This is not a podcast, this is not a book, this is not even history. As a work of scholarship, it is absolutely worthless. As a document for policy advocacy, this has negative worth. We record these writings merely as a way to document a series of speculations about the nature, meaning, and purpose of Jewish history. The 'Why' of a religion, a peoplehood, an experience, hurtled through eons of episodes so eventful, so dramatic, so filled up with the infinite light of meaning, that the lessons to learn seem to have no end: connected both to the essence itself of being and thought, and also to life lived in every experience every day. Or, perhaps, these speculations have no essential meaning at all.
But from a certain point of view, from many points of view, world history, and/or certainly Western history, IS Jewish history, and you cannot begin to understand the world until you begin to understand the one people who lived the experience of history's main events. And whether our outlooks are sacred or secular, I would venture at least a 50% likeliness that this coincidence is not simply because Judaism is blessed or chosen by God, and I would venture no guess that Jews and Judaism are in any manner superior to others and their faiths, nor would I ever have such chutzpah to speculate that the story of Judaism is somehow connected to the fundaments of the ultimate plan and/or purpose of the world that a divine being sets in motion for us to realize; but rather, because through a series of convenient accidents of being, Judaism's always been placed at the exact center of the world story. Whether a divine being placed us at there is not the purview of this podcast, but the story of the Western world is tethered to the Jews and Judaism at their umbilicals, and now, in 2020, as the Western river of history seems potentially at its mouth, flowing itself as an overdocumented tributatary into an ocean of world history, the story of the world still seems no less tethered to the centrality of the Jewish story.
And this centrality need not be explained through any theory of Jewish superiority, or any theory of the of a Jewish god's superiority - though those are regrettably popular Jewish explanations; but in this explanation, at the center of the Jewish story is a series of accidents.
The first accident is a mere accident of geography. Israel and/or Palestine will forever be poised at the easternmost point of the Mediterranean sea, the single most easily designated meeting point between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Within this tiny junction at the center of every map, one of the many peoplehoods who inhabited it synthesized the influences of their experiences with surrounding geographical environs into the practice of an intellectual, spiritual, and moral revolution which, becacuse of their central geographical proximity to the entire world, was able to be more exported in all directions more easily than any other worldview. That's accident #1.
So that first accident, a geographical accident, causes a second accident, which is really a a long series of accidents which still have not ended. From its very beginnings, the people of Israel seemed to synthesize ideas of their neighbors most significant to ancient history. Three idea of consequence particularly:
Idea 1: taking the nascent monotheism occurring in Pharaonic Egypt; particularly when, during the period of Hebrew slavery, the Pharaoh Akhenaten banned all gods but Ra - the Sun god. From this, Israelites perhaps gained the idea of a single god, to whom not a single miraculous natural feature was attributable but many seemingly miraculous feats of nature - perhaps even all feats of nature.
Idea 2: the anthropomorphized, human-like gods of Mesopotamia which the Abrahamic line took with them upon their emigration to Canaan. From this, Israelites perhaps gained a concept of a divinity concerning itself with affairs of humanity more than affairs of nature, and therefore more concerned with the particularities of human behavior.
Idea 3: the complex legal codes of morality from Babylon, perhaps Hamurabi's, of which like codes must surely have become prolific in nearby civilizations, perhaps the best evidence of which is the religio/moral revolution in Canaan which could only have flourished with the aid of a sophisticated ethical system. When complex moral codes are combined with the idea of a singular god with human qualities whose powers border upon omnipotence, the beliefs and judgements of such a being, both human and omnipotent, must apply not only among the people and places where this god's rule is unquestioned, but in all places and times, even and perhaps especially in those places where his word has never been preached.
Together these three concepts created a singular, universal, and exportable morality. And therefore, one can view the place in which this revolution incubated as a petrie dish of thought, uniquely situated through geography for intellectual contagion. No place was far-flung influences more likely to reach than Israel, and far-flung places were more likely to encounter influences from no place more than those influences from Israel. And as the connectivity of the known world expanded to include not just the few civilizations around the Tigris and Nile but to include ever new parts of the world, so too each of these newly charted parts of the world secreted their influence upon the people of Israel, and the people of Israel influence upon them. As the millennia progressed, the world story expanded to include the whole of Europe and Africa, and the western half of Asia. As common era Jewish diaspora reached the second half of its second millenium, the world story still expanded to include the Americas on one side and East Asia/Oceania/Australia on the other, and as the centuries pass into the third millenium of this common era, these previously unknown corners of the world to commonly shared history have only accumulated greater and greater influence upon world affairs, and yet the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point, through which the tensions of world cultures play out at the point of their maximal geographic stress. That continuing series of accidents can be termed accident #2.
