"What strikingly characterizes the imagination of the archaic Jew is the centrality
     of Israel, the Jewish people in human history, the certainty that being Jewish is the
     most important thing about oneself, and that Jewishness, meaning Judaism, was
     the dominant aspect of one's consciousness." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 62]

       Simon Dubnov, a prominent and well-respected Jewish historian, notes that Jews were so self-isolated from the non-Jews around them that for centuries their own history was merely the recycled metacommentaries about their seminal myths of Chosen People victimhood:

      "Talmudic literature (including the Midrashim) ... hardly contained any

       material concerning social dynamics which is necessary for history in

       the true sense. The leaders of the nation that was deprived of its

       kingdom seemed to have lost interest in the events of the world

       around them ... The historian is greatly distressed when, in the scores

       of volumes of talmudical literature, he finds merely vague hints at events

       of the first five centuries of the Christian era, and searches in vain for

       chronological data. He has a sense of shame for the nation ... which...

       lost its ability to perpetuate its experiences, even in simple chronicles...

       The one-sidedness of the Jewish sources, which illuminated only the

       spiritual side of life, created a false historical perspective." [DUBNOV,

       p. 436-438]

       Robert Goldenberg notes that, in Jewish tradition,

      "great rabbinic leaders ... became both disembodied bearers of a

      an elaborate legal tradition and also heroes of a marvelously rich

      tradition of legend ... From the historian's point of view, the Talmud

      thus becomes a terribly frustrating book. It is rich with stories that

      may -- or may not -- reflect the way certain events happened, and it

      is full of legal discussions that may -- or may not -- report the actual

      content of early rabbinic scholarly activity. Everything is fascinating,

      everything is potentially an open window on the past, but nothing

      can be trusted." [GOLDENBERG, R., 1984, p. 157]

      "Jews have suffered and Christians have suffered [throughout history]," wrote Rabbi Richard Singer, "Mankind has suffered. There is no group with a monopoly on suffering and no human beings which have experienced hate and hostility more than any other. I must say, however, that it is my impression that Jewish history has been taught with a whine and a whimper rather than a straightforward acknowledgement that man practices his inhumanity on his fellow human beings." [ZUKERMAN, p. 66]

      "[A] disability for the Jews in modern times," says Barnet Litvinoff, "has been their own obscurantism. If all the questions of how to live were to be answered only in the wisdom of the Talmud, there could be no intellectual explorations, and therefore no progress." [LITVINOFF, p. 10]  "[Rabbis] had cut off [the Jewish community] from the community of nations," wrote Bernard Lazare in 1894 about the Jewish ghetto mentality, "They had made of it a sullen recluse, a rebel against all laws, foreign to all feeling fraternity [with others], closed to all beautiful, noble, and generous ideas; they had made of it a small and miserable nation, soured by isolation, brutalized by a narrower education, demoralized and corrupted by an unjustifiable pride." [LAZARE, p. 14] "The Eastern European Jews," notes Raphael Patai, "(with a few very notable exceptions) considered interest in all realms of non-Jewish intellectual endeavor as un-Jewish and therefore prohibited. Even the readings of books other than the Bible, the Talmud, the codes, and the Midrashim was strictly forbidden, and has remained so to this day in those circles in which the Eastern European Yeshiva tradition survives." [PATIA, R., 1971, p. 294]

     "Jews lived with memory, so that redemption might be hastened," adds Stephen Whitfield, "but they did not live with history. The rabbis ... made little effort to record the history of their own post-Biblical era ... The first post-medieval attempt at a history of the Jews was written by a gentile, Jacques Basnage ... Only ... under the impact of modernization … could Jews ... wrest meaning from Jewish life and identity. [WHITFIELD, p. 29-30]

     Basnage's 17-volume work, published between 1706 and 1711, has been called by one twentieth-century Jewish reviewer "the basis for the science of Jewish history; and though his work was far from perfect, it remained the best for a century to come." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 212]

