The Miracle

In the Cairo Museum stands a giant slab of black granite known as the Merneptah stele. Originally installed by Pharaoh Amenhotep III in his temple in western Thebes, it was removed by a later ruler of Egypt, Merneptah, who reigned in the thirteenth century BCE. Inscribed with hieroglyphics, it contains a record of Merneptah’s military victories. Its interest might have been confined to students of ancient civilisations, were it not for one fact: the stele contains the first reference outside the Bible to the people of Israel. What does it tell us about our ancestors and how they appeared to others? The inscription lists the various powers crushed by Merneptah and his army. It concludes:

All lands together, they are pacified; Everyone who was restless, he has been bound By the King of Upper and Lower Egypt.…

Among those who were “restless” were a small people otherwise unmentioned in the early Egyptian texts. Merneptah or his chroniclers believed that they were now a mere footnote to history. They had not simply been defeated. They had been obliterated. This is what the stele says:

Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.

The first reference to Israel outside the Bible is an obituary notice. Ironically, so is the second. This is contained in a basalt slab dating from the ninth century BCE which today stands in the Louvre. Known as the Mesha stele, it records the triumphs of Mesha, king of Moab. The king thanks his deity Chemosh for handing victory to the Moabites in their wars, and speaks thus: “As for Omri, king of Israel, he humbled Moab many years, for Chemosh was angry with his land. And his son followed him and he also said, ‘I will humble Moab.’ In my time he spoke thus, but I have triumphed over him and over his house, while Israel has perished forever.”

The story of Jewish survival is so strange, unique and vast that it strains our imagination to the limit. Even the events of a single century, our own, defy sober description. The twentieth century of the Common Era – the fifty-seventh century, Jewish time – witnessed the most brutal, systematic assault on the Jewish people since ancient times: the Third Reich’s Final Solution in which the whole of European Jewry was scheduled for destruction and in which six million Jews, one third of world Jewry, perished. Yet, the Jewish response to the Holocaust has been the rebirth of the State of Israel, the restoration of Jewish sovereignty after a lapse of nineteen hundred years and the ingathering of Jews from more than seventy countries to their ancestral home.

More than 3,000 years ago Moses, at the end of his life, addressed the assembled Israelites in the desert. They had not yet crossed the Jordan. Their history as a people in their own land had not yet begun. In world terms, they were an insignificant group of erstwhile slaves, a potential irritant to other powers but no more. Nonetheless, as he reviewed the events that they had lived through, Moses was convinced that this people and its story would endure to the end of time. He foresaw no comfortable destiny for his people. When he turned to the future, he did not speak of a mighty civilisation, economically strong and militarily invincible. Moses’ speech is entirely free of the triumphalism that marks the records of other leaders of the ancient world. Israel, he predicted, would remain a tiny people. It would frequently be at the mercy of greater powers. It would be led astray by affluence. Its people would lose the one thing that made them different, even remarkable: their faith in and dedication to God. They would suffer defeats and exile and persecution. But they would remain distinctive. They would endure. And one day, “Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens,” God would bring them back.

At the very beginnings of their national history Moses recognised that there would never be any other people quite like Israel. Turning to the new generation, he asked them a rhetorical question:

For ask now of the days past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and from one end of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it?

That question still echoes, gathering force with each successive century.

Today, as the twentieth century draws to its close and as we stand as if on a mountain peak surveying the breathtaking landscape of Jewish history, we know this: that those who sought to destroy the people of the covenant gather dust in the museums of mankind while am Yisrael chai, the people Israel lives. Ancient Egypt is no more. The Moabites have long since disappeared. The Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans successively strode the stage of world dominion. Each empire played its part, said its lines, and each in turn has gone. In our day, the two great powers which declared “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not” – the Third Reich and the Soviet Union – have been defeated, dismantled and have disappeared. But the Jews survive. “Ask now of the days past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth…whether there hath been any such thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it?”

WITNESSES Perhaps we are too close to appreciate to the full the majestic, improbable persistence of the Jewish people. We speak, after all, of our people, our grandparents and theirs back across the generations. Wonders are more awesome when we come upon them from afar, but this wonder is no further away than our own family tree were we able to trace it back four thousand years through space and time.

