There was a scholastic strand which valued the Jews almost as living fossils. This saw them not just as the much-debased inheritors of Old Testament traditions but also as intermediaries with ancient Egyptian magic, through the Kabbala and, even more bizarrely, as the unwitting descendants of the ‘Land of Cham’ with access to the secrets hidden within the still-undecoded world of hieroglyphics. These very odd forms of esoteric
