The pre-history of the Jews before the formation of Israel in 1948 can be summarized by three important conclusions: First, the Jews have since antiquity attempted to change the political and social order of any culture in which they resided. Johnson traces this trait of being "subversive of the existing order' to the time of Moses.

       Second, each time that the Jewish people embarked on a course of conquest of land and peoples by establishing 'kingdoms' and 'commonwealths,' in order to secure their survival, it has ended in disaster. During the time of their kings -- Saul, David, and Solomon -- they achieved their first secular 'Commonwealth.' It ended in devastation, death and exile for their people. Again, in the 200-year period before Christ, the Hasmoneans created the 'Second Commonwealth' as a secure haven from the hated Greeks. It too ended in disaster for the Jewish people. The Romans forced them into an exile that lasted until the mid-twentieth century.

       According to Johnson, "This raises a central dilemma about Israelite, later Judaic, religion and its relationship with temporal power. The dilemma can be stated quite simply: could the two institutions coexist, without one fatally weakening the other? If the demands of religion were enforced, the state would have too little power to function. On the other hand, if the state were allowed to evolve normally, according to its nature, it would absorb part of the essence of the religion to itself, and sterilize it. Each had an inherent tendency to be parasitical upon the other. If the Israelites tried to survive simply as a religious community, without a state, they would sooner or later be attacked, scattered and absorbed into the local paganism. Thus the worship of Yahweh would succumb to external assault. That, of course, was what nearly happened during the Philistine invasion, and would have happened had the Israelites not turned to the secular salvation of kingship and a united state. On the other hand, if kingship and state became permanent, their inevitable characteristics and needs would encroach upon the religion, and the worship of Yahweh would succumb to internal corruption. The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealths; it remains unresolved in Israel today." Modern Jews claim the state of Israel as their 'Third Commonwealth."

       Third, the 'chosenness' of the Jewish people has been a thorn in their relationship with others with whom they have shared a geographical existence. While Jews in antiquity accepted this 'burden' as a price to pay for having been chosen by God to save all of mankind from its inherently evil nature, modern Jewry, especially in the United States, resorts to charges of anti-Semitism in attempts to diminish or eliminate any opposition to the notion of the legitimacy of the state of Israel. It is noteworthy that many Rabbinical Jews welcome the concept of the Jewish 'burden,' based in antiquity, by proudly asserting that the root cause of anti-Semitism is Judaism itself ('Why the Jews: The Reason for Anti-Semitism').

       Because of the importance of the first and third conclusions and their impact on the Middle East hostilities, Johnson spends a great deal of effort in trying to date the first beginnings of anti-Semitism in antiquity. He informs us that [1], "Both the great Jewish revolts against Roman rule should be seen not just as risings by a colonized people, inspired by religious nationalism, but as a racial and cultural conflict between Jews and Greeks. The xenophobia and anti-Hellenism which was such a characteristic of Jewish literature from the second century B.C. onwards was fully reciprocated. It is anomalous to speak of anti-Semitism in antiquity since the term itself was not coined until 1879."

       "As in the modern age, fables about the Jews were somehow fabricated, then endlessly repeated...As in modern times, moreover, anti-Semitism was fuelled not just by vulgar rumor but by the deliberate propaganda of intellectuals."

       Johnson describes the history of the modern Jewish state, created in 1948 - the New Zion [2]. "The holocaust and the new Zion were organically connected. The murder of six million Jews was a prime causative factor in the creation of the state of Israel. This was in accordance with an ancient and powerful dynamic of Jewish history: redemption through suffering. Thousands of pious Jews sang their profession of faith as they were hustled towards the gas chambers because they believed that the punishment being inflicted on the Jews, in which Hitler and the SS were mere agents, was the work of God and itself proof that He had chosen them. According to the Prophet Amos, God had said: 'You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.' The sufferings of Auschwitz were not mere happenings. They were moral enactments. They were part of the plan. They confirmed the glory to come. Moreover, God was not merely angry with the Jews. He was also sorrowful. He wept with them. He went with them into the gas chambers as he had gone with them into exile."