Perhaps, too, we are victims of our own astonishing faith. For never once, even in our remotest past, did we doubt that Israel would be a people of eternity. In a passage of almost unrelieved darkness, Moses foresees the devastation that would befall Israel if it departed from its sacred vocation. But at the end of this prophecy of suffering, he adds in the name of God. “Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking My covenant with them.” Isaiah declares that though Israel will be deeply afflicted, “a remnant will return.” Jeremiah, in cascading poetry, solemnly affirms the immortality of Israel:

This is what the Lord says, He who appoints the sun to shine by day, Who decrees the moon and stars To shine by night, Who stirs up the sea So that its waves roar – The Lord Almighty is His name: “Only if these decrees vanish from My sight,” declares the Lord, “Will the descendants of Israel ever cease To be a nation before me.”

Jews never doubted the truth of the momentous blessing we make over the Torah, in which we thank God “who gave us the Torah of truth and thus planted within us eternal life.” No one has put this sense of certainty better than Paul Johnson at the culmination of his A History of the Jews:

If the earliest Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it. They always knew that Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race. That Jewish dilemmas, dramas and catastrophes should be exemplary, larger than life, would seem only natural to them. That Jews should over the millennia attract such unparalleled, indeed inexplicable, hatred would be regrettable but only to be expected. Above all, that the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted or vanished into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed.

The most eloquent witnesses to the miracle of Israel are therefore not Jews but those who came upon our history from the outside. Blaise Pascal was one. In his Pensées, he wrote:

Whereas the peoples of Greece and Italy…have long since perished, these [the Jews] still survive, and, despite the endeavours of so many mighty kings who have over and over again sought to destroy them, as their historians testify and as it is easy to deduce by the natural course of things, they have nevertheless been preserved all through these many years (and their preservation was a thing foretold), and, stretching from their earliest to the latest times, their history embraces all others.

The Russian thinker Nicolas Berdyayev was another who was transfixed by his study of Jewish history. In The Meaning of History he confesses that it forced him to jettison his preconceptions of the laws governing the fate of nations. As a Marxist, he had believed that the destiny of civilisations was ruled by material forces: economies, wars, the physical indices of power. But in the case of Jewry he found a people whose fate could only be accounted for in non-material terms. As the prophet Zechariah had said, and as he now discovered, here was a people who endured “Not by might nor by power but by My spirit.”

Berdyayev was led to the following admission:

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint.… Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the most radical thinker of the nineteenth century, and Karl Barth, modern Christianity’s leading neo-traditionalist theologian, had no such sympathy for the Jews. Nietzsche was a hostile and relentless critic of Judaism. Necessarily so, for he saw in Judaism the origin of the ethical imperative in Western civilisation, which he sought to overthrow in the name of the will to power. Nonetheless he candidly admitted that “The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history” because, “faced with the question of being or not being,” they always chose to live as Jews even without power rather than ally themselves with power at the cost of ceasing to be Jews.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Karl Barth wrote about Jewish suffering. His Church Dogmatics is painful to read, for in it he reaffirms one of the most ominous of traditional Christian doctrines, that the trials and tribulations of Jews are the price they pay for refusing to become Christians. “This,” he writes, “is how Israel punishes itself for its sectarian self-assertion.” Nonetheless even he is moved to admit that “The existence of the Jews, as is generally recognised, is an adequate proof of the existence of God.” Consciously or unwittingly he was echoing a famous precedent. It is said that King Frederic the Great once asked a Lutheran clergyman to provide him with a proof of God’s existence. The pastor replied: “Your majesty, the Jews.”

A SINGULAR PEOPLE It was not simply that Jews survived. So too did the Chinese. So, as Arnold Toynbee pointed out, did the Parsees. It was that Jews survived without any of the normal accompaniments of survival. For most of their history, they had neither land nor power. They were driven into exile. They were dispersed across the face of the globe. Time after time they were uprooted. In the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and 1394, from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, from Perugia in 1485, from Milan in 1489, from Florence and Tuscany in 1494, and most dramatically and traumatically from Spain in 1492.

They had no common territory. Other than Hebrew, the language of prayer, they had no common language. Nor did they share a culture. Rashi lived in Christian France. Maimonides was born in Islamic Spain. One spoke French, the other Arabic. Their worlds were utterly different. Rashi inhabited the atmosphere of anti-Jewish hostility that was soon to explode in the massacres of the Crusades. Maimonides lived in the high intellectual altitude of Islamic neo-Aristotelianism. They were as far apart as were Western and Eastern European Jewry in the nineteenth century. All that linked them was a faith, a way of life, a memory and a hope. No people has ever been held together by such slender threads. Yet they proved stronger than steel.

