by Paul Johnson
The Jews were not just innovators. They were also exemplars and epitomizers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and clarified from. They were the quintessential ‘strangers and sojourners’. But are we not all such on this planet, of which we each possess a mere leasehold of threescore and ten? The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp? The Jews were fierce idealists striving for perfection, and at the same time fragile men and women yearning for flesh-pots and safety. They wanted to obey God’s impossible law, and they wanted to stay alive too. Therein lay the dilemma of the Jewish commonwealths in antiquity, trying to combine the moral excellence of a theocracy with the practical demands of a state capable of defending itself. The dilemma has been recreated in our own time in the shape of Israel, founded to realize a humanitarian ideal, discovering in practice that it must be ruthless simply to survive in a hostile world. But is not this a recurrent problem which affects all human societies? We all want to build Jerusalem. We all drift back towards the Cities of the Plain. It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatize these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their particular fate into a universal moral. But if the Jews have this role, who wrote it for them?
Historians should beware of seeking providential patterns in events. They are all too easily found, for we are credulous creatures, born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme. Yet excessive scepticism can produce as serious a distortion as credulity. The historian should take into account all forms of evidence, including those which are or appear to be metaphysical. If the earliest Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it. They always knew that Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race. That Jewish dilemmas, dramas and catastrophes should be exemplary, larger than life, would seem only natural to them. That Jews should over the millennia attract such unparalleled, indeed inexplicable, hatred would be regrettable but only to be expected. Above all, that the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted or vanished into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed. The historian may say: there is no such thing as providence. Possibly not. But human confidence in such an historical dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them. The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves. Therein, perhaps, lies the key to their story.
Glossary
Aggadah: The non-legal part of the Talmud and midrash, tales, folklore, legends etc., as opposed to the Law itself (halakhah).
Aliyah: ‘Ascending’; emigrating to Israel; being called to read the Law in synagogue.
Am Ha-arez: Lit. ‘people of the land’; can mean ‘natives’, and sometimes used pejoratively, as denoting ignorance; the common people; the population as a whole.
Amoraim: Jewish scholars, third to sixth centuries AD, who produced the Gemara.
Ashkenazi: German Jews; west, central and east European Jews, in contrast to Sephardi Jews.
Ba’al shem: ‘Master of the Holy Name’; a learned kabbalist who knew how to use the power of the Holy Name; a learned man, usually hasidic.
Bar: ‘Son of’ (Aramaic) in personal names. ‘Ben’ (Hebrew) means the same.
Bar-mitzvah: Initiation of thirteen-year-old Jewish boy into the community.
Bet din: Rabbinical law court.
Cohen: Jew of priestly or Aaronic descent.
Conservative Judaism: Term used in the United States for Jewish worship which modifies the Law to meet modern needs while avoiding the wholesale changes of Reform Judaism.
Conversos: Spanish medieval and Renaissance term for Jews who converted to Christianity, and their descendants.
Dayyan: Judge in rabbinic court.
Diaspora: Collective term for the dispersal and Jews living in it, outside Erez Israel.
Erez Israel: Land of Israel; the Promised Land; Palestine.
Exilarch: Lay head of the Jews in Babylonia.
Galut: The Exile; the exiled community.
Gaon: Head of Babylonian academy.
Gemara: Rulings, etc., of the amoraim, supplementing the Mishnah and forming part of the Talmud.
Genizah: Depository of sacred writings; usually refers to the one in Fustat (Old Cairo).
Get: A Jewish bill of divorce.
Golem: An artificial man brought to life by magic.
Haganah: Jewish defence force under the British mandate, which became the basis of the Israeli army.
Halakhah: A generally accepted ruling in rabbinical law, and the part of the Talmud dealing with legal matters, as opposed to the aggadah.
Hanukkah: Feast commemorating the victory of the Maccabees over the pagan Greeks.
Hasidim: Followers of devout form of Judaism with strong mystical element, usually in eastern Europe.