    Although Jewish history usually highlights Christian intolerance and the periodic burnings of the Talmud, the earliest printings of even this religious tract were accomplished with substantial Christian support. As M. Hersch Goldberg notes:

     "Pope Leo X, who reigned from 1513 to 1521, encouraged the printing

     of the first complete edition of the Talmud. Under his patronage, fifteen

     volumes of the Babylonian Talmud were printed in Venice beginning in

     1519 ... Another Christian played an important part in preparing that

     historic edition of the Talmud. The printer Daniel Bomberg (whose name

     may sound Jewish, but who was a Christian) had set up his press in

     Venice in 1516. He devoted great care and attention in printing the

     Talmud ... Seemingly fascinated with Jewish literature, Bomberg is

     said to have done more to spread Jewish learning than any other

     printer of his time ... Over the years, Bomberg printed approximately

     two hundred books of Jewish interest." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976,

     p. 210-211]  

      The Talmud itself, of course, is not history, but religious polemic. "Memory of the past," says Yosef Yerushalmi, "was always a central component of Jewish experience; the historian was not its primary custodian." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 30] "The [Israelite] prophet," notes Old Testament scholar John Allegro, "saw Yahweh [the Israelite God] as a cosmic deity, lord of the heavenly hosts and forces of nature, but at the same time still the special god of Israel, a tribal deity whose main interest was the welfare of his Chosen People. Thus it followed that whatever the grand strategy in the Creator's mind, it involved the destiny of the Jews, and all history was directed to their glorification." [ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 58]

     "Most Jews have a slight knowledge of Jewish history," says Chaim Bermant,

     "This is true even of those in Yeshiva (college of higher learning), for the
      Yeshiva is devoted largely to the study of the Talmud, and the Talmud,
      though encyclopaedic in scope, was completed by the sixth century and
      events beyond that date are largely terra incognita, except where they are
      echoed by liturgy and lore." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 18]

    The above observations, and one of the theses of this volume, point to a Jewish identity that is at its conceptual roots -- even for the secular today -- religious in complexion and fundamentally ahistorical.

      Firmly going against the grain of popular Jewish proclamation that they, and their old religion, Judaism, are the root of everything wise and wonderful on earth, a Jewish author and social activist, Maurice Hindus, wryly observed in 1927 that

      "The force that first pried the Jewish mind open to radical doctrines of

      a modern nature had its origin not in Jewish but in distinctly non-Jewish

      intellectual associations ... [Political philosophers] Marx and Lassalle

      were steeped in Western, that is, modern Gentile culture, Gentile

      philosophy, Gentile science ... It is only after the Jew began to ram

      down the gates of the ghetto and to make excursions into the intellectual

      temples of his Christian neighbors, only after he had laid aside the

      Talmud and the Shulcan Aruch for modern, western, that is Gentile,

      history, biology, psychology, science, that he embarked on a

      career of achievement in modern arts and science ... The old Jewish

      civilization, with its rigid orthodoxy and its emphasis on Jewish

      superiority, compelled aloofness from worldly intellectual intercourse

      even as it compelled social isolation. It frowned on the perusal of

      modern literature, philosophy, social theory, even on the study of

      foreign, that is Gentile, languages." [HINDUS, p. 369-370]

       "Guided by the dictum that 'all that is new is forbidden by the Torah,'" says Charles Silberman, "the rabbis spoke as though the slightest deviation from tradition was a lapse into heresy." [SILBERMAN, p. 171]

      "The Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment," noted Israel Abrahams, "... It was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo, medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza." [FEUERLICHT, p. 38] "One can be ignorant of all the sayings of the wise old rabbis," notes Ann Roiphe, "and still acknowledge the Magna Carte, the Declaration of Independence, the words of Rousseau, Hobbes, Emerson, the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michealangelo and Dante, the science of Darwin, Newton and Galileo. These were not Jewish, and the great Jewish thinkers, Freud, Marx and Einstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, studied at Christian universities and learned form Christian scholars ... The great universities of the West were founded without Jews ... The Christian world created Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Yale." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 209]