Idea 1: taking the nascent monotheism occurring in Pharaonic Egypt; particularly when, during the period of Hebrew slavery, the Pharaoh Akhenaten banned all gods but Ra - the Sun god. From this, Israelites perhaps gained the idea of a single god, to whom not a single miraculous natural feature was attributable but many seemingly miraculous feats of nature - perhaps even all feats of nature.
Idea 2: the anthropomorphized, human-like gods of Mesopotamia which the Abrahamic line took with them upon their emigration to Canaan. From this, Israelites perhaps gained a concept of a divinity concerning itself with affairs of humanity more than affairs of nature, and therefore more concerned with the particularities of human behavior.
Idea 3: the complex legal codes of morality from Babylon, perhaps Hamurabi's, of which like codes must surely have become prolific in nearby civilizations, perhaps the best evidence of which is the religio/moral revolution in Canaan which could only have flourished with the aid of a sophisticated ethical system. When complex moral codes are combined with the idea of a singular god with human qualities whose powers border upon omnipotence, the beliefs and judgements of such a being, both human and omnipotent, must apply not only among the people and places where this god's rule is unquestioned, but in all places and times, even and perhaps especially in those places where his word has never been preached.
Together these three concepts created a singular, universal, and exportable morality. And therefore, one can view the place in which this revolution incubated as a petrie dish of thought, uniquely situated through geography for intellectual contagion. No place was far-flung influences more likely to reach than Israel, and far-flung places were more likely to encounter influences from no place more than those influences from Israel. And as the connectivity of the known world expanded to include not just the few civilizations around the Tigris and Nile but to include ever new parts of the world, so too each of these newly charted parts of the world secreted their influence upon the people of Israel, and the people of Israel influence upon them. As the millennia progressed, the world story expanded to include the whole of Europe and Africa, and the western half of Asia. As common era Jewish diaspora reached the second half of its second millenium, the world story still expanded to include the Americas on one side and East Asia/Oceania/Australia on the other, and as the centuries pass into the third millenium of this common era, these previously unknown corners of the world to commonly shared history have only accumulated greater and greater influence upon world affairs, and yet the ancestral seat of the Jewish people is STILL poised to be the world's uniquely central meeting point, through which the tensions of world cultures play out at the point of their maximal geographic stress. That continuing series of accidents can be termed accident #2.
The third is as follows:
As we hope to have already established, these tensions of world influence operated at their ultimate point of pressure in this geographical node between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and this diversity of influence created a revolutionary peoplehood. Once a peoplehood in Canaan was so revolutionzied, a series of more powerful neighbor civilizations - be they Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and/or Roman - found these Israelites and their subversive beliefs to be such a threat that these Hebrews must be neutralized by any and all means over a period of a millennium, until such time as the most powerful civilization of them all, the Roman Empire, decimates the Hebrews into the same basic non-existence to which Rome brought hundreds of other peoplehoods for which thereafter was little record or none. But because of this same geographic tension that causes an overwhelming diversity of intellectual influences, this decimated peoplehood created yet another series of intellectual and moral revolutions.
The first of which, and this is accident #3, is a Rabbinic revolution which teaches almost precisely the opposite precepts to the original revolution of prophetic revelation:
The original moral revolution of the Hebrews, a pre-classical, mystic revolution of revealed truth, espoused a deity who preached a universal worldview, applicable to all times and all places. But this next moral revolution is a thousand years later, and established a long series of particulars within this universal morality. After 500 years of exposure to Greek culture in forms Syrian from the Selucid Dynasty, Egyptian from the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and Macedonian from the Antigonid Dynasty, all of them broken apart residues after the brief conquests of Alexander the Great. Taking with them exposure by either text or osmosis to the Socratic dialectics of Plato and Zeno. But while the Socratic dialogues were a kind of Athenian declaration of philosophical independence from the Homeric era of myths and gods, the Mishna and Gemara were a retethering back to the era of primal myths for a Judaism which had now assimilated the intellectual nuance of classicism. As Socrates's death showed, Greek philosophy and skepticism provided a radical break with its past, but by this time, the truly radical Israelite break with its Semitic past was already a millennium ago. For the Hebrews of the Roman era, the truly revolutionary act would not be a second radical break with their past, but rather, radical continuity: to preserve the essence of a past culture but nevertheless make it capable of evolving to the accommodation of new eras' requirements, rather than every epochal shift necessitating a radical break, as one had to figure every pre-historic attempt at civilization did, which is perhaps why recorded history as we know of it began only when it did.
Perhaps it is paradoxical, even now in 2020, to declare that the second revolution of Israel was a revolution of conservation, a coup d'etat of permanent stability, but this revolution was a statement of labyrinthinely complex principles over three hundred years, declaring in the first that all the lessons and laws of Judaism had entirely been received and permanently fixed, perhaps in part because there was already so much to conserve, but also in part because there was no guarantee that Jews would be able to create any more history within their formative land. The Sages of the early common era knew very well that their time as the principle occupants of the land of Israel was severely limited.
