“Why have Jews survived through the ages while other civilizations and religions have come and gone?” Thus begins the online “Ask the Rabbi” Web page sponsored by Chabad, one of the most prominent and active Orthodox groups in the world. The response delivered by Rabbi Moshe Goldman, a Chabad emissary in Canada, is not surprising: “G‑d did it and continues to do it.”
The rabbi’s answer rests on the claim that Jews are God’s Chosen People and thus guaranteed a special form of divine protection. This assertion is deeply rooted in Jewish history and figures prominently in the Hebrew Bible and many other traditional Jewish writings. The Book of Genesis reports on the “everlasting covenant” that God forged with Abraham and his descendants. Later the medieval and early modern Jewish mystics referred to the Jewish people as “netsah Yisra’el,” the eternal Israel that would survive all earthly travails.
This traditional claim does not lend itself to sustained historical inquiry into how exactly the Jews survived. Indeed, we still struggle to understand what explains the endurance of this small people, when so many other larger and more powerful groups—great world empires from the Romans to the Mongols to the Ottomans—have passed from the stage of history.
Complicating the query are two recurrent characteristics in the annals of the Jews. First, throughout history, they have been a people in movement, beginning with the mythic account of the sojourn of their founding patriarch Abraham from Ur (in present-day Iraq) to the land of Canaan some four thousand years ago. They have never ceased moving throughout their history and have made their ways to all corners of the globe, from Yemen to the Netherlands to Brazil to Australia; in fact, they pioneered the very notion of a “diaspora,” a Greek term invented to describe their dispersed state. One scholar has labeled Jews the classic “Mercurians” in the world, alluding to their constant mobility and resourcefulness in adapting to new settings.
Along with the Jews’ constant motion throughout their long and wide dispersion, there is a second striking feature of their history: they have consistently been disliked. The long history of antisemitism—a modern term applied anachronistically to an old phenomenon—has few peers. For thousands of years, Jews have been subject to stigmatization, marginalization, and full-blown attempts at elimination. Perhaps no group in human history has been regarded with such disdain for so long by so many. What is especially remarkable is the malleability of the phenomenon. Jews have been hated as jealous Christ-killers and godless atheists, rootless cosmopolitans and insular ghetto dwellers, internationalist communists and arch-capitalists.
And yet, they have survived. They have repeatedly defied the odds by overcoming challenge, crisis, and tragedy with new forms of religious, cultural, and political expressions. Tellingly, in the wake of the most sustained attempt to eradicate them during the Holocaust, they have developed two of the largest and, by many measures, most successful communities produced during their long journey: Israel and the United States.
Their resilience has reduced even avowedly secular observers to mystical reverie. The early-twentieth-century historian Simon Dubnow, one of the three towering Jewish historians of the modern age (along with Heinrich Graetz and Salo W. Baron), wrote of the “secret of the existence” of the Jews. Despite his own abandonment of religious belief as an adolescent, he echoed the explanation of traditionalists for whom Jewish survival was a supernatural miracle.
The veil of mystery has inspired many explanations. Apart from the traditional biblical view that Jews are God’s Chosen People, they range from the assertion of Church Fathers in the fourth century that the Jews were preserved, albeit in a debased state, in order to bear witness to the truth of Christianity to Hannah Arendt’s notion in the twentieth century that it was the alliance of Jews with political sovereigns that saved them—until the rise of the Nazis, when it proved to be their undoing. More recently, scholars have argued that it was the premium placed on literacy in the post–Second Temple era that provided Jews with a competitive advantage that enabled them to survive.
Amidst the welter of explanations, this book pursues a different tack, seeking to explain how, rather than why, the Jews have survived. It does so as part of the effort to chronicle, in a very short space, the long history of the Jews, for their very survival is the main drama in that tale. We begin by recalling what evolutionary biologists teach us, namely, that human survival writ large has been enabled by the capacity to respond and adapt to a variety of challenging environments, not just one.
The Jews are an especially illuminating case study of this proposition, having weathered frequent challenges by developing a mechanism that allowed them to adapt to new environments without losing a distinctive sense of cultural self. Ironically, the two factors mentioned above—the constant mobility of Jews and the persistent hostility toward them—have been key components of that adaptive mechanism.
