History of the Jews

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 whole, and make sense of it.

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 idea which made the Jews different and kept them homogeneous? Did
its continuing power lie in its essential immutability, or its capacity to adapt, or both? These are sinewy themes with which to grapple.

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-treated, powerless, oppressed and scorned, in short those who suffer.’ He found it, he said, ‘an experience of incomparable value’. The historian finds a similar merit in telling the story of the Jews: it adds to history the new and revealing dimension of the underdog.

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 persistence in the face of savage suffering. Many of them believe it still. Others transmuted it into Promethean endeavours to raise our condition by purely human means. The Jewish vision became the prototype for 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 of my own inquiry, will I hope help its readers to answer these questions for themselves.

The Jews are the most tenacious people in history. Hebron is there to prove it. It lies 20 miles south of Jerusalem, 3,000 feet up in the Judaean hills. There, in the Cave of Machpelah, are the Tombs of the Patriarchs. According to ancient tradition, one sepulchre, itself of great antiquity, contains the mortal remains of Abraham, founder of the Jewish religion and ancestor of the Jewish race. Paired with his tomb is that of his wife Sarah. Within the building are the twin tombs of his son Isaac and his wife Rebecca. Across the inner courtyard is another pair of tombs, of Abraham’s grandson Jacob and his wife Leah. Just outside the building is the tomb of their son Joseph.
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This is where the 4,000-year history of the Jews, in so far as it can be anchored in time and place, began.

Hebron has great and venerable beauty. It provides the peace and stillness often to be found in ancient sanctuaries. But its stones are mute witnesses to constant strife and four millennia of religious and political disputes. It has been in turn a Hebrew shrine, a synagogue, a Byzantine basilica, a mosque, a crusader church, and then a mosque again. Herod the Great enclosed it with a majestic wall, which still stands, soaring nearly 40 feet high, composed of massive hewn stones, some of them 23 feet long. Saladin adorned the shrine with a pulpit. Hebron reflects the long, tragic history of the Jews and their unrivalled capacity to survive their misfortunes. David was anointed king there, first of Judah (
II
Samuel 2:1-4), then of all Israel (
II
Samuel 5:1-3). When Jerusalem fell, the Jews were expelled and it was settled by Edom. It was conquered by Greece, then by Rome, converted, plundered by the Zealots, burned by the Romans, occupied in turn by Arabs, Franks and Mamluks. 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.
²
Even so, the petitioners were in danger. In 1518 there was a fearful Ottoman massacre of the Hebron Jews. But a community of pious scholars was re-established. It maintained a tenuous existence, composed, at various times, of orthodox Talmudists, of students of the mystic kabbalah, and even of Jewish ascetics, who flogged themselves cruelly until their blood spattered the hallowed stones. Jews were there to welcome, in turn, the false Messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, in the 1660s, the first modern Christian pilgrims in the eighteenth century, secular Jewish settlers a hundred years later, and the British conquerors in 1918. The Jewish community, never very numerous, was ferociously attacked by the Arabs in 1929. They attacked it again in 1936 and virtually wiped it out. When Israeli soldiers entered Hebron during the Six Day War in 1967, for a generation not one Jew had lived there. But a modest settlement was re-established in 1970. Despite much fear and uncertainty, it has flourished.

So when the historian visits Hebron today, he asks himself: where are all those peoples which once held the place? Where are the Canaanites? Where are the Edomites? Where are the ancient Hellenes and the Romans, the Byzantines, the Franks, the Mamluks and the Ottomans? They have vanished into time, irrevocably. But the Jews are still in Hebron.

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.

Hebron is the site of their first recorded acquisition of land. Chapter 23 of the Book of Genesis describes how Abraham, after the death of his wife Sarah, decided to purchase the Cave of Machpelah and the lands which surrounded it, as a burying-place for her and ultimately for himself. The passage is among the most important in the entire Bible, embodying one of the most ancient and tenaciously held Jewish traditions, evidently very dear and critical to them. It is perhaps the first passage in the Bible which records an actual event, witnessed and described through a long chain of oral recitation and so preserving authentic details. The negotiation and ceremony of purchase are
elaborately described. Abraham was what might now be termed an alien, though a resident of long standing in Hebron. To own freehold land in the place he required not merely the power of purchase but the public consent of the community. The land was owned by a dignitary called Ephron the Hittite, a West Semite and Habiru of Hittite origin.
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Abraham had first to secure the formal agreement of the community, ‘the children of Heth’, ‘the people of the land’, to make the transaction; then to bargain with Ephron about the price, 400 shekels (i.e. pieces) of silver; then to have the coins, ‘current money with the merchant’, weighed out and handed over before the communal elders.

This was a memorable event in a small community, involving not merely transfer of ownership but change of status: the ritualistic bowings, the dissimulations and false courtesies, the hardness and haggling, are all brilliantly conveyed by the Bible narrative. But what strikes the reader most, what lingers in the mind, are the poignant words with which Abraham begins the transaction: ‘I am a stranger and a sojourner with you’; then, when it was concluded, the repeated stress that the land ‘was made sure unto Abraham for a possession’ by the local people (Genesis 23:20). In this first true episode in Jewish history, the ambiguities and the anxieties of the race are strikingly presented.

