The Indestructible Jews [antikvár]

I PREFACE For all too long, Jews and Christians have distorted Jewish history with so many pious frauds and smothered it with so much pious mythology that at times it has been difficult for scholar or layman to perceive its real grandeur. It was not always thus. The Old Testament, most of it unequaled for sheer narrative skill, gives us an entirely different picture of Jewish history—^proud, grand, and dynamic. It is also the first historical record, in the modem sense of the word, so accurate that an archaeologist can go to where the Bible said things happened and find the evidence. The Greeks and Romans patterned their historical writings on the Jewish idea of history as a continuous biography of a people. But with the decline of Greece and the fall of Rome, the writing of objective history disappeared for close to a thousand years. After the Renaissance it became the fashion in Church circles to denigrate Jewish history in order to ennoble the Christian view of things, thus reducing Jewish history to a meaningless, minor footnote. In ghetto circles, it became fashionable to count dead Jews in order to enhance Jewish suffering, thus reducing Jewish history to a meaningless, boring dirge. In the nineteenth century, with the era of the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung), so-called scientific Judaism was bom. A more apt phrase would be "public-relations xi