Each new preeminent civilization had come to Israel, correctly perceiving this geographic node between the continents as being of the most vital strategic importance, and each coming to grief because they could not control the vital people within this vital land - each new preeminent civilization more powerful than the last, both in their capabilities for creation and destruction. Perhaps one could even say that the Common Era was created because the Roman Empire had such extreme capability compared to preceding Empires that they could build and destroy civilizations in manners of which even the most inventive civilizations before them lacked. And therefore, in a new rung of human evolution, with entirely new creative and destructive capabilities, the dynamism of Israeli minds, which already seemed relatively extreme in "per-keppe" comparison to any other peoplehood, had to be refocused entirely for a new existential challenge: Preserve the identity and history of Israel in foreign lands. Continually interpret and re-interpret the foundational texts for the requirements of every new era and place. Rather than worship according to the unquestioned revelations of prophetic authority, constantly question, constantly discuss, constantly engage in dialogue, and if not yet among the laymen, then at least among the sages, one rabbi to another, questioning each other page by page, question by question, across geographical space and time over more than half-a-millennium, creating a mosaic that, as often is commented lately, looks uncannily like a 2010s hypertext. And by doing so, and declaring that the truth of Judaism is not in the skies, which is not just how Abraham and Moses would conceive of religion, but also Plato, but here on earth, for we, the living, to determine and actuate according to the pressing needs of our time and place. And consequently, the religion of the Israelites, formerly tied as all worship was, to the land, is transfigured into a portable religion, newly designed with the capability to practice in the least sympathetic places and times, and rather than center a religion upon a covenant of land, centers the religion upon the book which promises that now mostly broken covenant of land.
That's accident #3.
Jews become a separate nation within every nation, who therefore, and let's use a paradoxical phrase: by the closeness of their distance, "the closeness of their distance" - meaning that the many dissimilarities of Jews to their neighbors becomes accentuated by their continual presence in the lives of their host countries. All other groups eventually assimilate into one another: the Prussians, the Bavarians, the Saxons, and the Wurtemburgians all had relatively distinct identities, but by 1871 their notable features were similar enough to unite as a singular German nation for Germans, and yet the Jews, even the assimilated Jews, so crucial to the development of a united Germany, were thought too essentially dissimilar to ever be considered fully German, and eventually even partially, leading to apocalyptic results. The Castillians, the Aragonians, the Leonians, and the Navarrians all eventually became the Spanish, more or less..., but due to religious differences, Spanish Jews remained considered their own people, unworthy of citizenship on Spanish soil, and in, of all years, 1492, were given the ultimatum of conversion or expulsion, and the conversions of those who chose the former path were never fully trusted, and led to tens of thousands of tortures and auto-da-fe, meaning execution by burning at the stake. In both cases, it seemed to be just at the moment of the country's greatest triumph, their fondest dreams, that they turned so virulently to Jew hatred. Obviously the circumstances were much more complicated, and as time goes on this extremely ADHD podcaster hopes to have sufficient dedication to this project to elaborate on said distinct complications and the like. On the other hand, during the Era of Black Death, beginning roughly 1348, and killing anywhere from a third to two thirds of the European population, Jews, who survived in far greater numbers by preserving their communities with far better hygenic practices, were often deemed to be the cause the Christian communities' death by poison, usually of the wells, and in these moments of civilizational weakness, Jews too were scapegoated in manners just as barbaric, entire communities of Jews around Europe slain and burned by the hundreds, and occasionally the thousands, until such time around 1400 as there may have been as few as 350 Ashkenazi Jews in the entire world.
In moments of great triumph and great tragedy, both moments of extreme fervor when critical ambiguity is utterly forgotten, the excited masses seem to direct their heated passions toward Jews, perhaps always known for their nuanced and complex reasoning, which is itself often thought to disguise trickery, and these host countries inevitably indulge in sadistic concupiscience to a point well past the typical battery and rapacity of everyday crime, and rather than the crimes of sufferance and victimhood which typically befall ethnic minorities in all countries, that which is perpetrated upon Jews so often becomes crimes of eradication.
So what causes these outbursts of "meta-mass violence" against Jews in era after era, country after country, that are too large to be explained as merely sadistic? All throughout the epochs, the violence against Jews is described in language like the attempted lancing of a wound, nations, or faiths, are the body, and while Jews are clearly part of the nation and its prosperity, this wound's pain is so great that civilizations feel as though they must amputate or irradiate whole parts of the national body in order to rid themselves of this ethnic pestilence. What has it been within Jews that eventually seems to bring out the desire in their host countries for their complete eradication and annihilation? And now, relevant to 2020 when the position of the world seems so precarious yet the position of Jews seems as close to impregnable as Jewish history ever allows, what are the chances of it happening again in our lifetimes?