       "That is to state cause and effect in religious, metaphysical terms. But it can also be stated in historical terms. The creation of Israel was the consequence of Jewish sufferings. We have used the image of the jigsaw puzzle to show how each necessary piece was slotted into place. As we have seen, the great eastern massacres of 1648 led to the return of a Jewish community to England, and so to America, thus in time producing the most influential Jewry in the world, and indispensable part of the geopolitical context in which Israel could be created. Again, the massacres of 1881 set in motion a whole series of events tending towards the same end. The immigration they produced was the background to the Dreyfus outrage, which led directly to Herzl's creation of modern Zionism. The movement of Jews set in motion by Russian oppression created the pattern of tension from which, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration emerged, and the League of Nations Palestine Mandate was set up to implement it. Hitler's persecution of the Jews was the last in the series of catastrophes which helped to make the Zionist state."

       Johnson provides some insight into the present day situation of American Jewry [3]. "The expansion and consolidation of United States Jewry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was as important in Jewish history as the creation of Israel itself; in some ways more important. For, if the fulfillment of Zionism gave the harassed diaspora an ever-open refuge with sovereign rights to determine and defend its destiny, the growth of U.S. Jewry was an accession of power of an altogether different order, which gave Jews an important, legitimate and permanent part in shaping the policies of the greatest state on earth. This was not fragile Hofjuden influence but the consequences of democratic persuasion and demographic facts. At the end of the 1970s the Jewish population of the United States was 5,780,960. This was only 2.7 percent of total U.S. population but it was disproportionately concentrated in urban areas, particularly big cities, which notoriously exert more cultural, social, economic and indeed political influence than small towns, villages and rural districts. Towards the end of the twentieth century the Jews were still big-city dwellers. There were 394,000 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, over 300,000 in Paris, 285,000 in Moscow 280,000 in Greater London, 272,000 in Kiev, 165,000 in Leningrad, 115,000 in Montreal and 115,000 in Toronto. But the most impressive urban concentration was in the United States. Metropolitan New York, with 1,998,000 Jews, was by far the largest Jewish city on earth. The second largest was Los Angeles with 445,000. Then followed Philadelphia (295,000), Chicago (253,000), Miami (225,000), Boston (170,000), and Washington, D.C. (160,000). [Today, over 250,000 live in the D.C. area.]. Altogether there were sixty-nine American cities with a Jewish population of over 10,000. There was also a demographic concentration in key states. In New York State 2,143, 485 Jews constituted 12 percent of the population. They formed 6 percent in New Jersey, 4.6 percent in Florida, 4.5 percent in Maryland, 4.4 percent in Massachusetts, 3.6 percent in Pennsylvania, 3.1 percent in California and 2.4 percent in Illinois. Of all the great American ethnic votes, the Jewish vote was the best organized, the most responsive to guidance by its leaders and the most likely to exert itself effectively."

       Johnson points out that the Jewish vote has been traditionally heavily in favor of the Democratic Party. "The Jews voted as they did not for communal economic or foreign policy reasons but from a residual sympathy for the poor and the underdog. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the notion of the 'Jewish lobby' in American politics had become to some extent a myth. What had happened, in the relationship of Jewish citizens to America as a whole, was something quite different and much more important: the transformation of the Jewish minority into a core element of American society. Throughout the twentieth century American Jews continued to take the fullest advantage of the opportunities America opened to them, to attend universities, to become doctors, lawyers, teacher, professional men and women of all kinds, politicians and public servants, as well as to thrive in finance and business, as they always had."

       Johnson describes the roots of the present day conflict between the Jews and the Arabs [4]. "One of the principal lessons of Jewish history has been that repeated verbal slanders are sooner or later followed by violent physical deeds. Time and again over the centuries, anti-Semitic writings created their own fearful momentum which climaxed in an effusion of Jewish Blood. The Hitlerian Final Solution was unique in its atrocity but it was none the less prefigured in nineteenth-century anti-Semitic theory. The anti-Semitic torrent poured out by the Soviet bloc and the Arab states in the post-war period produced its own characteristic form of violence: state-sponsored terrorism. There was irony in this weapon being used against Zionism, for it was militant Zionists, such as Avraham Stern and Menachem Begin, who had (it could be argued) invented terrorism in its modern, highly organized and scientific form. That it should be directed, on a vastly increased scale, against the state they had lived, and died, to create could be seen as an act of providential retribution or at any rate as yet another demonstration that idealists who justified their means by their ends did so at their peril. The age of international terrorism, created by post-war Soviet-Arab anti-Semitism, effectively opened in 1968 when the Palestine Liberation Organization formally adopted terror and mass murder as its primary policy. The PLO, and its various competitors and imitators, directed their attacks primarily against Israeli targets but they made no attempt to distinguish between Israeli citizens, or Zionists, and Jews any more than traditional anti-Semitic killers distinguished between religious Jews and Jews by birth."