Nor, contrary to the history of other great civilisations, did the Jews flourish once and then decline. Time and again they faced crisis and responded with stunning bursts of creativity. Always at or near the centre of world events, they faced opposition and hostility, first from the great empires of the ancient world – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia – then from the Greeks and Romans, then during the Middle Ages from Christianity and Islam, and most recently from the two great secular totalitarianisms, Fascism and Communism. At each phase they discovered new modes of spirituality from within themselves. Prophets and priests were succeeded by scribes and then sages, and in turn by commentators, jurists, poets, philosophers, mystics and pioneers of the return to Zion.

When the gates of wider culture and society were opened to them, within a generation the Jews had produced from their ranks scientists, statesmen, financiers, businessmen, intellectuals and literati. They did so in medieval Spain. They did so again as Enlightenment dawned. They contributed an astonishing number of the makers of the modern mind: Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Proust, Kafka, Canetti, Mahler, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss, Adorno, Isaiah Berlin, Chomsky, Pissarro, Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani. Jews revolutionised thought, art, politics, the cinema. They pioneered in disciplines from music to medicine. Numerically insignificant, they won a remarkable percentage of Nobel prizes. In Britain they have provided, out of all proportion to their numbers, Cabinet ministers and Masters of Oxbridge colleges.

When the gates were closed and the Jewish mind turned inward, its creative pulse hardly missed a beat as it directed its energies to Jewish law and piety and mystic speculation. In the darkest environments – France and Germany of the Crusades, the century after the expulsion from Spain, the benighted villages of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe – Jews carried with them a pillar of fire. Surrounded by poverty, ignorance and superstition, they sustained a life of literacy and religious scholarship. In yeshivot and Hasidic circles they penetrated the heavens. In Hamlet’s phrase, their kingdom might be bounded by a nutshell, but they were kings of infinite space.

Wherever they went, the Jews carried a message whose content varied little through the ages and which constituted the core of the Jewish contribution to mankind. Through the Bible, they had learned that God and nature are radically distinct. Jews had been the first to distinguish faith from myth and place it instead on the foundations of ethics. They taught that human beings have freewill and therefore moral choice and responsibility. They believed that human life is sacred, that the individual is made in “the image of God,” that justice is a supreme value, and that right is distinct from might. They insisted that no human power is beyond reproach and that a prophet may criticise a king. They taught that freedom is the touchstone of civilisation and that God Himself redeems slaves. Against every other theory of time, they maintained that history has meaning and is the stage on which man encounters God. They had faith that humanity, though corrupt, is redeemable and that our destination is the messianic age. Against every premature consolation, they taught that salvation lies not in the past but in the future. As long as violence and injustice reign, the messianic age is not yet.

Through its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam, Judaism taught monotheism to the world, and with it the supremacy of ethics. To quote Paul Johnson again:

All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews it might have been a much emptier place.

Western civilisation owes its character to two decisive influences, Athens and Jerusalem, the homes respectively of Greek reason and Jewish revelation, of Greek aesthetics and Jewish ethics. Without this tiny people, the Jews – seldom more and often less than half a percent of the population of the world – human history would have run a different course.

HEIRS TO ETERNITY Jews did more than survive under seemingly impossible circumstances. They maintained their distinctiveness against every inducement – sometimes benign, often brutal – to assimilate or convert. To every crisis they responded with renewal. Heirs to one of the world’s oldest faiths, they remained perennially young, creative, challenging, revolutionary. In each generation they embellished their ancient faith with new customs and interpretations and made it gleam as if it had just been given. Whenever the opportunity arose they enriched the life of the larger society in which they lived. Through thirty-seven long and difficult centuries they remained faithful to the mandate given by God to Abraham in the first words of covenantal history: “Through you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

And we are their heirs. Was there ever a more challenging proposition than this? Milton Himmelfarb once wrote: “Each Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is; yet taken together, we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable.” He was right. As individuals, there is nothing remarkable about Jews. There have been many theories, Jewish and non-Jewish, which attribute to us an innate genius, a racial gift, a genetic endowment, a mystic difference. None is convincing. Removed from our traditions, our past, our way of life and our community, within three generations or less we merge into the wider landscape and become invisible. Individually we are ordinary. Collectively we become something else.

