The Secret

In 1899, the great American novelist Mark Twain wrote an article about the Jews. It ended with these words:

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous, dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s greatest names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the smallness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

It is a marvellous tribute, but it ends with a question, the right question. What is the secret of Jewish survival? No ordinary answer will suffice, because Jewish history has been altogether extraordinary. Jews remained a distinctive nation without land, power, territory or a shared culture. They were dispersed and almost everywhere a minority. For the most part they refused active efforts to convert them, and they resisted the passive pull of assimilation. No other people has kept its identity intact for so long in such circumstances. How then did they do so?

Faith suggests an answer. At Sinai, Israel and God entered into a solemn and mutually binding pledge: the covenant. Israel would dedicate itself to God. God, in turn, would protect Israel. The Jewish people would exist, in Jeremiah’s words, as long as the sun and the stars shone and the waves roared in the sea. Israel would be God’s witnesses, and their eternity would mirror His. Jews survived for a simple reason. Interwoven in our history was something larger than history: Divine providence.

I believe this answer to be true. Nor has it appealed to believing Jews only. Secular and non-Jewish historians, too, have been moved to a sense of religious wonder as they have contemplated the enigma of our people. Heinrich Graetz, for example, in his conscious attempt to secularise Jewish self-understanding in his History of the Jews a century ago, was nonetheless prompted to write: “The continuance of the Jewish race until the present day is a marvel not to be overlooked even by those who deny the existence of miracles, and who only see in the most astounding events, both natural and preternatural, the logical results of cause and effect.” So closely have the vicissitudes of Jewry mirrored the destiny laid out in the pages of the Bible that even the most hardened of sceptics has been forced into a temporary suspension of disbelief.

Nonetheless, this answer cannot suffice – and not only for unbelievers, but for believers as well. A consistent thread runs through Jewish thought, from the Bible, through the sages, to the present day. Providence, we believe, is not a unilateral decree imposed by Heaven on humanity. God grants us freewill, and therefore no outcome in the affairs of man is certain in advance. The Bible does not contain predictions. It contains prophecies, which are very different things. A prophecy is a warning and the stark portrayal of a choice. This way lies blessing, that way lies curse, but there are always two roads and the choice is ours. If providence is written between the lines of Jewish history, as I believe it is, it is a providence that works through, and not independently of, the free decisions of Jews. The question therefore remains. Why did Jews, in difficult circumstances and for generation after generation, choose to continue to be Jews?

ANTISEMITISM AND JEWISH SURVIVAL One answer was suggested by Spinoza. In order to understand it we should recall that Spinoza lived in an age still haunted by the Spanish expulsion. His ancestors had been Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity in fifteenth-century Spain, but who remained Jews in secret. Theirs was the original crisis of identity. They were half Jews, half Christians, torn between two cultures and distrusted by both. By the time Spinoza reached intellectual maturity in the relatively liberal environment of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, he had become convinced that religion had done great harm to humanity. Reason promised more than revelation. There should be a separation of church and state. Public life should be secularised. Jews would then be free to rid themselves of the tragic Jewish fate without having to convert to another faith.

Given Spinoza’s opposition to religion, he had to find a natural rather than a supernatural explanation for Jewish survival. His argument was striking and paradoxical. The Jews may have been threatened by antisemitism, but they had been preserved by it too. “As to their continuance so long after dispersion and the loss of empire,” he wrote, “there is nothing marvellous in it.” Jews kept themselves apart. Their laws were distinctive. They celebrated on special days and ate special foods. Indeed the whole code of Jewish law was a discipline of difference. The result was that they drew “down upon themselves universal hate.” Yet, far from threatening Jewish existence, hostility reinforced it. “That they have been preserved in great measure by Gentile hatred, experience demonstrates.”

Spinoza’s argument cannot be lightly dismissed. Undoubtedly, antisemitism has played a complex role in Jewish history. At times it threatened the very basis of Jewish survival: in the Crusades, the later expulsions, the Chmielnicki massacres of the seventeenth century, the pogroms of the nineteenth, and worst by far, the Shoah. At other times and in other ways, however, it formed a barrier against assimilation. It preserved a distance between Jews and their neighbours. Jews wishing to leave Judaism often found the doors barred, sometimes even after they had converted to Christianity. They were treated as outsiders, different, alien. Centuries later, assimilationists like Heinrich Heine and Max Nordau discovered the same thing. Heine eventually wrote: “I am now hated by Jew and Christian alike. I am truly sorry that I permitted myself to be baptized.” Nordau described the Jew who “has abandoned his specifically Jewish character, yet the nations do not accept him as part of their national communities. He flees from his Jewish fellow, because antisemitism has taught him, too, to be contemptuous of them, but his gentile compatriots repulse him as he attempts to associate with them.”