       Johnson describes an event that called into question (even by some Jews) the methods of the Jews to defend their new state [5]. "The occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982, which involved heavy Israeli bombing and many Arab casualties and homeless, was a bitter source of discord between Israel and her allies and even within Israel. It was also the background to a slaughter of Moslem refugees, by Christian Falangist Arabs, in the Sabra and Shatilla camps on 16 September. This episode was skillfully exploited by Arab and Soviet propagandists and presented in the Western media as an Israeli responsibility. Begin, then still Israel's prime minister, commented bitterly to a cabinet meeting three days later: 'Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jew.' The Israelis wisely ordered an independent judicial inquiry which established the facts and placed some blame on the Israeli Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, for not having foreseen and prevented the killings."

      "The spectacle of Jews killing, especially killing unjustly, was deeply disturbing to them. The possibility had been foreseen in Judah Halevi's Kuzari, written in about 1140, in dialogue form between a rabbi and the wise King of the Khazars. Thus: 'Rabbi: Our relation to God is a closer one than if we had already reached greatness on earth. King: That might be so if your humility were voluntary. But it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay. Rabbi: Thou hast touched our weak spot, O King of the Khazars.' Every man possessed it. The state merely exercised it vicariously, on the community's behalf, and on a greater scale. Jews, perennially preoccupied, almost obsessed, with the sanctity of life, found the killing role of the state hard to accept. To them it was the curse of Saul. It had cast a shadow on the life of their greatest king, so that David, being man of blood, could not build the Temple. But between the curse of Saul and the reality of Auschwitz there could be no real choice. The Jews had to have their state, with all its moral consequences, to survive." [Note: This is precisely the same situation that faced the Israelites after Joshua's conquest of Canaan and the fear of the small enclaves of independent Israelis under the 'Judges' and the threat of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires from without - the need for a united Kingdom, which ended in disaster for the Israelites every time it reared its ugly head.].

       "The need for a secular Zion did not diminish during the first forty years of its history. It increased. It had been created to receive the victims of European anti-Semitism and, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to house its shattered survivors. It had served to accommodate those expelled from Arab Jewries. These fulfilled purposes alone justified its existence. But new tasks emerged. It became clear, during the post-war decades, that the Soviet regime was no more likely to reach a peaceful accommodation with its Jewish citizens than its Tsarist predecessor. The evidence suggested that they might be in greater collective peril than ever before. So one prime aim of the Israelis was to get their 1,750,000 Russian brethren out of the power of the Soviet system. They had to be prepared, at short notice, to accept a mass migration of the kind that Tsarist cruelties had provoked. They had equally to be ready to move heaven and earth if the hatred of the Soviet regime for the Jews took other forms."

       "The state of Israel acquired an even more somber purpose. It was the sovereign refuge of the imperiled Jew anywhere in the world. It was the guardian of gathered Jews already within its borders. It was the only physical guarantee that another Holocaust would not occur. The unremitting campaign of violent anti-Semitism by its Soviet and Arab enemies suggests that separately or conjointly they might seek to impose another Final Solution if they got the opportunity. Israel had to assume such a possibility, and arm against it. It had reliable promises of United States protection but in the last resort a sovereign state must look to its own defenses. Hence Israel had to posses the means to inflict unacceptable damage on a would-be aggressor, however powerful. If David had to meet Goliath, he must possess a sling. During the Second World War Jewish scientists had played a critical part in making the first nuclear weapons. They had done so because they feared Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first. In the 1950s and 1960s, as Soviet and Arab hostility to Israel grew, Israeli scientists worked to equip the state with a means of deterrence. In the late 1970s and 1980s they created a nuclear capability, whose existence was secret but understood in the quarters where it would have most effect. Thus Israel was in a position to fulfill the second of the two new tasks which circumstances had placed upon her."

