History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

As in England, the issue of Jewishness was not raised. Jews simply came, built houses, enjoyed equal rights and, it seems, voted in the earliest elections; they held offices too.

every Jewish settlement in Continental Europe.

tiny states within states. This was the ghetto system,

In North America it was quite different,

All could participate in a common society. Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In North America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community’, as they did in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue.

for the first time Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration.

meant that Jewry was no longer a dualism:

rather, a tripod of forces: Israel, the diaspora, American Jewry, which was quite different in kind to any other diaspora settlement and proved, in the end, the Third Force which enabled the Zionist state to come into existence.

even in the early modern period the acceptance of the Jews in the Anglo-Saxon area of power began to have a growing impact on the role Jews played in the economy, giving it a perman...

The Jews had always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But once they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they then enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate it too. Confidence in their rights led Jews to expand the scope of their activities.

It was the unconscious collective instinct of the Jews both to depersonalize finance and to rationalize the general economic process. Any property known to be Jewish, or clearly identifiable as such, was always at risk in medieval and early modern times,

Hence the whole thrust of Jewish activity in the early modern period was to refine these devices and bring them into universal use.

Next to the development of credit itself, the invention and still more the popularization of paper securities were probably the biggest single contribution the Jews made to the wealth-creation process. Jews hastened the use of securities just as much in areas where they felt safe as in areas where they were vulnerable, for they saw the entire world as a single market. Here, too, the global perspective which the diaspora gave them turned them into pioneers. For a race without a country, the world was a home.

Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system.

Werner Sombart

Jews were exceptionally adept at gathering and making use of commercial intelligence.

In general, they brought to the eighteenth-century economic system a powerful spirit of rationalization, a belief that existing ways of doing things were never good enough, and that better, easier, cheaper and quicker ways could and must be found. There was nothing mysterious about Jewish commerce; nothing dishonest either; simply reason.

There is a paradox that, at one and the same time, the ghetto bred mercantile innovation and religious conservatism.

The Jews in the early modern period were curiously dualistic. They often saw the world outside with clearer eyes than it saw itself; but when the Jews turned inward, on themselves, their eyes misted over, their vision became opaque. In the twelfth century Maimonides had tried hard to align Judaism with natural reason. That effort faltered and went underground in the fourteenth century. The ghetto helped to keep it there. It strengthened traditional authority. It discouraged speculation. It made the penalities of communal disapproval much more severe, since a Jew could not leave the ghetto without sacrificing his faith entirely. But of course it could not kill the rationalizing spirit altogether because that was inherent in Judaism and in the halakhic method. Even in the ghetto, Judaism remained a cathedocracy, a society ruled by learned men. Where scholars exist, controversies will erupt and ideas circulate.

historical writing.

they did come to it again in the end, in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Azariah de...

Me’or Eynayim (Light of the Eyes) in 1573.

This power of orthodoxy was dramatically demonstrated in the tragic case of Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-77) of Amsterdam.

Spinoza was excommunicated publicly.

in 1670 he published, unsigned, his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in which he set out his principles of Biblical criticism. Therein lay his essential heterodoxy. He argued that the Bible should be approached in a scientific spirit and investigated like any natural phenomenon.

Spinoza was the first major example of the sheer destructive power of Jewish rationalism once it escaped the restraints of the traditional community.

The trouble with Spinoza’s pantheism, however, was that he pushed it to the point where it was impossible to make valid distinctions between it and atheism.

Maimonides, who argued that perfect worldly peace could be achieved through reason–that was how he thought the Messianic Age would come. But Maimonides imagined this state being reached when the Law was fully observed in all its noble rationality. It would be achieved on the basis of Revelation, through the Torah. Spinoza, however, did not believe in Revelation and wanted to scrap the Torah. He thought the end could be achieved by pure intellect.

Spinoza wanted to overcome passion.

There remained the irrationalist tradition. It had triumphed in the fourteenth century. Its kabbalah had been received into normative Judaism. It had received a stunning blow with the apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi. Shabbeteanism had gone underground.

The huge emotional energy and fervour which had powered the messianic movement in the 1660s remained. Was there no way it could be allowed to express itself and yet at the same time remain harnessed–if only loosely–to the Judaic chariot?

hasidism.

Pious fervour among the Jewish masses of Poland was not just a religious force. It had radical undertones. Jewish society was authoritarian and often oppressive. It was run by an intermarried oligarchy of rich merchants and lawyer-rabbis.

Israel ben Eliezer, later known as the Ba’al Shem Tov (c. 1700-60), or the Besht,

he recognized that the vanished Messiah had left a hole in Jewish hearts.

The zaddik, in Ba’al Shem Tov’s teaching, was not a messiah, but not quite an ordinary human being either–somewhere between the two. Moreover, since the zaddik did not claim a messianic role, there could be many of them. Thus a new kind of religious personality arose, to perpetuate and spread the movement.

Secondly, he invented a revolutionary form of popular prayer. This was important because it enabled ordinary, humble Jews to contribute. The great strength of Lurianic kabbalah had been the feeling among the masses that they could hasten the coming of the Messiah by their prayers and piety.

He stressed that prayer was not so much a human activity as a supernatural act, in which man breaks down the barriers of his natural existence and reaches into the divine world.

The Besht taught that, in order to enter in, the man has to annihilate his personality and become nothing. He thus creates a vacuum, which is filled up by a sort of supernal being, who acts and speaks for him.

Hence hasidic ceremonies became very noisy affairs.

They were poor, rough people. They shocked the Jewish establishment, particularly when their practices spread all over Poland and into Lithuania. They were quickly accused of secret Shabbeteanism. There were angry calls for their suppression.

In Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-97), the gaon of Vilna, the early hasidics found a dedicated enemy.

He regarded hasidism as an outrage.

persecute them.

The orthodox attempt to destroy it failed. Indeed it was soon abandoned, as both scholars and enthusiasts united in the face of a new and common enemy–the Jewish enlightenment or haskalah.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86).

The traditional gentile world said: keep the Jews under or expel them. The enlightened gentile world said: how can we best assist these poor Jews to stop being Jewish? Mendelssohn replied: let us share a common culture, but allow us Jews to remain Jewish.

In 1767 he published Phaedon,

Mendelssohn was driven, despite himself, into a rationalist defence of Judaism; or, more precisely, into a demonstration of how Jews, while remaining attached to the essentials of their faith, could become part of a general European culture.