Haskalah: Jewish form of the eighteenth-century European enlightenment. One who believed in it was a maskil.
Hazzan: Liturgical prayer-leader.
Heder (or cheder): Judaic primary school.
Herem: Excommunication.
Histadrut: Israeli labour federation.
Irgun: Underground military wing of the Revisionist movement in Israel, 1931-49.
Kabbalah: Jewish mysticism. ‘Practical kabbalah’ is a form of magic.
Karaite: Member of eighth-century Jewish sect which rejected the Oral Law or post-Biblical rabbinic teaching, and stuck to the Bible alone.
Ketubbah: Jewish marriage contract.
Kibbutz: Jewish settlement, usually agricultural, owning property in common.
Kiddush: Blessing over wine, preceding Sabbath or festival meal.
Knesset: Israel’s parliament.
Kosher: Food conforming to Jewish dietary laws or kashrut.
Levirate marriage: Obligatory marriage of childless widow with deceased’s brother (Deuteronomy 25:5).
Maggid: Popular hasidic preacher.
Marranos: Secret Jews, descended from Spanish and Portuguese forced converts.
Maskil: Member of the Jewish enlightenment or haskalah.
Masoretic: Word used of the accepted tradition for spelling and pronouncing the Bible.
Menorah: The seven-branched lamp used in Temple; the eight-branched candelabrum used on Hanukkah.
Mezuzah: Torah verses fixed to doors of Jewish houses.
Midrash: An exposition of Scripture or collection of such.
Minyan: Quorum (ten adult Jews) for community prayers.
Mishnah: Codified version of Jewish Oral Law.
Mohel: Circumciser.
Moshav: Smallholders’ co-operative in Israel.
Nagid: Medieval head of Jewish community.
Nasi: President of the Sanhedrin; a Jewish prince; a descendant of Hillel recognized as Jewish patriarch.
Oral Law: As opposed to the written Torah or Bible; first found written form in the Mishnah.
Orthodox Judaism: Traditional Judaism based on strict observance of the Law.
Pale: The twenty-five Tsarist provinces where Russian Jews were granted permanent residence.
Palmah: The full-time section of the Haganah.
Parnas: The chief synagogue official or elected head of the laity.
Pilpul: A talmudic discussion or dispute, often hair-splitting.
Piyyut: Liturgical poetry in Hebrew.
Purim: Festival commemorating deliverance of the Persian Jews by Esther.
Rabbi: Literally ‘master’; religious teacher.
Reform Judaism: Jewish worship modifying the Law to meet modern conditions.
Responsum: Written opinion in r
eply to query about the Law.
Revisionist: Follower of breakaway Zionist movement led by Jabotinsky.
Rosh Ha-Shanah: Jewish New Year holiday.
Sanhedrin: Supreme Court of religious scholars in Second Commonwealth.
Schnorrer: A professional beggar.
Shabbat: Dusk Friday till darkness Saturday.
Shabbetean: Follower of the false Messiah, Shabbetai Zevi.
Shadchan: A match-maker. A match is a shidduch.
Shammos: Synagogue sexton-beadle.
Sheitl: Wig worn by Orthodox woman in public.
Shekhinah: lit. ‘dwelling’; the numinous presence of God in the world.
Shema: Judaic confession of faith (Deuteronomy 6:4).
Shiksa: Young gentile woman.
Shofar: Liturgical ram’s horn.
Shohet: Ritual slaughterer.
Shtetl: Small Jewish town in eastern Europe.
Shulhan Arukh: Joseph Caro’s famous code of Jewish law.
Siddur: Prayer-book.
Sukkot: Festival of Tabernacles.
Tallit: Prayer-shawl.
Tannaim: Rabbinical scholars of Mishnah period.
Targum: Aramaic translation of Hebrew Bible.
Tefillin: Phylacteries or small leather boxes fixed to the arm or forehead during prayers.