For that reason we always set as our first and highest goal the transmission of identity across the generations. A Jewish child knew that he or she was something special, that he or she was “caught up in things great and inexplicable.” For each of us, surely, there was such a childhood moment whose significance we only realised many years later. Was it the first Seder at which we asked the four questions and perhaps, even then, dimly sensed the huge history of which we were the latest chapter? Was it when we began to learn Hebrew and translate verses from the Bible and slowly realised that a single ancestral chain linked us to Abraham and Sarah? Was it when we first attended synagogue and heard the sad, haunting melodies which seemed to speak of faraway sufferings and an unfathomable faith? Whenever it was, however it happened, at that moment we stumbled inadvertently on the great secret of Jewish existence: that though we might not be born great or achieve greatness, our history thrusts greatness upon us. We are more than individuals. We are part of a collective history and destiny, perhaps the strangest and most miraculous the world has ever known. That is our inheritance, and the most important thing we can do is to hand it on to our children.

THE BREAKING CHAIN That is what Jews did for thousands of years. And that is what we are failing to do now. With a speed and suddenness that has caught us unawares, the chain of Jewish continuity is breaking. In Britain, America, and throughout most of the diaspora, one young Jew in every two is deciding not to marry another Jew and have Jewish children.

I tremble as I write these words, and yet I must do so again: In Britain, America, and throughout most of the diaspora, one young Jew in every two is deciding not to marry another Jew and have Jewish children. In any age this would be an unspeakable tragedy. There were times – fifteenth-century Spain was one – when under terror and the threat of death Jews converted to Christianity. There were other times – eighteenth-century Germany and nineteenth-century Russia – when anti-Jewish prejudice was such that Jews chose assimilation, in Heinrich Heine’s famous phrase, as their “entrance ticket to European culture.” But today in countries where intermarriage is at its highest, there is no terror or threat. No avenues are closed. On the contrary, Jews in Britain and America are the best educated, most successful and most upwardly mobile of any religious or ethnic group. And yet Jews are choosing not to hand on their inheritance to their children.

In any age this would be a tragedy. In ours it is worse. For we have lived through the century in which, between 1941 and 1945, one third of the Jewish people died. Eighty percent of European Jewry was murdered. More than one million Jewish children were shot, gassed or buried alive. To this day we do not, nor perhaps to the end of time will we, understand the Holocaust. But there is one thing which every Jew understands, best summed up in the words of Emil Fackenheim, that we must not hand Hitler “a posthumous victory.” What greater posthumous victory can we give the enemies of Jewry than, in the space of the next generation, to cease to be Jews?

That is a question from the heart of darkness. But in the opposite direction there is a question from the core of light. For nearly two thousand years our ancestors prayed for the freedom to live without persecution as Jews. Since the collapse of the Bar Kokhba rebellion and the start of a seemingly endless exile, they prayed that one day they would be gathered in to their land. At the two climaxes of the Jewish year, at the Pesach Seder and at the end of Yom Kippur, they yearned for “Next year in Jerusalem.” In our time, these prayers have been answered. In Britain and America, Jews are free to live as Jews and are respected when they do. In Israel, ancient prophecies have come true. After nineteen hundred years of wandering, Jews have a home and a sovereign state. Jerusalem has been reunited and rebuilt. Hebrew, the ancient language of the Bible, has become again the living language of Jewish speech. There is no precedent in all of human history for this renaissance and return. How can it be that, at the very time when the hopes that drove us for centuries have become reality, Jews are turning their backs on hope and reality alike and ceasing to be Jews?

These are profound questions which cannot be fully answered here. In this book, I confine myself to manageable themes. What is happening to the contemporary diaspora, in which Anglo-Jewry is no exception to the rule? Why is it happening? And what, as a community, can we do to reverse the trend? These are straightforward, quantifiable and practical issues. Underlying them, though, is one fundamental proposition, the proposition I have argued here.

If we are Jews it is because our ancestors were Jews and because they braved much and sacrificed more to ensure that their children would be Jews. Can we do less? In the only verse in the entire Bible which explains why God chose Abraham – and thus Israel, and therefore us – we read: “For I have chosen him so that he will command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” Abraham was chosen because he would hand his way of life on to future generations. Ever afterward, until modern times, his descendants did likewise. Can we do otherwise?

The miracle of Jewish continuity is too precious for us to let it fail. Nor need it fail. I began this chapter with the oldest surviving words written by non-Jews about Jews. They were an obituary. “Israel is laid waste: his seed is not.” In one form or another those words have been pronounced many times, not only by Merneptah of Egypt and Mesha of Moab, but by a succession of tyrants from Haman to Hitler. More than three thousand years later, the people Israel lives. It is not that we were unscarred by our enemies. We were afflicted and wounded, and after the Holocaust, we limp. Yet, the Jewish will to live and confer Jewish life upon our children proved stronger than the greatest empire. It is this that is now in danger, as never before.