This seems curious, if not delusional. How could it be, for example, that the enmity that Jews have faced throughout their history could preserve them? Drawing on the Roman historian Tacitus, the seventeenth-century renegade Jewish philosopher Benedictus Spinoza wrote that the stubborn adherence of the ancient Jews to their particular laws led them to separate from their Gentile neighbors. This segregation made them alien and despised in the eyes of the Gentiles. Far from leading to their disappearance, Spinoza argued, it was “Gentile hatred” that preserved the Jews. On his provocative reading, it was not just the external barriers posed by Gentile society that kept the Jews apart. It was also the Jews’ own consciousness of being reviled that fortified their sense of being distinct. This dynamic took on curious new form in the post-Enlightenment era, when Jews began to lose the high degree of faith and commitment to ritual observance of their medieval predecessors. In the absence of those pillars, Gentile enmity—and the organized fight against it—became central modes of Jewish identity. Spinoza’s insight holds true up to today; both antisemitism and the efforts to combat it define how Jews see and define themselves.
But there are obvious constraints on the surprising logic of hatred as a preservative force. When hatred leads to mass murder, as in the Holocaust, then it destroys rather than preserves. But throughout much of their history, Jews were disliked in ways that reinforced their sense of being a distinct people. Seen in isolation, this perspective risks reducing Jewish history to an unrelentingly “lachrymose,” or tearful view, to borrow the memorable phrase of Salo Baron. But Jewish history is far more than the static tale of antisemitism.
It is also a story of constant motion that kept Jews lithe on their feet, moving from place to place when the need arose, like a good boxer (of which there were more than a few Jews) who is able to dodge and deflect the full brunt of blows directed against him. The ceaseless mobility of the Jews led to a second key factor in enabling their survival—what we may call in shorthand “assimilation” (otherwise known as “acculturation”). In contemporary parlance, this word induces panic in Jewish community officials, who point to high intermarriage rates and weakening organizational affiliation as signs of the impending disappearance of the Jews. In historical terms, assimilation refers to the process by which Jews, in making their way to new locales, absorbed the linguistic and cultural norms of their Gentile neighbors—and then shared their own. This peculiar understanding follows the usage of historian Gerson Cohen, who argued in 1966 that assimilation as a means of cultural interaction was not only unavoidable in Jewish history, but also necessary to the survival of the Jews. Without the constant cultural encounters, enacted every day over the course of millennia, Jews would have become fossilized, as the British historian Arnold Toynbee famously and mistakenly claimed they had. In fact, it was the interaction with non-Jews that allowed for the explosive diversity of Jewish culture and the ongoing vitality of its practitioners.
An instructive example of this process is the range of Jewish languages that Jews developed apart from Hebrew, beginning with Aramaic and Greek in antiquity and extending to Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), and Yiddish, among many others. These languages emerged out of the daily exchange that Jews had with Gentile neighbors and the vernacular they spoke. Prior to modern times, Jews typically acquired fluency in the tongues of their host societies, but they still felt a need to create their own encoded version of them, accessible only to other Jews. In most instances, they did so by transcribing the language not in vernacular script but in Hebrew letters, while at the same time adding Hebrew words to the linguistic mix. What resulted was a rich and entwined bilingualism, whereby Jews spoke and wrote both in the vernacular and in the Hebraized cognate. Out of this web emerged great works of cultural production—legal tomes in Aramaic, philosophy in Judeo-Arabic, biblical commentary in Judeo-Spanish, and belles lettres in Yiddish.
This kind of cultural work reflects not only the potential, but also the limits of Jewish “assimilation.” Jews were able to tone their cultural muscles as they balanced between adaptation to the broader world and preservation of the borders of their narrower Jewish community. Maintaining this balance was not simply a matter of Jewish will. It also depended on a wide range of external conditions, including, most especially, the persistence of antisemitism.
It is at this point that the two key factors converge. Assimilation, understood in the idiosyncratic sense above, ensured ongoing cultural vitality, allowing Jews to survive for millennia in a variety of settings beyond their homeland. Antisemitism, meanwhile, guaranteed that the path of Jews to full integration was frequently blocked. Unlikely as it may seem, these two forces have interacted, allowing Jews to persist, when many other groups faded.
In following this fascinating story, I have opted not to divide the book in conventional fashion, namely into chronologically based chapters. Instead, I have chosen five themes to capture some of the major animating forces of the Jewish past. Each of these themes is rendered in the plural; thus, “Culture” is not employed but rather “Cultures” to reflect the diversity of cultural encounters of a widely dispersed group in many different venues. The five themes are meant to be representative but by no means exhaustive. At the same time, they are intended to be interwoven and cumulative, as well as occasionally overlapping to reinforce points of particular import.
Invariably in an undertaking of this sort in which selectivity and distillation are key, not all major categories of historical experience that deserve attention—for example, economics—can be included. It is my hope that, notwithstanding this and other deficiencies, the reader will gain a rich enough sense of the flowing currents of the Jewish past to grasp its intrigue and, even, its marvel.