23
" The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-biblical, aware only of some of the legal codes of the Torah and some of the elements of the founding epic, but had not yet taken in Deuteronomy, the book written two centuries earlier, ostensibly the 120-year-old dying Moses’ spoken legacy to the Israelites, which codified more rigorously the much looser and often contradictory injunctions of Leviticus. Or the Elephantine Jews did have the Mosaic strictures of Deuteronomy, and perhaps even knew all about the reforms of kings Hezekiah and his great-grandson Josiah making the Jerusalem Temple the sole place of sacrificial ritual and pilgrimage, but had no intention of surrendering to its monopoly. The Elephantine Yahudim were Yahwists who were not going to be held to the letter of observance laid down by Jerusalemites any more than, say, the vast majority of Jews now who believe themselves to be, in their way, observant, will accept instruction on what it means to be Jewish (or worse, who is and who isn’t a Jew) from the ultra-Orthodox. "
― Simon Schama , The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE – 1492 CE
28
" This was ominous. The Jews of France and the Rhineland, like everywhere else in Christian Europe, had lived under St Augustine’s dispensation that they had been punished for killing the Saviour by the destruction of the Temple, their banishment from Jerusalem, and their scattering about the world. This was said to be a penance so severe that it was ‘a life worse than death’. And in such a miserable dispersion they were to be preserved as a people who, in their entirety, bore the mark of Cain, living witnesses to the contrasting triumph of Christian salvation. Hence the need, according to this view, of their preservation. Wiping them out would have the unfortunate "
― Simon Schama , The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BCE – 1492 CE