Torah: The Pentateuch, or scroll thereof; the entire body of Jewish law and teaching.
Tosefta: Collection of tannaic teaching related to Mishnah.
Yeshivah: A rabbinical academy. The rosh yeshivah is head of it.
Yishuv: A settlement; the Jewish community in Erez Israel before the state was created.
Yom Kippur: Day of Atonement.
Zaddik: A hasidic leader or holy man.
Zohar: The principal work of kabbalah, being a mystical commentary on the Pentateuch.
Source Notes
PART ONE: ISRAELITES
1. For a description and plan of the tombs, see L. H. Vincent et al., Hebron: Le Haram El-Khalil. Sépulture des Patriarches (Paris 1923); Encyclopaedia Judaica, xi 671.
2. G. L. Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems (London 1890), 309ff.
3. E. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (London 1967), 168ff.
4. Herbert Han, updated by H. D. Hummel, The Old Testament in Modern Research (London 1970); R. Grant, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible (New York 1963).
5. English translation published Edinburgh 1885; New York 1957.
6. M. Noth, The History of Israel (2nd edn, London 1960); A. Alt, Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (New York 1968).
7. G. Mendenhall and M. Greenberg, ‘Method in the Study of Early Hebrew History’, in J. Ph. Hyatt (ed.), The Bible in Modern Scholarship (Nashville, New York 1964), 15-43.
8. See W. F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (3rd edn, Baltimore 1953) and Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (London 1968); Kathleen Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land (4th edn, London 1979) and The Bible and Recent Archaeology (London 1978).
9. Deuteronomy 4:19.
10. R. D. Barnett, Illustrations of Old Testament History (London 1966), ch. 1, ‘The Babylonian Legend of the Flood’.
11. Genesis 11:31.
12. L. Woolley et al., Ur Excavations (British Museum, London, 1954—); L. Woolley, The Sumerians (London 1954).
13. M. E. L. Mallowan, ‘Noah’s Flood Reconsidered’, Iraq 26 (1964).
14. W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atrahasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (London 1970); E. Sollberger, The Babylonian Legend of the Flood (3rd edn, London 1971).
15. Cambridge Ancient History, I i (3rd edn 1970), 353ff.
16. Genesis 9:18.
17. Encyclopaedia Judaica, v 330; Michael Grant, A History of Ancient Israel (London 1984), 32.
18. For a summary of the calculations, see R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the New Testament (London 1970).
19. See Kenyon, Archaeology of the Holy Land (London 1960), for the concordance between the Middle Bronze Age tombs outside Jericho and the Cave of Machpelah; Nelson Glueck, ‘The Age of Abraham in the Negev’, Biblical Archaeologist 18 (1955).
20. A. Parrot, Mari, une ville perdue (Paris 1935).
21. D. H. Gordon, ‘Biblical Customs and the Nuzi Tablets’, Biblical Archaeologist 3 (1940).
22. P. Matthiae, ‘Ebla à l’Époque d’Akkad’, Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, compte-rendu (Paris 1976).
23. A. Malamat, ‘King Lists of the Old Babylonian Period and Biblical Genealogies’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968); ‘Northern Canaan and the Mari Texts’, in J. A. Sanders (ed.), Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century (Garden City, NY 1970), 167-77; and ‘Mari’, Biblical Archaeologist, 34 (1971).
24. Genesis 23:29-34.
25. Quoted in R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (London 1970).
26. C. H. Gordon, ‘Abraham of Ur’, in D. Winton Thomas (ed.), Hebrew and Semitic Studies Presented to G. R. Driver (Oxford 1962), 77-84; E. A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY 1964). See also M. Grunberg, ‘Another Look at Rachel’s Theft of the Terraphin’, Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962).
27. Kenyon, The Bible and Recent Archaeology, 7-24.
28. J.-R. Kupper, Les Nomades de Mésopotamie au temps des rois de Mari (Paris 1957); I. J. Gelb, ‘The Early History of the West Semitic Peoples’, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 15 (1961).