Antisemitism kept Jews apart. Indeed, the early rabbinic sages suggested something similar. Resh Lakish in the third century CE compared Israel to Noah’s dove which found no rest. “Had the dove found rest it would not have returned to the ark. Had Israel found rest among the nations, it too would not have returned to God.” Being too much at home in a non-Jewish culture could lead to a loss of Jewish identity. By contrast, persecution could lead to Jewish revival. Rabbi Joshua (early second century CE) argued that if Israel did not turn to God of their own accord, Heaven would send a king “whose decrees will be as harsh as those of Haman” and Israel would then return. Earlier still, the prophet Ezekiel had warned “You say: We want to be like the nations.… But what you have in mind will never happen.” So prophets and sages saw the hand of providence in antisemitism. It reinforced from the outside what the Jews believed from within, that they were “a people that dwells alone, not reckoned among the nations.”

Nonetheless, this explanation is inadequate. Antisemitism sometimes prevented assimilation, but at other times it led to it. In fifteenth-century Spain, eighteenth-century Germany and nineteenth-century Russia, Jews abandoned Judaism to escape hostility. The fact that they failed did not prevent them from trying. Correspondingly, periods of religious tolerance can lead to a dilution of Jewish identity, but they can also promote revival. The Golden Age of Spain, and postwar America, witnessed not only Jewish defections but also a flowering of Jewish scholarship. There is no direct, linear relationship between Jewish continuity and the attitudes and policies of the non-Jewish environment. Mark Twain’s question therefore remains: “All things are mortal but the Jew.… What is the secret of his immortality?”

A RELIGION OF CONTINUITY The answer, I believe, is straightforward. The secret of Jewish continuity is that no people has ever devoted more of its energies to continuity. The focal point of Jewish life is the transmission of a heritage across the generations. Time and again in the Torah we are drawn to dramas of the next generation. Judaism’s focus is its children. Abraham’s first words to God are “What can You give me, if I am without children?” Rachel says: “Give me children, for without them it is as if I am dead.” To be a Jew is to be a link in the chain of generations. It is to be a child and then a parent, to receive and to hand on. Moses “received the Torah at Sinai and handed it on…” and so must we. Judaism is a religion of continuity.

We who have grown up with Judaism are so familiar with this idea that we take it as self-evident, but it is not. It is exceptional, even unique. The first command in the Torah is not to believe, but to have children. Abraham is chosen not because he is righteous (only Noah is described as that) but because “he will instruct his children and his household after him.” On the brink of the exodus from Egypt, Moses does not spend time telling the Israelites about the land of milk and honey that awaits them across the Jordan. Instead, he instructs them about how they should teach future generations. Three times he returns to the theme: “And when your children ask you…,” “In days to come, when your son asks you…,” “On that day you shall tell your son….” Not yet liberated, they are invited to become a nation of educators.

Thus, from the very outset, Judaism predicated its survival on education. Not education in the narrow, formal sense of the acquisition of knowledge but something altogether broader. Indeed, the word “education” is wholly inadequate to describe Judaism’s culture of study, meditation and debate, its absorption in texts, commentaries and counter-commentaries, its devotion to literacy and lifelong learning. Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am.” A Jew would have said: “I learn, therefore I am.” If there is one leitmotif, one dominant theme linking the various periods of Jewish history it is enthronement of education as the sovereign Jewish value.

In one of the most famous verses in the Torah, Moses commands: “You shall teach these things diligently to your children, speaking of them when you stay at home or when you travel on a journey, when you lie down and when you rise up.” The first Psalm describes the happy human being as one who “studies Torah day and night.” In an astonishing commentary on rabbinic priorities, the fourth-century sage Rava, seeing another scholar prolonging his prayers when he might have been studying, said: “Such people forsake eternal life and occupy themselves instead with temporal life.” The rabbis said: “Greater is an illegitimate scholar than an ignorant high priest.”

The central, burning, incandescent passion of Jews was study. Their citadels were schools. Their religious leaders were sages: the word rabbi does not mean priest or holy man but teacher. Even when they were racked by poverty, they ensured that their children were educated. In twelfth-century France a Christian scholar noted: “A Jew, however poor, if he has ten sons, will put them all to letters, not for gain as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law – and not only his sons but his daughters too.” In the shtetl (small township) of Eastern Europe, learning conferred prestige, status, authority and respect. Men of wealth were honoured, but scholars were honoured more. It was they who occupied the seats of rank along the synagogue’s eastern wall. In their study of the culture of the shtetl, Life Is with People, Zborowski and Herzog describe the impact this made on the Jewish family:

The most important item in the family budget is the tuition fee that must be paid each term to the teacher of the younger boys’ school. “Parents will bend the sky to educate their son.” The mother, who has charge of household accounts, will cut the family food costs to the limit if necessary, in order to pay for her son’s schooling. If the worst comes to the worst, she will pawn her cherished pearls in order to pay for the school term. The boy must study, the boy must become a good Jew – for her the two are synonymous.

