Jews, Judaism, and Success Quotes

“Also instructive for anyone – Jew or non-Jews – looking to succeed in the modern world is the entire saga of Jewish history that has been discussed throughout this book. It shows how perseverance in the face of adversity can pay off in the long term.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“The more important value for Jewish success was a high regard for the cultivation of the intellect…”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“Most important for our purposes here is that the [Jewish] obsession with learning and cultivating the intellect had no precise parallel in Christian Europe in the early medieval period.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“What emerges here is that the rabbis, in dwelling as much as they did on the concerns of this world, were motivated by a vision that they constructed quite deliberately. They believed that the best hope for the Jewish people to overcome their dire circumstances was to engage in the world as it was, not to retreat from it. As we will see in the next chapter, that vision helped Jews survive not just up to the year 1000 but in the late medieval and early modern periods as well, and once the modern period arrived, the same vision prepared them to achieve immense success when they were invited to become part of Western society.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“Their [the Rabbi’s] answer to the catastrophe that befell the Jewish community in the Roman period was to embrace life even more intensely than before.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“To put it succinctly, in fashioning a Judaism that allowed Jews to survive centuries of subjugation, the rabbis also fashioned a Judaism that allowed Jews to thrive in the modern period.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“That is why Jews succeeded as they did in Europe: Christian Europeans had created an environment in which Jews could thrive. Jews, who had recently been invited to become part of non-Jewish society, found themselves entering a world that was built on ideas that were already deeply entrenched in their own collective mindset.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“If Judaism was going to survive, the rabbis would have to take their religion into their own hands and shape it so that it could deal with the reality of exile. The same sense of independence helps explain why the rabbis adopted a high degree of tolerance for each other’s opinions on the meaning of God’s laws. If the rabbis could argue with God, as they sometimes did, they could certainly argue with other rabbis.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement

“The Protestants were not much better than the Catholics in their treatment of dissenters.”
― Robert Eisen, Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement