book, the coffee-table book is the favorite format of authors and publishers who are staking out the Jewish book buyer and, especially, the Jewish gift giver. Few of these books, I’d wager, are purchased by their readers; rather, they are wrapped up and handed over as gifts on the occasion of a bar mitzvah, a birthday or a Hanukkah observance, which explains how a great many such titles found their way into my library.

The marketplace for books with Jewish themes is a crowded one, but there are always new contenders, among them a couple of titles whose approaches are starkly different even if they hope to make their way to the same bookshelf. “The Illustrated History of the Jewish People,” consisting of eight weighty but well-considered essays by credentialed scholars, is a book that is intended to be studied and not just looked at. “The Jewish Spirit,” generously illustrated with color plates on nearly every page, is a kind of sideboard of Jewish storytelling, an assortment of myths, legends, fairy tales and parables that are easily consumed in small bites. While “The Illustrated History” is edgy and provocative, which comes as something of a surprise, “The Jewish Spirit” is celebratory and comforting, which is no surprise at all.

“The Jewish Spirit” is the work of Ellen Frankel, a “professional story-teller” who also serves as editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society, the venerable source of authoritative translations of the Hebrew Bible. Frankel has assembled more than 50 stories, all of them short and most of them sweet, and she has decorated them with an abundance of eye-pleasing illustrations. The result is the very model of a Jewish coffee-table book: large, lush, upbeat and so rich in appearance that it asks to be put on display rather than studied.

Among the decorative elements in “The Jewish Spirit” are passages from the works of famous Jewish figures: Theodor Herzl, Sholom Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, S.Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel, Bernard Malamud and Grace Paley, among others--and artwork of Marc Chagall, Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer and Louise Nevelson. Less obvious choices are drawn from the folk literature of the far-flung Diaspora, not only the Ashkenazic culture of Europe but also the less familiar Sephardic traditions of medieval Spain and the Arab world. Frankel herself retells several tales from the vast Rabbinic literature known as Midrash. Characteristically, Frankel insists on putting a cheerful spin on even the darkest and most dangerous elements of traditional Jewish storytelling. Her own version of the myth of Lilith, for example, turns the demonic baby killer of Jewish tradition into “a parable of female empowerment” and a politically correct feminist icon. “Because this first woman was equal to Adam in every way,” she writes, “she insisted on enjoying equal footing with him in the Garden.” Even though Frankel does not deny that Lilith goes around sucking the breath of life out of newborn babies, the demoness is made to act generously toward her “sister creatures” by revealing to the mothers of her victims how to create the very amulet that will defeat her.

“The Illustrated History,” by contrast, is a work of uncompromising scholarship that more nearly resembles “The Oxford History of the Classical World” than a book of pretty pictures and textual tidbits. The editor, Nicholas de Lange, has dressed up the pages with an occasional illustration--a detail from an ancient stone inscription that corroborates an incident from the Bible, an illuminated page from the work of Maimonides, the identity card of a Jewish child in Nazi Germany stamped with the telltale “J” for Jude--but the real glory of his book are its words, not its images. Notably, the scholars who have contributed to “The Illustrated History” are not cheerleaders for Jewish culture and civilization, whatever that may turn out to be in our own troubled times, and they are willing to challenge some of our comfortable assumptions about Jewish history and identity.

In one instance, the historical reality that lies beneath the surface of the Jewish observance of Hanukkah is explored with both courage and clarity by Seth Schwartz, a history professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, in the section of the book labeled “Beginnings.” Schwartz points out that the armed revolt of the Maccabees started with “what can only be described as acts of terrorism” and can be understood as a holy war by zealots who sought to impose theocracy in government and fundamentalism in religious practice on a nation that had been sliding toward the secularism and materialism of Greek culture, a reading with rather unsettling implications for the Jewish world today.

The text of “The Illustrated History” is dense with facts and ideas, but it’s never tedious or tendentious. Schwartz, for example, leavens his account with a few surprising and illuminating notes on one of his crucial sources, the Second Book of Maccabees, whose anonymous author was the first to use (and may have invented) the familiar terms “Judaism” and “Hellenism” and whose graphic description of the sufferings of Jewish martyrs is the origin of the word “macabre.”

Both of these books aspire to something more than celebration or decoration, and their editors and authors are to be praised for approaching the long and diverse history of Judaism with an open mind and an open heart. “A people’s tales are its memory, its conscience,” writes Frankel in “The Jewish Spirit,” and she insists that the collected stories “teach each generation how to live and what to believe, whom to trust and whom to fear, when to laugh and why to cling fast to hope.” Something of the same sentiment is uttered by Nicholas de Lange in “The Illustrated History”: “A history is a story, and the story of the Jewish people is unbroken, even by the most dramatic interruptions.”

When it comes to a moment of pleasure in beholding a handsome book, both of these volumes, like so many others in the same genre, deliver what they promise. But I fear that it is no longer possible to identify Judaism with the ecumenical values of “The Jewish Spirit,” however attractive they may be to most of us: the modern zealots who, not unlike the Maccabees whom we recall at Hanukkah, cast stones at their less-observant fellow Jews, have raised the stakes for “The People of the Book. “That’s why the cutting edge of “The Illustrated History of the Jewish People” reaches a deeper and less comfortable truth than “The Jewish Spirit,” if truth rather than comfort is what the reader of these books is seeking.