       Johnson continues [6]. "But it would be wrong to conclude a history of the Jews on this grim note. Jewish history can be presented as a succession of climaxes and catastrophes. It can also be seen as an endless continuum of patient study, fruitful industry and communal routine, much of it unrecorded. Sorrow finds a voice while happiness is mute. The historian must bear this in mind. Over 4,000 years the Jews proved themselves not only great survivors but extraordinarily skillful in adapting to the societies among which fate thrust them, and in gathering whatever human comforts they had to offer. No people has been more fertile in enriching or humanizing wealth, or in turning misfortune to creative account. This capacity springs from a moral philosophy both solid and subtle, which has changed remarkably little over the millennia precisely because it has been seen to serve the purposed of those who share it. Countless Jews, in all ages, have groaned under the burden of Judaism. But they have continued to carry it because they have known, in their hearts, that it carried them. The Jews were survivors because they possessed the law of survival."

       "Hence the historian must also bear in mind that Judaism has always been greater than the sum of its adherents. Judaism created the Jews, not the other way round. As the philosopher Leon Roth put it: 'Judaism comes first. It is not a product but a program and the Jews are the instruments of its fulfillment.' Jewish history is a record not only of physical facts but of metaphysical notions. The Jews believed themselves created and commanded to be a light to the gentiles and they obeyed to the best of their considerable powers. The results, whether considered in religious or in secular terms, have been remarkable. The Jews gave the world ethical monotheism, which might be described as the application of reason to divinity. In a more secular age, they applied the principles of rationality to the whole range of human activities, often in advance of the rest of mankind. The light they thus shed disturbed as well as illuminated, for it revealed painful truths about the human spirit as well as the means to uplift it."

       "The Jews have been great truth-tellers and that is one reason they have been so much hated. A prophet will be feared and sometimes honored, but when has he been loved? Yet a prophet must prophesy and the Jews will persist in pursuing truth, as they see it, wherever it leads. Jewish history teaches, if anything can, that there is indeed a purpose to human existence and that we are not just born to live and die like beasts. In continuing to give meaning to creation, the Jews will take comfort from the injunction, thrice repeated, in the noble first chapter of the Book of Joshua: 'Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest."

      It is instructive at this point to give a view of why the Islamic terrorists came to find America as its primary target. Niall Ferguson ('Colossus,' 2004) concludes that it was not so much our support of Israel, but a conflation of the fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979 and the East German revolution of November 9, 1989 (11/9). He claims that (pp. 117) "To lose Vietnam to the heirs of Ho Chi Minh...had not really mattered in geopolitical terms. But to lose Iran to the ayotollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Lenin of Islamic revolution, was a calamity whose ramifications were and remain incalculable."

       "Iran was, after Turkey, the biggest of the Middle Eastern states...Crucially, it was second only to Saudi Arabia as an oil producer…(the U.S. was still the world's biggest at the time)...The real difficulty the U.S. faced [after losing Iran] was that exerting any direct influence on the gulf depended on being able to maintain some kind of military presence there. Yet one consequence of the Iranian Revolution was to make the Saudi regime distinctly unenthusiastic about giving American troops access to gulf bases…"

       Ferguson continues to explain that "the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force set up to apply the Carter doctrine [intended as a signal to the Soviet Union] ('Any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the U.S. -- and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.'), at first based in Tampa, Florida, [was later moved to Saudi Arabia]."

       In May 1981 the Saudi-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council declared that the entire gulf region should be kept 'free of international conflicts, particularly the presence of military fleets and foreign bases.' Finally, [after both Iran and Iraq were prepared to attack neutral shipping in the gulf], in 1990, the Saudis relented and allowed American troops on their soil. It was to prove a decision fraught with danger for both parties. Unwittingly the American's...had made a new and dangerous enemy."

       Ferguson concludes, "Why did Osama bin Laden, himself a Saudi, order twenty-one of his followers, most of them also Saudis, to hijack four planes and fly them into [American targets]? In their Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders of February 23, 1998, he and his cosignatories gave three reasons for issuing their notorious fatwa 'to kill the Americans and their allies': 'First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.'"

       The second reason was the 1991 invasion of Iraq by the crusader-Zionist alliance. The third reason mentioned the Jews, the occupation of Jerusalem, the murder of Muslims there and the fragmentation of the states in the region such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan in a brutal crusade of occupation of the Peninsula." This, of course refers to the Arab/Israeli wars of 1956, 1967, 1973 and later -- all won quickly and totally by the Israelis.

       According to Ferguson, "The aim of killing Americans was therefore clear: it was in order 'to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim...His goals, in short, were to get American forces out of Saudi Arabia, to get them out of the Middle East altogether, to overthrow Arab governments sympathetic to the U.S. and to destroy the state of Israel."

