How
the Jews Survived
Abridged
from The Daily Telegraph
Graham
Turner has spent four months talking to Jews in Britain,
the United States and Israel about their beliefs, their
fears and their sense of what the future holds.
How
on earth, I wondered, had the Jews, scattered across the
face of the globe and subject to persecution such as has
been visited on no other people, managed to survive, while
great empires – The Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Greek,
the Roman, the British – had all withered and died?
Over
the course of the past 2,000 years, the Jews have been expelled
from virtually every European country. They were kicked
out of the German states six times; out of parts of Italy
five times; out of France four times. They were massacred
by the Babylonians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Poles,
the Russians and, most recently, the Germans. They have
to keep thinking of moving from the countries where they
live.
For
many centuries, Jews could not own land, belong to guilds
or go to university. In Germany and Russia, they were not
allowed to travel without special permission. They were
routinely blamed for everything, from the death of Jesus
to the Black Death. There is surely the most astonishing
story of survival against all the odds in the whole of human
history. Yet they have not merely survived, they have flourished.
"There are only about 13 million of us", says
Ed Koch, three times Mayor of New York. "That is less
than a third of one per cent of the world’s population,
and yet, coming from the loins of the Jewish people, you
have Moses, Jesus, Marx, Freud and Einstein, the seminal
thinkers of the modern world. Not to mention 116 Jewish
Nobel Prize winners".
In
the United States, 5.7 million Jews account for only two
per cent of the population, but have roughly 10 per cent
of the members of Congress. A few years ago, seven out of
eight Ivy League colleges, which, even in the Sixties were
still applying quotas to Jewish students, had Jewish Presidents.
Nor
have Jews merely achieved positions of temporal power. Their
spiritual influence has been enormous. They have given the
other monotheistic religions a catalogue of priceless gifts.
They gave Christians and Muslims the notion of one God who
is not only the Creator of the Universe but also the God
who speaks through "the still, small voice" of
Conscience. They gave Christians the basis of their moral
law in the shape of the Ten Commandments.
Each
year, during the Seder meal with which they celebrate Passover
– the story is told of their release from bondage in
Egypt. That happened more than 3,200 years ago. They are
commanded to tell the story as if it were yesterday, and
are expected to learn the lesson of that story. The Holocaust
may cast an immensely dark shadow, but it is only the latest
shadow among many. The German Jews were the most assimilated
of all Jewish communities – and look what happened
to them.
Political
anti-semitism could only come again anywhere, even in the
United States.
"Non-Jews
have an endemic disease called anti-semitism", said
a New Jersey Professor. "But Jews tend to blow up any
inconsequential incident, as if the entire Gentile population
is about to rise up and wipe them out forever. If someone
throws a handkerchief in a synagogue, they think a pogrom
is in progress, said Jackie Mason, the comedian".
But
how did the Jews, this tiny people with no homeland, manage
to survive the multiple traumas of two millennia?
One
explanation, said Esther Rantzen, is that "the slow
often got wiped out. You always had to be a jump ahead of
the pogrom. I am casting no aspersions on those who died
but, if you are persecuted for thousands of years, it is
a very tough form of the survival of the fittest".
The crucial factor, however, was the genius of the rabbis
of old. In the long centuries after the Babylonian exile
2,500 years ago, they succeeded in creating a marvellously
shockproof survival capsule for a religion whose followers
had no firm land base; and who, from the moment the Roman
Emperor Constantine became Christian, were forbidden to
swell their ranks by making converts.
"The
Jews in Babylon", said the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks,
"reflected long and hard about what it would take to
survive in exile. "After all, they had already lost
10 of the 12 tribes of Israel, who’d chosen to assimilate
when they were conquered by the Assyrians. So the rabbis
who came after them knew what was at stake, because so many
of their brothers and sisters had simply abandoned their
people and their faith. They came to the conclusion that:
"We have got to create a survival mechanism that will
enable our people to keep their faith and identity in a
diaspora".
Jews
were told, through the dietary laws of kashrut, what was
kosher (fit to eat) and what was not. That, in itself, put
an immense social barrier between themselves and non-Jews.
They were told that every male child must be circumcised
on the eighth day after his birth. Not satisfied with the
Ten Commandments of Moses, they were given no fewer than
613 mitzvot to observe.
Religious
Jews were – and are – expected to say as many
as 100 different blessings every day. Jews everywhere were
encouraged to live within walking distance of a synagogue.
And the family was to be the primary unit of survival, and
celebrating in the home the Sabbath and the festivals.
As
the Jews moved out of their ghettos and into mainstream
society over the past two centuries, they have been faced
with different problems.
In
an open society, mixed marriages are shrinking Jewish communities.
Can
Judaism survive tolerance and kindness as successfully as
it survived persecution?
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