Who was this Abraham, and where did he come from? The Book of Genesis and related Biblical passages are the only evidence that he existed and these were compiled in written form perhaps a thousand years after his supposed lifetime. The value of the Bible as a historical record has been a matter of intense argument for over 200 years. Until about the year 1800, the predominant view, among scholars and layfolk alike, was fundamentalist: that is, the Bible narratives were divinely inspired and true in whole and in detail, though many scholars, both Jewish and Christian, had maintained for centuries that the early books of the Bible in particular contained many passages which should be understood as symbols or metaphor rather than as literal fact. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, a new and increasingly professional ‘critical’ approach, the work mainly of German scholars, dismissed the Old Testament as a historical record and classified large parts of it as religious myth. The first five books of the Bible, or pentateuch, were now presented as orally transmitted legend from various Hebrew tribes which reached written form only after the Exile, in the second half of the first millennium
BC
. These legends, the argument ran, were carefully edited, conflated and adapted to provide historical justification and divine sanction for the religious beliefs, practices and rituals of the post-Exilic Israelite
establishment. The individuals described in the early books were not real people but mythical heroes or composite figures denoting entire tribes.
⁴

Thus not only Abraham and the other patriarchs, but Moses and Aaron, Joshua and Sampson, dissolved into myth and became no more substantial than Hercules and Perseus, Priam and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Aeneas. Under the influence of Hegel and his scholarly followers, Jewish and Christian revelation, as presented in the Bible, was reinterpreted as a determinist sociological development from primitive tribal superstition to sophisticated urban ecclesiology. The unique and divinely ordained role of the Jews was pushed into the background, the achievement of Mosaic monotheism was progressively eroded, and the rewriting of Old Testament history was pervaded by a subtle quality of anti-Judaism, tinged even with anti-Semitism. The collective work of German Biblical scholars became the academic orthodoxy, reaching a high level of persuasiveness and complexity in the teachings of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), whose remarkable book,
Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel
, was first published in 1878.
⁵
For half a century Wellhausen and his school dominated the approach to Biblical study, and many of his ideas influence the historian’s reading of the Bible even today. Some outstanding twentieth-century scholars, such as M. Noth and A. Alt, retained this essentially sceptical approach, dismissing the pre-conquest traditions as mythical and arguing that the Israelites became a people only on the soil of Canaan and not before the twelfth century
BC;
the conquest itself was largely myth too, being mainly a process of peaceful infiltration.
⁶
Others suggested that the origins of Israel lay in the withdrawal of a community of religious zealots from a Canaanite society they regarded as corrupt.
⁷
These and other theories necessarily discarded all Biblical history before the Book of Judges as wholly or chiefly fiction, and Judges itself as a medley of fiction and fact. Israelite history, it was argued, does not acquire a substantial basis of truth until the age of Saul and David, when the Biblical text begins to reflect the reality of court histories and records.

Unfortunately, historians are rarely as objective as they wish to appear. Biblical history, which for Christians, Jews and atheists alike involves beliefs or prejudices which go to the very root of our being, is an area where objectivity is peculiarly difficult, if not quite impossible, to achieve. Moreover, scholarly specialities involve their own
déformations professionnelles
. During the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth centuries, Biblical history was controlled by the text scholars, whose instinct and training was and is to atomize the Biblical
narratives, identify the sources and motives of those who assembled them, select the few authentic fragments on this basis, and then reconstruct events in the light of comparative history. With the development of modern scientific archaeology, however, a countervailing force has been exerted, for the bias of the archaeologists is to use the ancient texts as guides and seek confirmation in the physical remains. In Greece and Asia Minor, the discovery and excavation of Troy, of Knossos and other Minoan sites in Crete, and of the Mycenaean cities of the Peloponnese, together with the unearthing and deciphering of ancient court records found in some of them, have rehabilitated the Homeric tales as historical records and enabled scholars to perceive growing elements of reality beneath the legendary veneer. 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. The work of W.F. Albright and Kathleen kenyon in particular has given us renewed confidence in the actual existence of places and events described in the early Old Testament books.
⁸
Equally important, the discovery of contemporary archives from the third and second millennia
BC
has thrown new light on hitherto obscure Biblical passages. 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.

The Jews are thus the only people in the world today who possess a historical record, however obscure in places, which allows them to trace their origins back into very remote times. The Jews who worked the Bible into something approaching its present shape evidently thought that their race, though founded by Abraham, could trace forebears even further and called the ultimate human progenitor Adam. In our present state of knowledge, we must assume that the very earliest chapters of the book of Genesis are schematic and symbolic rather than factual descriptions. Chapters 1-5, with their identification of such concepts as knowledge, evil, shame, jealousy and crime, are explanations rather than actual episodes, though embedded in them are residual memories. It is hard, for instance, to believe that the story of Cain and Abel is complete fiction; Cain’s reply, ‘Am I my
brother’s keeper?’, has the ring of truth, and the notion of the shamed and hunted man, with the mark of guilt upon him, is so powerful as to suggest historic fact. 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.

Not that the Jewish God is in any sense identified with nature: quite the contrary. Though always unvisualized, God is presented in the most emphatic terms as a person. The Book of Deuteronomy, for instance, is at pains to draw a distinction between the despised pagan peoples, who worship nature and nature-gods, and the Jews who worship God the person, warning them ‘lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them’.
⁹
Moreover, this personal God, from the start, makes absolutely clear moral distinctions, which his creatures must observe, so that in the Jewish version of early man moral categories are present and imperative from the very beginning. This again differentiates it sharply from all pagan accounts. 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.