Insofar as there can ever be an answer to a question so vast and painful to meditation, I believe that part of the answer must lie within an inability to forgive for Jews making their host countries come face to face with moral ambiguities. In plain English, many gentiles cannot forgive Jews for making them realize that life is complicated.
Perhaps reality is not this way, but it would seem as though everywhere Jews have gone, we have been the barometer of your civilization. So far as I and any other Jew I've spoken to or read ever seemed to know, we have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably allege, but we were, to use a metaphor from the extremely un-Jewish Christopher Hitchens - no matter what his ethnic origins...., the "yeast" that leavened your societies' rise. When we were your honored guests, your civilizations prospered. When you did us dishonor, your civilizations declined. As we've hopefully established at the beginning of this, the reason would not seem to be that God is watching over us and keeping score of who is doing well by His chosen people, the reason is probably deceptively simple: a civilization well-disposed toward its guests is a civilization that values the exchange of knowledge, tolerance, progress, and is therefore destined to improve.
One could make the argument, and I will make it at length in due time, that Judaism; the two millennium normative Rabbinic Judaism which is practiced unto our generation, revolves entirely upon these practical accommodation to the realities of all given moment and situation. Again and still yet again, the long-term survival of the Jewish people comes upon inevitable dependence upon practical adjustment to these realities whose dangers are quite often stark in extremis.
But it is precisely this practicality, this ambiguity, this subtlety, so often perceived as trickery and manipulation, which inevitably runs its shelf-life in every long-term situation to which Jews are deposited. In every dominant Western society over the common era, Jews seemed to arrive en masse just before the moments of their rise to the peak of world civilization. Is that in itself a coincidence (or 'accident?') or is there a direct correlation? Did Jews attach themselves to these rising countries to ride their waves of prosperity and reap the harvests of their prosperity, or were Jews directly responsible for facilitating the country's rise? And even if it's the former, is there anything at all wrong with that? While even if it's the latter, is there anything at all beneficial about such a union if it obviously ends time and again with so much tragedy? And if the answer is both, did Jews facilitate a country's rise only so they could benefit from it at the expense of others who would have been better off had they never met a Jew? These are not questions that generally occur to Jews, but they do occur to the gentiles who are always dealing with these unfamiliar people whose reputation precedes them in country after country, and they are questions at a clearance of ambiguity which most people do not have the cerebral wherewithal to wrestle. But even if these questions do not occur to Jews themselves, this level of ambiguous thought is endemic in the Jewish experience, and somehow Jews carry with them this capacity for ambiguity to wherever they journey, and they bring to their new countries these new tools for critical thought: in economics of course, but also nearly as obviously in what's probably the most crucial of all subjects to how we live: moral philosophy. Certainly more on that anon....
This intellectual ambiguity, this constant debate whether it's talmudic disputation or the infinitesimally finer points of Zionist politics or price kibbitzing at a deli counter, seems, in one way or another, endemic to Jewish life. This kind of parsing what probably seems like bupkes is ultimately the means by which Jewish life continues from age to age, because out of the trillions of notions debated in the Jewish community over the millennia, some keyner point of disputation is ultimately the difference between survival and death. To sustain a community and civilization from civilization to civilization, two-thousand years past what might have been a peoplehoods natural death, requires that level of care to sort out every ambiguous detail, and to breathe life into the ambiguous that creates reality where there once was Atzmus, or essence.
And this psychic difference between these Jewish and the native civilization of their lands, has entailed, over and over again, that Jews have become the main subject to which so many nations direct centuries of their mental space as they obsessively ponder how Jews can simultaneously live among others for centuries, be so incredibly influential in the lives of nation after nation, and yet seem to remain a community entirely separate. Though, of course, the Jewish community and the gentile community are never entirely separate. Thousands and thousands of Jews assimilate in country after country, give the best of themselves to the lives of their surrounding society rather than to their faith and peoplehood, and directly influence the lives of their countries in ways that seem completely as though anyone else could have done what they've done, and yet, when people squint, they inevitably perceive that Jewish ambiguity, that invisible worm of difference that irrevocably changes the society. Creating still more doubt, still more confusion, still more ambiguity, and still more chance for tension between the host countries and their extremely consequential guests. And it is in this manner that Jews directly influence the lives of every nation upon whose territory they live, and though in everything the Jewish people's mentality may seem completely unrelated to the mentality of the host country, each country has even more intimate influence on the history of Jews, as millions of Jews live their lives as Americans, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Dutchmen, Iberian/Spaniards, and yet also live lives as Jews - it seems to some as though Jews live twice while citizens of their host nations live once. And these accident of influence and co-dependence, of ambiguity and tension, of bond and resentment, of rise and fall, is accident #4.
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