Ken Spiro

Five Famous Gentiles who said the same thing about the Jews

Ken Spiro – February 2022

One of the great challenges of being Jewish is learning to appreciate how totally weird Jewish history is.  When I say “weird” I mean how completely out of the ordinary Jewish history is compared to the history of other peoples. Things happen to us, for better and for worse, that just don’t happen to anyone else.  The reason this is so challenging is that we have come to accept what is basically supernatural as natural and normal and have lost the sense of wonder as to just how amazing it is that we are still here! 

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to take a step back and look at ourselves and our history through the eyes of outsiders, non-Jews who can more objectively appreciate the uniqueness of Jewish history.  Let’s take a look at five famous non-Jews who have all taken note of the uniqueness of the Jews.  

We’ll go in chronological order starting with the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, Blais Pascal: 

This people are not eminent solely by their antiquity, but are also singular by their duration, which has always continued from their origin...and in spite of the endeavors of many powerful kings who have a hundred times tried to destroy them...they have nevertheless been preserved... 

Next comes the 18^th century Bishop of Bristol, England, Thomas Newton: 

The preservation of the Jews is really one of the most signal and illustrious acts of Divine Providence…and what but a supernatural power could have preserved them in such a manner as none other nation upon earth hath been preserved …. We see that the great empires, which in their turn subdued and oppressed the people of God, are all come to ruin… 

Now let’s see what the famous Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy had to say about us: 

What is a Jew?  This question is not at all so odd as it seems.  Let us see what kind of peculiar creature the Jew is, which all the rulers and all the nations have together and separately abused and molested, oppressed and persecuted, trampled and butchered, burned and hanged...and in spite of this is still alive. 

Here’s what American author, Mark Twain wrote about the Jews in 1899: 

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream -stuff and passed away; the Greek and Roman followed and made a vast noise, and they are gone The Jew saw them all, beat them all… All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains.  What is the secret of his immortality? 

Finally, let’s see what early 20th-century Russian philosopher and theologian, Nikolai Berdyaev thought about Jewish history: 

Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by special predetermination…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... 

If we had to summarize in one sentence what all five of these famous personalities are saying it would be: “Isn’t it amazing that the Jewish people have suffered for so long at the hands of so many, yet have survived, while so many of those nations that persecuted them are gone.” 

The question is why are they all focusing on the same theme?  To understand this, we need to take a quick look at a few of the really usual aspects of Jewish history: 

Hated - The Jewish people have been around for a very long time, more than 3,000 years yet since we first appeared on the planet we have been the objects of such intense hatred and persecution that a special word was invented just to describe it-“antisemitism. “Throughout our very long history the Jewish people have lived in a lot of places yet, where ever we have gone, in any significant numbers, antisemtism has followed.   Jew hate has proven to be history’s longest, most universal, most irrational, and deepest hatred.  Logic would dictate that such an intense hatred would make the odds of Jewish survival small indeed yet, this wasn’t the only obstacle we had to overcome. 

Exiled – We may have begun our national history in the land of Israel 3,300 years ago and lived there as a nation for over a thousand years yet, we have spent the majority of history, the last two thousand years in exile, wandering around the world as strangers in a strange land.  Most of the ancient nations of the world are no longer with us yet, very few of them were exiled. To survive as a nation in exile is no easy accomplishment, but what makes Jewish history even more amazing is that we were exiled more than once and that is unheard of in history!  The first time was around 2,500 years ago at the hands of the Babylonians.  We survived that and came back to our homeland but were exiled again about 2,000 years ago by the Romans 

Scattered – If surviving as a people in exile for millennium wasn’t a big enough challenge, for most of that time we have lived in hundreds of communities scattered around the world, from one end of the earth to the other.   Isolation, persecution, expulsion, forced conversion, and outright slaughter destroyed many of the communities and stifled population growth so despite being around for thousands of years and traditionally having high birthrates, the Jewish people remained a tiny nation, and until today are just .2% of the world’s population! 

Persecution, exile, expulsion, wandering and slaughter have sadly been such a large part of the Jewish historical experience that we, as a people, have come to accept them as normal.  Non-Jews, like the ones quoted above, can look at us from a more objective perspective and see clearly that Jewish survival is one huge contradiction. To be exiled, dispersed, few in number, and constantly persecuted should have all been nails in the coffin of Jewish people’s existence yet, not only did we survive, we outlasted many of those nations that tried to destroy us. If you go back and reread these quotes again, you will see that is  precisely what these great non-Jewish minds found so amazing. .  (None of the people quoted above lived to see the return and rebirth of Israel in the mid-20^th century. Imagine what they would have written if they had lived to see that!?) 

The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion once said “To be a realist as Jew, you have to believe in miracles.”  If we can start to look at our history through the eyes of others, we can begin to appreciate how truly miraculous and amazing our history and our exitance really is. 

# posted by The View from Jerusalem @ 4/04/2022