29. E. A. Speiser, ‘The Biblical Idea of History in its Common Near Eastern Setting’, in Judah Goldin (ed.), The Jewish Experience (Yale 1976).
30. Genesis 26:16.
31. Genesis 16:12.
32. J. L. Myers, The Linguistic and Literary Form of the Book of Ruth (London 1955); Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, 1-25; S. Daiches, The Song of Deborah (London 1926).
33. S. W. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews (2nd edn, New York 1952), i I 44. Grant, A History of Ancient Israel, 32ff.
34. Joshua 24:2.
35. Isaiah 29:22.
36. Speiser, op. cit.
37. G. E. Wright, ‘How Did Early Israel Differ from Her Neighbours?’, Biblical Archaeology 6 (1943), Baron, op. cit., i I 48.
38. Genesis 22:2 says ‘thine only son Isaac’, meaning of course by Sarah.
39. Encyclopaedia Judaica, ii 480-6; Philo, De Abrahamo, 177-99, 200-7; Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:24; Nahmanides, Works, ed. C. B. Chavel (London 1959), i 125-6.
40. Fear and Trembling (trans.), Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth 1985).
41. Ernst Simon in Conservative Judaism 12 (Spring 1958).
42. Genesis 22:14.
43. Ibid., 22:18.
44. This theme is ingeniously discussed in Dan Jacobson, The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and its God (London 1982).
45. Abot 6:10 (baraita, Kinyan Torah); quoted in Samuel Belkin, In His Image: The Jewish Philosophy of Man as Expressed in the Rabbinical Tradition (London 1961).
46. Midrash Tehillim 24:3.
47. Leviticus 25:23; I Chronicles 29:15; Psalms 39:12.
48. Genesis 15:1-6.
49. Genesis 17:8.
50. W. D. Davies, The Territorial Dimensions of Judaism (Berkeley 1982), 9-17.
51. Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (trans., Edinburgh 1966); J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia 1972).
52. In Genesis 32:28 and 35:10.
53. In Genesis 37:1.
54. Genesis 29:30; 35:16-18; 48:5-6.
55. Genesis 25:13-16; 22:20-4; 10:16-30; 36:10-13.
56. W. F. Albright, ‘The Song of Deborah in the Light of Archaeology’, Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research, 62 (1936); H. M. Orlinsky, ‘The Tribal System of Israel and Related Groups in the Period of Judges’, Oriens Antiquus, 1 (1962).
57. O. Eissfeld in Cambridge Ancient History, II ii ch. xxxiv, ‘The Hebrew Kingdom’, 537ff.
58. Genesis 14:18-20; 17:1; 21:33.
59. For Shechem, see W. Harrelson, B. W. Anderson
and G. E. Wright, ‘Shechem, “Navel of the Land” ’, in Biblical Archaeologist, 20 (1957).
60. Genesis 48:22.
61. Joshua 8:30-5.
62. Cambridge Ancient History, II ii 314-17.
63. Baron, op. cit., i I 22.
64. Genesis 41:39.
65. Encyclopaedia Judaica, x 205.
66. Exodus 1:11.
67. Cambridge Ancient History, II ii 321-2.
68. H. H. Ben Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (trans., Harvard 1976), 42ff.
69. I Kings 1:6 refers to ‘the 480th year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel….’ Solomon’s reign is the first in Israel’s history for which we have absolute dating.
70. B. Couroyer, ‘La résidence Ramesside du Delta et la Rames Biblique’, Revue biblique 53 (1946).
71. Ben Sasson, op. cit., 44; Cambridge Ancient History, II ii 322-3.
72. Deuteronomy 4:23-4; Exodus 19:4-6.
73. Exodus 4:10ff.
74. Exodus 18:14-24.
75. Sifra 45d; Encyclopaedia Judaica, xii 568.