History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Why have I written a history of the Jews? There are four reasons. The first is sheer curiosity. When I was working on my History of Christianity, I became aware for the first time in my life of the magnitude of the debt Christianity owes to Judaism. It was not, as I had been taught to suppose, that the New Testament replaced the Old; rather, that Christianity gave a fresh interpretation to an ancient form of monotheism, gradually evolving into a different religion but carrying with it much of the moral and dogmatic theology, the liturgy, the institutions and the fundamental concepts of its forebear. I thereupon determined, should opportunity occur, to write about the people who had given birth to my faith, to explore their history back to its origins and forward to the present day, and to make up my own mind about their role and significance.

The world tended to see the Jews as a race which had ruled itself in antiquity and set down its records in the Bible; had then gone underground for many centuries; had emerged at last only to be slaughtered by the Nazis; and, finally, had created a state of its own, controversial and beleaguered. But these were merely salient episodes.

I wanted to link them together, to find and study the missing portions, assemble them into a ...

My second reason was the excitement I found in the sheer span of Jewish history. From the time of Abraham up to the present covers the best part of four millennia. That is more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilized humanity. I am a historian who believes in long continuities and delights in tracing them. The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives. They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present. Whence came this extraordinary endurance? What was the particular strength of the all-consuming ...

My third reason was that Jewish history covers not only vast tracts of time but huge areas. The Jews have penetrated many societies and left their mark on all of them. Writing a history of the Jews is almost like writing a history of the world, but from a highly peculiar angle of vision. It is world history seen from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim. So the effort to grasp history as it appeared to the Jews produces illuminating insights. Dietrich Bonhoeffer noticed this same effect when he was in a Nazi prison. ‘We have learned’, he wrote in 1942, ‘to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of those who are excluded, under suspicion, ill-tre...

story of the Jews: it adds to history the new and revealing dimen...

Finally the book gave me the chance to reconsider objectively, in the light of a study covering nearly 4,000 years, the most intractable of all human questions: what are we on earth for? Is history merely a series of events whose sum is meaningless? Is there no fundamental moral difference between the history of the human race and the history, say, of ants? Or is there a providential plan of which we are, however humbly, the agents? No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistenc...

many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man-made. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose. Does their own history suggest that such attempts are worth making? Or does it reveal their essential futility? The account that follows, the result o...

From 1266 the Jews were forbidden to enter the Cave to

pray. They were permitted only to ascend seven steps by the side of the eastern wall. On the fourth step they inserted their petitions to God in a hole bored 6 feet 6 inches through the stone. Sticks were used to push the bits of paper through until they fell into the Cave.

Hebron is thus an example of Jewish obstinacy over 4,000 years. It also illustrates the curious ambivalence of the Jews towards the possession and occupation of land. No race has maintained over so long a period so emotional an attachment to a particular corner of the earth’s surface. But none has shown so strong and persistent an instinct to migrate, such courage and skill in pulling up and replanting its roots. It is a curious fact that, for more than three-quarters of their existence as a race, a majority of Jews have always lived outside the land they call their own. They do so today.

So, in Palestine and Syria, the investigation of ancient sites, and the recovery and translation of a vast number of legal and administrative records, have tended strongly to restore the value of the early Biblical books as historical narratives.

Whereas, fifty years ago, any early passage from the Bible was assumed to be mythical or symbolic, the onus of proof has now shifted: increasingly scholars tend to assume that the text contains at least a germ of truth and see it as their business to cultivate it. This has not made the historical interpretation of the Bible any easier. Both the fundamentalist and the ‘critical’ approach had comforting simplicities. Now we see our Bible texts as very complex and ambiguous guides to the truth; but guides none the less.

What strikes one about the Jewish description of creation and early man, compared with pagan cosmogonies, is the lack of interest in the mechanics of how the world and its creatures came into existence, which led the Egyptian and Mesopotamian narrators into such weird contortions. The Jews simply assume the pre-existence of an omnipotent God, who acts but is never described or characterized, and so has the force and

invisibility of nature itself: it is significant that the first chapter of Genesis, unlike any other cosmogony of antiquity, fits perfectly well, in essence, with modern scientific explanations of the origin of the universe, not least the ‘Big Bang’ theory.

God is presented in the most emphatic terms as a person.

The prehistoric sections of the Bible thus constitute a kind of moral fundament, upon which the whole of the factual structure rests. The Jews are presented, even in their most primitive antecedents, as creatures capable of perceiving absolute differences between right and wrong.

a moral universe superimposed on the physical one

Moreover, not only is Noah the first real man in Jewish history: his story foreshadows important elements in Jewish religion. There is the Jewish god’s obsession with detail, in the construction and loading of the ark. There is the notion of the one righteous man. Even more important, there is the Jewish stress on the supreme importance of human life, because of the imaginative relationship of man to God, which occurs in the key verse 6 of Genesis 9: ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.’ This might be termed the central tenet of Jewish belief, and it is significant that it occurs in conjunction with the Flood, the first historic

event for which there is non-Biblical confirmation.

Habiru seems to have been a term of abuse used of difficult and destructive non-city-dwellers who moved from place to place.

the real purpose of the Bible narratives: the depiction of individuals, the ancestors of the people, in a moral context and,

still more important, the origin and development of their collective relationship with God.

early Bible records testify to the creative role played by women in the shaping of Hebrew society, to their intellectual and emotional strength, and to their high seriousness.

the early Bible is above all a statement of theology: an account of the direct, often intimate, relationship between the leaders of the people and God. Here the role played by Abraham is determinant. The Bible presents him as the immediate ancestor of the Hebrew people and founder of the nation. He is also the supreme example of the good and just man. He is peace-loving (Genesis 13:8-9), though also willing to fight for his principles and magnanimous in victory (14:22), devoted to his family and hospitable to strangers (18:1), concerned for the welfare of his fellow men (18:23), and above all God-fearing and obedient to divine command (22:12; 26:5). But he is not a paragon. He is a deeply human and realistic personality, sometimes afraid, doubtful, even

sceptical, though ultimately always faithful and carrying out...