     These perspectives do not reflect the mainstream current of modern Jewish history, however. For most, the self-repeating myths of the wonders of Jewish Talmudic scholarship and its attendant Jewish martyrology were -- and are -- central to Jewry's understanding of its past.  In the late nineteenth century, for example, Heinrich Graetz, the seminal "modern" Jewish historian, was only following a long line of self-portrayal when he introduced one of his volumes of Jewish history with what he felt to be the essence of their story:

            "The long era of the dispersion, lasting nearly seventeen centuries,

            is characterized by unprecedented sufferings, an uninterrupted 

            martyrdom, and a constantly aggravated degradation and

            humiliation unparalleled in history ... " [GRAETZ, v. 4 Intro,

            in LIBERLES p. 104]

     In 1911 a Jewish anthropologist, Maurice Fishberg, blamed common Jewish "nervous disposition" largely on historic persecutions:

        "Considering that in medieval times massacres of Jews were quite

        frequent ... it may be said that many of the survivors have remained

        with unstable nerves, and that a fair proportion of neurotics and

        psychopathics have inherited their nervous disposition from their

        maltreated grandparents ... Any people, no matter what race, could

        not remain with healthy nerves under the ban of abuse and persecutions

        to which the Jews were subjected." [FISHBERG, p. 532]

     In 1917, H. G. Enelow framed the same world view this way:

     "There is no history as full of hardship and suffering as the history of

     Israel. But there is none so heroic, either. That is just what has made it

     the most heroic history in the world. That because the Jews were

     chosen for a divine work, they have to suffer a great deal." [ENELOW,

     p. 45]

     Likewise, another nineteenth century Jewish scholar, Leopold Zunz, made the convergence of Jewish superiority and "aristocracy" through suffering explicit in a quote that eventually became "perhaps the best known in modern Jewish literature" [ROTH, Most, p. 136]:

         "If there be an ascending scale of sufferings, Israel reached its highest

          degree. If the duration of affliction, and the patience with which they

          are borne, confer nobility upon man, the Jews vie with the aristocracy

          of any country." [SCHULMAN, p. 34]

   A 1954 "High Holy Days Prayer Book" for Jewish congregations even devoted two pages to quotes (including the one immediately above) by secular Jewish commentators, a legendary Jewish martyrological history framed here as the expression of religious faith. Other lamentations in the prayer book included:

       * "Combine all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies

          have ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have

          reached the full measure of suffering which this martyr people

          was called upon to endure." [Leopold Zunz]

       * "The thousand years' martyrdom of the Jewish people, its

          unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic fate, its teachers of religion,

          its martyrs, its philosophy, champions -- this whole epic will,

          in days to come, sink into the memory of men." [Simon Dubnov]

          [SILVERMAN, M., p. 386-387]

      Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen understand such self-definitions as "aristocratic" victims to be essential to modern Jewish temperament: "Jews anticipate attack from non-Jews, while privately reassuring themselves that they are 'God's chosen people.' The assumption is that suffering is a basic part of life. This suffering may even reinforce the notion that they are superior to others by virtue of their burden of oppression." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367]

     In 1993, one of England's chief rabbis, Jonathan Sacks, framed Jewish resistance to assimilation in the land they lived as a noble sacrifice, the willingness to stand loyal with a relentlessly subjugated, oppressed people: "For the most part, Jews [through history] did not say, 'What advantage is it to remain part of the people of Israel, seeing that they are humiliated and persecuted? It is better for me to join my destiny to those who have power.' They declared their willingness liheyet miyisrael, to be counted among Israel." [SACKS, J., p. 131]

     "[The] self-image of Judaism," says Philip Sigal, "as originating in bondage and redemption indelibly engraves itself upon the group memory and it became the permanent mythos of its origin. Beside that, documentable history is irrelevant. All that has transpired since antiquity is wedded to that theology." [SIGAL, p. 1] Israeli scholar Boas Evron notes that

       "Long historical memory, delving into centuries-old, even millennia-old,

       disasters, massacres and wrongs (accompanied by the convenient

       forgetting of wrongs and atrocities perpetrated by ones' own people

       against others), lachyrmorose self-righteousness, are all characteristics

       of groups whose experience is basically passive, as the Jews have been

       politically for thousands of years. In such groups, the consciousness of

       being victims accumulates and poisons the very being of its members.