The result was that Jews knew. They knew who they were and why. They knew their history. They knew their traditions. They knew where they came from and where their hearts belonged. They had a sense of identity and pride. They knew Abraham and Moses and Isaiah and Hillel and Akiva and Rashi and Maimonides, for they had studied their words and argued over their meaning. The Torah was the portable homeland of the Jew, and they knew its landscape, its mountains and valleys, better than they knew the local scenery outside their windows. Jerusalem lay in ruins, but they were familiar with its streets from the prophets and the Talmud and they walked in the golden city of the mind. Nowhere else was literacy, scholarship and high culture so widely diffused, so highly prized as among this people of the book. Paul Johnson describes traditional Jewish life as an “ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.” It was an aristocracy of the spirit and mind. Not everyone, said Maimonides, can be a priest or a king. But the crown of Torah – the greatest of all crowns – is available to all.

THE TRANSMISSION OF IDENTITY Identity is a delicate thing. It is reality internalised, how we see ourselves in relation to the world around us. For most people at most times, identity is not a problem. It is provided by the surrounding culture and its institutions. For Jews, however, it has been a problem at most times and places throughout our history. The reason is simple. Jewish identity was not provided by the surrounding culture, for Jews were a minority in a non-Jewish environment. Most minorities eventually give up the uneven struggle of maintaining a separate identity. Based as it is on tradition, memory and habit, identity is weakened as these are eclipsed by adjustment to the ways of the majority. It takes time – several generations – for this to happen. But almost invariably it does.

Jews were different, for they saw their identity not as an accident of history – who they happened to be – but as a religious vocation – who they were called on to be. From the very outset they did not rest content with tradition, memory and habit, the legacy of the past. They renewed and recreated the past in each successive generation. A Jewish child, on Pesach, tasted the unleavened bread and bitter herbs of Egyptian slavery. On Sukkot he joined his ancestors in their tabernacles as they journeyed precariously through the desert. On Tisha be’Av he sat with the author of Lamentations and mourned the destruction of the Temple and the sufferings of his people through the ages. In the most vivid way, Jews handed on their memories to their children.

Not only their memories but their way of life. Since the days of Moses, Jews have lived distinctively according to the laws set forth in the Torah. Had this rested on habit alone it would have gradually disappeared once Jews were exiled and dispersed. But Jews were never content with habit. They believed not only in keeping the law but in studying it as well. Rabbinic Judaism is the only civilisation in which every citizen is expected not just to obey the law but to become a lawyer, a student and exponent of the law. Jews were – to use David Reisman’s terms – not tradition-directed but inner-directed individuals. The “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” of the Torah were not an external code but an internalised discipline, part of identity itself. That is how Jews were able to hand on their way of life to their children.

Even this might not have sufficed were it not for one other thing. Perhaps the most precious heritage Jews gave their children was hope. From the outset, Israel has been a remarkably future-oriented people. The story of Abraham begins with the promise of a land, but by the end of the book of Genesis it has still not been fulfilled. The book of Exodus begins with the Israelites leaving Egypt and travelling towards the land of milk and honey, but by the end of Deuteronomy they have still not arrived. In contrast with almost every other faith, Judaism’s golden age lies not in the past but in the future, just over the horizon.

As a result, at every moment of crisis – the Babylonian exile, the Roman destruction, the Spanish expulsion – prophets, sages and mystics were able to rescue a people from despair by messianic intimations. Jews remembered their future as actively as they recalled their past. They prayed towards Jerusalem and mentioned it constantly because they knew it would one day be rebuilt, and they or their children would return. It is said that Napoleon, passing a synagogue on Tisha be’Av in 1806 and hearing sounds of weeping, asked what tragedy had just occurred. He was told: “The destruction of Jerusalem seventeen centuries before.” He replied: “A people that can mourn a city for so long will one day have it restored.” He was right. Jewish memory, because of its peculiar character, kept Jewish hope alive. This, too, led Jews to live for the future, which meant for and through their children.

IDENTITY IN THE DIASPORA There is nothing inevitable about Jewish identity in the diaspora, and there never was. In Israel one is Jewish by living in a Jewish state, surrounded by a Jewish culture and Jewish institutions. But elsewhere, being Jewish means going against the grain, being countercultural. The most natural form of identity is to say, I belong to the here-and-now, to the people around me and the landscape I see every morning. Jews chose a more complex identity, and had they not done so they would have disappeared as Jews.

