History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

some ways a most attractive prospect. But it was not Judaism. The pious Jew–and there could be no other–did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it. Hence the ‘science of Judaism’, as a dislocated academic discipline, was contrary to Jewish belief. Worse, it was the exact reversal of the true Jewish attitude to studying. As the Rabbi Hiyya put it in the fourth century AD: ‘If a man learns the Law without intending to fulfil the Law, it were better for him had he never been born.’47 A real Jew did not see Jewish history as a self-contained bit of world history, on a parallel with that of other peoples. To them, Jewish history was history.