       The importance of the Arabian Peninsula and the holy places of Islam is, thus, of utmost importance to Osama bin Laden as it was to his idol, the 12th-century Sultan Saladin, whose Counter-Crusade defeated and expelled the Crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187. According to Bernard Lewis ('The Crisis of Islam,' 2003), the Crusaders, who had captured Jerusalem in 1099, made a fatal mistake afterward. "Their victory stirred up little interest in the region...newly established Crusader principalities fitted into the game of [local Arab] politics, with cross-religious alliances in the pattern of rivalries between and among Muslim and Christian princes."

       That is, according to Lewis, until the Crusader leader conducted raids against the holy places of Islam, in violation of an agreement with Sultan Saladin. The Crusader attacks on the Hijaz ports which served Mecca and Medina were the last straw. This led directly to Saladin's proclamation of a jihad against the Crusaders. The victories of Saladin and his capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 have long been and are today a source of inspiration to Arab leaders.

       Ferguson reminds us Bin Laden may not be a genuine harbinger of a clash of civilizations. "It would be more accurate to say that [he] is the offspring of the Middle East's distinctive civilization of clashes, a retarded political culture in which terrorism has long been a substitute for both peaceful politics and conventional warfare [a direct result of the humiliating defeats of the Arabs by the Israelis in all of their conventional wars]...the ideology of al Qaeda has relatively little in common with the belief systems of the majority of people in the largest Muslim countries, such as Indonesia and Turkey, to say nothing of the immigrant Muslim communities of the West. Even bin Laden's religious beliefs bear the idiosyncratic hallmarks of Wahhabism, which scarcely exists outside the deserts of Arabia. Al Qaeda is better understood as the extremist wing of a specifically Arab political religion, a term illuminatingly used...to capture the essential characteristics of nazism: its messianic leadership, its need to indoctrinate, its appetite for persecution."

       Ferguson goes on to label al Qaeda as "Islamo-nihilism or Islamo-Bolshevism,' for we should not forget that in their early years Lenin and Stalin were also terrorists. Indeed, there is more than a passing resemblance between [Lenin], hatching his plans for the overthrow of tsarism from dingy Swiss hotels, and the renegade Saudi millionaire, orchestrating the downfall of America from a secluded Afghan cave. That should also remind us that 'Western civilization' … has itself been capable in the past of producing political religions just as intolerant and bloodthirsty as today's Islamo-bolshevism."

       Ferguson continues, "Humiliated on the battlefield, the Arab states early on resorted to the sponsorship of terrorism by Palestinian exiles. Operating from bases in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, Palestinian fedayeen (literally 'self-sacrifices') mounted numerous attacks on Israeli civilians after 1949...After the Six-Day War [in 1967], the Palestine Liberation Organization operated with impunity from Jordanian territory until Israeli pressure forced its expulsion in 1970. The PLO then moved to southern Lebanon, a country whose subsequent descent into civil war created an almost perfect seedbed for terrorist organizations...Terrorist attacks by PLO guerrillas based in Lebanon prompted the Israelis to invade that country in the wake of a particularly bloody hijacking in March 1978...Four years later, in June 1982, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon...driving the leasers out -- this time to distant Tunisia."

       Ferguson describes a new generation of terrorists in the 1980s. They identified themselves primarily with Islam [as opposed to the previous nationalist and Marxist identities]. "What set their tactics apart from those of the 1960s and 1970s was their resort to suicide bombing and their much greater readiness to attack Americans. Less significance should probably be attached to the first of these traits. In most countries at most times, terrorists who have committed acts of murder have been in effect suicidal, since they have either died in flagrante or been executed subsequently for their crimes. Those experts who were momentarilly baffled by the willingness of the 9/11 attackers to 'kill themselves so as to kill others' were forgetting the many precedents for such behavior. Far more important was the fact that the terrorists now considered Americans legitimate targets. The turning point in this regard came on April 18, 1983, when a suicide bomber attacked the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including the CIA's entire Middle Eastern team. Six months later, in another kamikaze mission, a truck packed with TNT was driven into a Lebanese barracks where American marines were billeted, killing 241 of them. "

       Subsequent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, bombings of the U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole at Aden in October 2000 reinforced this trend. According to Ferguson, "It was hardly a wild prophecy when the Commission on National Security, chaired by Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman, warned in its first September 1999 report: 'Terrorists and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.' To repeat, the surpirsing thing about 9/11 was simply that it had not happened before. The United States had for years subsidized Israel [with arms in its wars with the Arab states]. It had shored up the shah's regime in Iraq. It had deployed troops in Arabia. There was no shortage of motivations for an attack by one or other of the Middle East's terrorist groups."

