Jews, God and History [antikvár]

PREFACE Most history books about Jews are written by Jews for Jews, or by scholars for scholars. But Jewish history is too fascinating, too interesting, too incredible to remain the private property of Jews and scholars. This book is a popular history of this amazing people, written without bowing to orthodoxy or pandering to anti-intellectualism. It will furnish the arguments, the data, the ideas, but the reader will have to furnish his intelligent understanding. The author is not seeking to convince anyone or change anyone's opinion. This book is designed to entertain, to inform, and to stimulate. The real history of the Jews has not yet been written. It took Europe sixteen hundred years after the decline of Greece to realize that her literature, science, and architecture had their roots in Grecian civilization. It may take another few hundred years to establish that the spiritual, moral, ethical, and ideological roots of Western civilization are embedded in Judaism. To put it differently—^the furniture in the Western world is Grecian, but the house in which Western man dwells is Jewish. This is a viewpoint which is beginning to appear more and more in the v^ritings of both churchmen and secular scholars. Jewish history cannot be told as the history of Jews only, because they have nearly always lived within the context of other civilizations. The destiny of the Jews has paralleled the destinies of those same civilizations, except in one important respect. Somehow the Jews managed to escape the cultural death of each of the civilizations within which they dwelled. Somehow the Jews managed to survive the death of one civilization and continue their cultural growth in another which was emerging at the time. How did they survive? IX