Home > Work > A History of the Jews
101 " In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions. "
― Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews
102 " There is nothing in the early church, other than its Christology, which was not adumbrated in Judaism. "
103 " The ancient writers were not merely convinced of Moses’ existence: they saw him as one of the formative figures of world history. "
104 " The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history, dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it pleased God to make. "
105 " There were as many Jews as Greeks in the Roman empire, and a higher proportion of them were literate. "
106 " The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies. "
107 " In 133 BC the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Sidetes was told by his advisers that Jerusalem should be destroyed and the Jewish people annihilated because they were the only people on earth who refused to associate with the rest of humanity. "
108 " It was an axiom of Zionism that a state must come into existence where Jews could feel safe. How could they feel safe if they did not, in some fundamental sense, control it? That meant a unitary, not a binary, system; not power-sharing but Jewish rule. "
109 " Hitler was determined to murder Jews rather than export them, he was quite capable of modifying his policy to embarrass the Allies if they gave him the opportunity. Goebbels wrote in his diary, 13 December 1942: ‘I believe both the British and the Americans are happy that we are exterminating the Jewish riff-raff. "
110 " Job is a formidable work of Hebrew literature. With the only exception of Isaiah, no work in the Bible is written at such a sustained level of powerful eloquence. "
111 " It is a remarkable fact that the Greeks, who were so inquisitive about nature, and so quick to pick up foreign technology and artistic skills, were quite incurious about alien languages. They were in Egypt for a millennium but never bothered to learn anything except trading demotic; Pythagoras was apparently the only Greek scholar who understood hieroglyphics. They had exactly the same blindness towards Hebrew, Hebrew literature and Jewish religious philosophy. They ignored it and knew of it only from inaccurate hearsay. This culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension. "
112 " The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new. On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated. "
113 " Indeed, in many respects Hebrew literature was far more dynamic than Greek. Greek texts, from Homer onwards, were guides to virtue, decorum and modes of thought; but the Hebrew texts had a marked tendency to become plans for action. "
114 " But he went further than most of them by regarding the Temple as a source of evil and predicting its destruction, and by treating the Temple authorities and the whole central system of Judaic administration and law with silent contempt. "
115 " Alfred Krupp sponsored an essay prize on the application of social Darwinism to state policy, winning entries advocating stern policies to preserve the Volk, such as sending Jews and other ‘degenerate’ types to the front as cannon-fodder. It included a new element of German neo-paganism. Thus Paul de Lagarde rejected Christianity, which had been corruptly invented by the Jew, St Paul, and wished it replaced by a specifically German Volk religion, which would conduct a crusade to drive the Jews, with their international materialist conspiracy, from the sacred German soil: "
116 " News of the extermination programme was available from May 1942, when the Polish Jewish Labour Bund got verified reports to the two Jewish members of the Polish National Committee in London. This included descriptions of the gas vans at Chelmno and the figure of 700,000 Jews already murdered. "
117 " The First World War made the Zionist state possible. The Second World War made it essential. It persuaded the overwhelming majority of Jews that such a state had to be created and made secure whatever the cost, to themselves or to anyone else. "
118 " It was Wagner’s writings which provoked the furious outpourings of Eugen Dühring, who throughout the 1880s published a succession of widely read racial attacks on the Jews: the ‘Jewish question’, he declared, should be ‘solved’ by ‘killing and extirpation’. "
119 " The GIS were furious when people back home refused to believe what they had seen or even look at their photos. "
120 " Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns. He was not a Jewish nationalist. On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist. Like the Baptist, he was influenced by the teachings of the pacific elements of the Essenes. But like the Baptist he believed that the programme of repentance and rebirth should be carried to the multitude, as was foreseen in Chapter 53 of Isaiah. "