       In the Epilogue of Johnson's 'A History of the Jews' [7], he states, "In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus describes Abraham as 'a man of great sagacity' who had 'higher notions of virtue than others of his time.' He therefore 'determined to change completely the views which all then had about God.' One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity, or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being. Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might eventually have stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. 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 other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews it might have been a much emptier place."

       "Above all, the Jews taught us how to rationalize the unknown. The result was monotheism and the three great religions which profess it. It is almost beyond our capacity to imagine how the world would have fared if they had never emerged. Nor did the intellectual penetration of the unknown stop at the idea of one God. Indeed monotheism itself can be seen as a milestone on the road which leads people to dispense with God altogether. The Jews first rationalized the pantheon of idols into one Supreme Being; then began the process of rationalizing Him out of existence (See Spinoza, pp. 291-294). In the ultimate perspective of history, Abraham and Moses may come to seem less important than Spinoza. For the Jewish impact on humanity has been protean. In antiquity they were the great innovators in religion and morals. In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology. Gradually they were pushed from the van and fell behind until, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were seen as a bedraggled and obscurantist rearguard in the march of civilized humanity. But then came an astonishing second burst of creativity. Breaking out of their ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere. Much of the mental furniture of the modern world too is of Jewish fabrication."

       "The Jews were not just innovators. They were also exemplars and epitomizers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and clarified form. They were the quintessential 'strangers and sojourners.' But are we not all such on this planet, of which we each posess a mere leasehold of threescore and ten? The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp? The Jews were fierce idealists striving for perfection, and at the same time fragile men and women yearning for flesh-pots and safety. They wanted to obey God's impossible law, and they wanted to stay alive too. Therein lay the dilemma of the Jewish commonwealths in antiquity, trying to combine the moral excellence of a theocracy with the practical demands of a state capable of defending itself. The dilemma has been recreated in our own time in the shape of Israel, founded to realize a humanitarian ideal, discovering in practice that it must be ruthless simply to survive in a hostile world. But is not this a recurrent problem which affects all human societies? We all want to build Jerusalem. We all drift back towards the Cities of the Plain. It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatize these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their particular fate into a universal moral. But if the Jews have this role, who wrote it for them?"

       "Historians should beware of seeking providential patterns in events. They are all too easily found, for we are credulous creatures, born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme. Yet excessive skepticism can produce as serious a distortion as credulity. The historian should take into account all forms of evidence, including those which are or appear to be metaphysical. 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 historian may say: there is no such thing as providence. Possibly not. But human confidence in such an historical dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them. The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have this role because they wrote it for themselves. Therein, perhaps, lies the key to their story."

       There is an explanation of the above summary. It is self-referential. Human confidence (a belief) impacts events (via its force) and moves them to an historical dynamic (affects the events), which in turn fortifies the human confidence. This self-referential system is a 'complex, non-linear, iterative feedback system which can be expected to exhibit chaotic behavior. The resulting 'dynamical system' oscillates between order and chaos, between religious purity and physical security (survival) - between an impossible human ideal of moral perfection and innate cruelty of human behavior. If the Israeli/Judaic history explains one thing, it is that mankind is basically, irredeemably, and forever completely corruptible. It is not perfectible and can never be made so. The struggle for the heart of mankind, between good and evil, will never end.

       Our Founding Fathers knew this history and, so - in their genius - crafted a form of government, which was based on this principle. They knew that man's quest for POWER over others was the basis of EVIL on earth -- the ultimate corruption of mankind. The history of the Israelite/Jews is a vast panorama of the truth of this principle. It is replete with the vicious cycle of 'goodness' and 'state power.' The Founding Fathers knew that our Constitutional Republic must be governed by a Power Law, that is must remain scale-free (no spider at the center of the web)! In order to preserve our civilization, we must make it eternally so. That is only possible through Eternal Vigilance - minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year by year - forever.
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Note:  This review (Part II) of Paul Johnson's book, 'A History of the Jews,' is preceded by the review (Part I) which covers the period from antiquity to the present at the link below.

    Home         America is at War        Neocons, Israel & Iraq          A History of the Jews (Part I) From Antiquity to 1948