It is true that Abraham’s covenant with God, being personal, has not reached the sophistication of Moses’ covenant on behalf of an entire people. But the essentials are already there: a contract of obedience in return for special favour, implying for the first time in history the existence of an ethical God who acts as a kind of benign constitutional monarch bound by his own righteous agreements.37

This underlines the whole purpose of sacrifice, a symbolic reminder that everything man possesses comes from God and

is returnable to him.

The Old Testament, it is important to grasp, is not primarily about justice as an abstract concept. It is about God’s justice, which manifests itself by God’s acts of choice.

The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history,

dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it pleased God to make.

In Jacob’s day, men still carried their household gods about with them, but it was already becoming possible to think in terms of a national God too.

Jacob’s adoption of the name Israel (or Isra-el) marks the point at which Abraham’s God becomes located in the soil of Canaan, is identified with Jacob’s progeny, the Israelites, and is soon to become the almighty Yahweh, the god of monotheism.

The Bible shows most leaders born without place or power but raised to it by their own efforts, themselves the product of acts of divine grace.63 The Bible sees a peculiar virtue in powerlessness, appropriate to a people which has seldom possessed power, and suffered much from its exercise; but it also sees virtue in achievement, and achievement as the sign of virtue, especially of those once weak

and lowly.

For those who heard, and later read, about it, the Exodus gradually replaced the creation itself as the central, determining event in Jewish history. Something happened, at the frontiers of Egypt, that persuaded the eye-witnesses that God had intervened directly and decisively in their fate. The way it was related and set down convinced subsequent generations that this unique demonstration of God’s mightiness on their behalf was the most remarkable event in the whole history of nations.

though the Mosaic code was in this sense part of a Near Eastern tradition, its divergences from all other ancient codes are so many and so fundamental as to make it something entirely new. Firstly, the other law-codes, though said to be inspired by God, are given and worded by individual kings, such as Hammurabi or Ishtar; they are thus revocable, changeable and essentially secular. By contrast, in the Bible, God alone writes the law–legislation throughout the Pentateuch is all his–and no Israelite king was ever permitted, or even attempted, to formulate a law-code. Moses (and, much later, Ezekiel, transmitter of the law reforms) was a prophet, not a king, and a divine medium, not a sovereign legislator. Hence, in his code there is no distinction between the religious and the secular–all are one–or between civil, criminal and moral law.

This indivisibility had important practical consequences. In Mosaic legal theory, all breaches of the law offend God. All crimes are sins, just as all sins are crimes.

the Mosaic code laid down, in the case where a man strikes a woman and she has a miscarriage, or when death follows a culpable accident, and in all lesser cases, ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot’,90 a much misunderstood passage, which simply means that strict compensation for the injury is due.

the huge importance the Mosaic code attaches to human life. There is a paradox here, as there is in all ethical use of capital punishment. In Mosaic theology, man is made in God’s image, and so his life is not just valuable, it is sacred. To kill a man is an offence against God so grievous that the ultimate punishment, the forfeiture of life, must follow; money is not enough. The horrific fact of execution thus underscores the sanctity of human life.

in the Mosaic law no property offence is capital. Human life is too sacred where the rights of property alone are violated. It also repudiates vicarious punishment: the offences of parents must not be punished by the execution of sons or daughters, or the husband’s crime by the surrender of the wife to prostitution.

the Mosaic code treats the body with respect. Physical cruelty is reduced to the minimum.

Decalogue,

The earliest form, as given directly by Moses, has been reconstructed as follows, falling naturally into three groups, one to four covering the relations between God and man, six to ten dealing with relations between men, and the fifth, acting as a bridge between the two, dealing with parents and children.

Indeed, being both historically minded and legalistic, they were inclined to formalize and cling to old superstitions.

God lives, how can his power be arbitrarily and unequally divided into a pantheon of deities? The idea of a limited god is a contradiction. Once the process of reason is applied to divinity, the idea of a sole, omnipotent and personal God, who being infinitely superior to man in power, and therefore virtue, is consistently guided in his actions by systematic ethical principles, follows as a matter of course. Looking back from the perspective of the twentieth century, we see Judaism as the most conservative of religions. But in its origins it was the most revolutionary. Ethical monotheism began the process whereby the world-picture of antiquity was destroyed.

since God is not merely bigger than the world, but infinitely bigger, the idea of representing him is absurd.111 It stands to reason, then, that to try to make an image of him is insulting. The Israelite ban on images, though not the oldest part of their religion, is very ancient and emerged soon after the cult of monotheism became established. It became the fiery symbol of the religion’s puritan fundamentalists, the aspect they found most difficult to impose on the nation as a whole, the most obvious, visible difference between the Israelite religion and all others, and the dogma the rest of the world

most resented, since it meant that strict israelites, and later Jews, could not honour their gods. It was closely linked not just to Israelite exclusiveness but to aggression, since they were told not merely to forswear images but destroy them:

Moreover, the Israelites were wrong to suppose–if they did suppose–that the use of images was a form of religious infantilism. Most Near Eastern religions of antiquity did not