To be sure, since the days of Jeremiah they knew that their responsibility as citizens was to “seek the peace of the city to which I have carried you into exile, and pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” So, whenever permitted, they entered into the life of Cairo and Cordova, Vilna and Vitebsk and left it enriched. But that was where they were, not who they were. Who they were was the very opposite of the here-and-now. It was a breathtaking identity spanning time and space, centuries and continents. Jews were defined by a network of relationships stretching back to the biblical past and forward to the messianic future, linked in a common destiny with Jews across the globe.

Diaspora Jewish identity was and is a matter of the mind, not the senses; of nurture, not nature. We live through what we learn. If we do not learn what it is to be a Jew, nothing in our environment, except antisemitism, will tell us. And antisemitism, while it may remind us that we are Jews, provides no reason for us to want our children to be Jewish. Jews survived, quite simply, because they devoted their best energies to education, their money to schools, their admiration to scholars, their spare hours to study, and their first concern to the tuition of their children. Their identity was constantly learned and relearned, enacted and reinforced, and passed on as a precious gift to the next generation. The secret of Jewish continuity is that Jews cared about it. They created continuity by making the transmission of tradition their first duty and greatest joy.

DEFYING DEATH The rabbis of the Talmud had a way of communicating deep truths in the most simple language. They told the following story about King David. David, they said, was once overcome by thoughts of his own mortality and prayed to God to know how long he had to live. God replied that no one is allowed to know when he or she will die. “Then let me know,” said David, “on what day of the week I will die.” “You will die,” said God, “on Shabbat.” As soon as he heard this, King David resolved to spend every Shabbat in uninterrupted study.

The appointed day eventually came and the angel of death was sent to bring David to heaven. But “learning did not cease from the mouth” of the king, and the angel was unable to lay hold of him. The angel knew it could not return to heaven empty-handed, so it devised a stratagem. It made a rustling noise in a tree in David’s garden. The king went out to investigate, and started climbing a ladder. The ladder broke, and as David was falling, he paused for a moment from his learning. At that moment, the angel laid hold of him and King David died.

It is a subtle story. On the surface it is a simple example of midrash aggadah, one of those legends by which the sages fleshed out the bare bones of biblical narrative and made them come vividly alive. It is, however, much more than that. The sages, with their unique combination of simplicity and depth, were talking not just about King David but about themselves and the fate of the Jewish people.

They had lived through two military uprisings against Rome: the great rebellion of 66 CE, and the Bar Kokhba rebellion of 132–135 CE. Both ended in disaster. As a result of the first, the Temple was destroyed. As a result of the second, the whole of Judea lay in ruins. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were refused entry on pain of death. Jews were profoundly affected by these two events. Not until the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943 were they again to take up arms against their oppressors. The twin defeats of the first and second centuries were catastrophic and devastating. For as long as anyone could foresee, Jews would not be able to survive by military strength or defend themselves by conventional weapons. How then would they endure?

The sages gave a remarkable answer. The military arena was not the only, or even the most important, battlefield. Of far greater significance from the point of view of Jewish continuity was the arena of culture, civilisation and faith. The Maccabees, who had begun as pious rebels against the Seleucid Greeks and had won a stunning victory which we still commemorate on Hanukkah, eventually became allies of Rome and thus agents of the very Hellenisation they had once opposed. So it was possible to win battles and yet lose the war against assimilation. If so, might the reverse not also be true? Might it not be possible to lose battles and yet win the war of identity.

The great Jewish embodiment of military prowess was King David. But there was another David, author of the book of Psalms. Reflecting on their fate, the sages realised that it was this other David who was the enduring symbol of Jewish life, not waging war but engaged in what was to become the very pulse of Jewish life after the destruction of the second Temple: study. The talmudic story of King David and the angel of death is nothing less than a metaphor of the people of Israel and its fate. David stood for Israel, the warrior turned scholar. So long as he carried a book, not a sword, he would be immune. The sages, in a story calculated to appeal to children, propounded a sophisticated hypothesis: that so long as their mouths did not desist from study, the angel of death would have no power over the Jewish people. The Jews might have lost the battles with Rome but they would win the war against mortality. Individual Jews would live and die but the Jewish people would be eternal. With the hindsight of history, we now know that they were right.

Daniel Elazar, in his encyclopaedic survey of world Jewry, People and Polity, draws the simple conclusion:

The history of the Jews has been a history of communities built around schools. They are the key institutions because they convey learning. Greek civilization survived for five hundred years after the Roman conquest of the Greek city-states, because the Greeks, like the Jews, had developed academies and they could live around those academies. When the academies failed, Greek civilization disappeared. The Jewish people has never allowed its academies to fail.

That is the secret of Jewish immortality.