       At times these characteristics become the primary content of their self-

       awareness as a group, a perverted focus of their self-identity. Finally,

       this suffering becomes a source of pride. ('I am persecuted and hated,

       a sign that I am valuable and unique, for which I am envied and hated'),

       rather than engendering a desire to be rid of it." [EVRON, p. 109]

     The cloaking of Jewish martyrological legend over an authentic Jewish history in the real world is noted by another Israeli, Meron Benvenisti:

     "It is an ahistoric philosophy of an ahistoric people. It sustained us

     for two thousand years and is so imbued in our psyche that it was

     not altered even when we made the profound leap from an ahistoric,

     dispensed, and powerless people to an historic, independent, and

     powerful nation [Israel]." [BENVENISTI, p. 73]

     "The belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive sufferer of Christian persecution," says Hannah Arendt, "actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness." [FEUERLICHT, p. 35]   "The more desperate the oppression," writes Raphael Jospe, "the more oppressors reinforced the Jewish view that they, the victims, were the Chosen People, and that the oppressor religions were all the more morally spiritually bankrupt." [JOSPE, R. p. 130]

     Michael Aronson notes the way that riots against Jews in Russia in the late nineteenth century were simply plugged into traditional interpretive Jewish martyrological frameworks focusing on categorical Jewish innocence: 

     "In Jewish consciousness, three biblical images are deeply ingrained

      as archetypes of Jewish oppression. First is that of the Pharoahs,

      who enslaved the Children of Israel in Europe. Next, are the

      treacherous and murderous Amalekites, who attacked the Children

      of Israel in Sinai after their exodus from Egypt and became the

      symbol of causeless hatred. And third is the archetypical murderer

      Haman (by tradition a descendant of Amalek), who tried to destroy

      all the Jews in the Persian Empire. From the very beginning of

      anti-Jewish outbreaks in 1881, the biblical images must have sprang

      to people's minds and influenced their interpretation of events.

      Indeed, these images were invoked repeatedly in both journalistic

      and historical literature on the pogroms written by Russian Jews,

      and others." [ARONSON, p. 9]

      Like many Jewish or Gentile historians tainted by martyrological contagion, Bryan Moynahan's index to the Jews' role in his book about the last 100 years of Russian history reflects almost solely the Jewish victimology theme:

     "Jews:

        -accusations against

        -anti-Semitism

        -behavior toward

        -emigration

        -in Great War

        -massacre

        -pogroms against" [MOYNAHAN, p. 266]

     Prominent Jewish psychoanalyst and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once wrote an article about the popular social psychology surrounding (famous Nazi victim) Ann Frank, noting the special state of "innocence" the Jewish people decree about themselves, a blanket character afforded no one else:

     "Some time ago I questioned in print why there is such vast admiration

     for The Diary of Ann Frank. I received many reactions, positive and

     negative, but whether those who let me know their reactions agreed

     or disagreed, they all shared one feature: a deep compassion for what

     they called the 'innocent' victims of Nazi aggression ... I was further

     startled to find that in the many communications I received, the

     adjective 'innocent' was applied only by Jews to Jewish victims.

     Nobody referred to the innocent Gypsies or the innocent Jehovah's

     Witnesses, though they, like the Jews were internal minorities, one

     of which, the Gypsies, was exterminated in toto. Maybe I overlooked

     it, but despite search I can recall no popular reference to the innocent

     Norwegians, for example, who the Nazis also killed in numbers."

     [BETTELHEIM, 1991, p. 257]

     "Jewish consciousness is cultivated consistently from the moment they are capable of understanding the spoken word," observed Maurice Feurlich in 1937,

     "... I had the theme, Children of a Martyr Race, dinned into my