ONE View Of World History

We know the Neanderthals were replaced by Homo sapiens. It is thought that one of the big differences between the two was the latter’s capacity to tell stories. With that comes the ability to elaborate larger regimes, many supporting the ideas of a leader to foster large projects like kingdoms.

Archeologists tell us about the ancient regimes, in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In the latter we know about the Sumerian civilization leading to the Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) supremacy. The Pharaohs of Egypt ruled to the south.

When the persecuted Jews bolted from Egypt, settling ultimately on both sides of the river Jordan, they persisted as a minor ethnic entity at the pleasure of the giant empires of the region. What distinguished them was their non-material monotheism in a pagan world. Akhenaton of Egypt offered the Sun God to the Egyptians during his reign, but this monotheism was buried at his death without a trace. When the Assyrians dispersed the population of the separated northern kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes vanished into the melting pot. Only Judah and Benjamin remained in the southern kingdom of Judea, of the twelve tribes, to carry on their message.

After King David, King Solomon built the first temple in Jerusalem and ruled with independence, Empires rose and fell, with Judea a vassal state of giant powers. Babylon destroyed the first temple and exiled leadership, the nation was permitted restoration by Cyrus of Persia and a new temple was built.

Much later the Greeks ruled. Judea had a period of real independence after the Maccabee revolt, before falling under the tutelage of Rome. During Roman rule, a preacher with a substantial following, one we know of today under the name of Jesus, challenged some of the traditional forms of Jewish religious worship . Although his goals were religious, the Roman Administration under Pontius Pilate saw him as a threat on a political level. He had him arrested and crucified.

What followed has some mystery. Although the family claimed the corpse, his followers reported that his body had disappeared, and that he had nevertheless been seen alive. His followers claimed that he had ascended bodily to heaven.

The Jews, unable, in the end, to tolerate pagan religious intrusion by Rome, went into full revolt. The Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., amid revolts over the next sixty years, the majority of Jews were dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. (Some remained in Jerusalem, and in the northern Galilee where religious leadership resided, (through contact with diaspora rabbis,) after the Temple’s destruction.)

Jesus’ Disciples, and many Jews who followed their teachings, spread the Jesus story. One, renamed Paul, abandoned the traditional path of Judaism. Following Jewish community practices, religious study, regular daily worship, and child education, were onerous for most under diaspora conditions. (This community structure enhanced their ability to survive as a scattered nation in exile.) Paul offered supporters a guaranteed path to salvation, an eternal afterlife, solely for accepting the belief that Jesus had risen before ascending bodily to heaven.

Jesus’ followers, despairing of blanket Jewish adhesion, sought an offering more appealing to potential pagan followers, particularly Romans. Jesus’ deification, a God-inspired virgin birth declared, Saints and miracles, became the order of the day. The organized Roman Catholic Church formulated a New Testament to replace the Jewish bible, included the Gospel of St. Mathew, written some hundred years after Jesus’ death, claiming Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion from that of Rome. The demonization of Jews was effected for all time. Three hundred years after Jesus’ passing, Rome adopted a modified version of Judaism renamed Christianity.

There followed more than 1500 years of persecution of Jews and their exclusion from general society. Tolerated when and where their knowledge and abilities were useful, Jews were seen universally as having committed the cardinal sin, killing Christ, to be forever persecuted and punished for their adjudged collective crime. A million were slaughtered in the Rhineland during a Crusade to free Jerusalem, blamed for the Black Death plague, ghettoized , murderous pogroms everywhere, excluded from the guilds, unable to own land, expelled from how many countries. But billions around the world still follow the religious idea that was born with them.

In our own day, Jews were excluded from employments, and choice of residence, their educational opportunities limited. It has been reported Church followers were active in elements of the Holocaust. The Pope of the era said nothing about what was happening before his eyes during the Hitler years.

Shall I now recount the miracle of rebirth? Not without the expenditure of blood and treasure. Israel, as always, is tiny among the Empires. As Jews around the world, and through history, have contributed to humanity, out of all proportion to their numbers, so Israel is counted among the mighty in so many fields, out of all proportion to its population numbers.

With an Arab party, many adherents sworn enemies, part of its recent government, it is a stalwart of Democracy. Science and medicine, technology and defense, agriculture and politics, new and better answers are being produced from this tiny place every day. Jews in the world take heart and feel new strength in every other country they inhabit, because of Israel.