Review: The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill – Discourses on Minerva
“The Jews started it all,” wrote Thomas Cahill in The Gift of the Jews. By “it,” Cahill states he is referring to modern sensibilities and dispositions. But the West’s struggle with its relationship with Judaism is something replete with ironies, paradoxes, and hostility. Yet, it is from this relationship that the modern West—as we know it today—was born. Indeed, the most cherished of Western ideals are all tied to a religion, and people, that often remain on edge.
Over the course of the West’s historical evolution, three of the most cherished of Western ideals: egalitarianism, the rule of law, and secularism, were born. So too, was the disposition of history as a pilgrimage of progress. All have their roots in Judaism and were transmitted to the West through that peculiar religious outgrowth of Judaism that we call Christianity.
While Christianity had a major role in universalizing these ideals, their primordial origins within Judaism have had a major impact upon the course and myths of Western society. As Marcel Gauchet noted in The Disenchantment of the World, Judaism’s universal God of the “Prophetic Revolution”—even with its own internal contradictions—laid the groundworks for the eventual acceptance of the notion of universal humanity and the patchwork of egalitarianism that naturally follows. Any serious study of the emergence of these ideas must necessarily start with Judaism.
In Judaism, humanity’s common origin is rooted in God’s oneness (the universal God) and in the creation of Adam and Eve—from which, in traditional accounts, all other humans stemmed from. It matters not whether this story is true (as fundamentalists suggest) or not. The intellectual implications of this simple story, as elaborated over two millennia, has had tremendous impact on our modern sensibilities and the manner in which we view other humans.
The story of Adam and Eve is further expanded upon in detail by Saint Augustine in The City of God, where Augustine declared, “The woman, then, is the creation of God, just as is the man; but her creation out of man emphasizes the idea of the unity between them.” That unity, symbolically established through Eve’s creation from Adam’s side—one of his ribs—implied an equality of the sexes long before the battle of sexes. The common trope that we are all “children of God” or that humans all have equal dignity stems from the Genesis creation myth of co-equality and individual autonomy.
This story, of course, is different from the creation stories and myths of the Near East. It is also dramatically different than the intellectual understanding of humanity offered by the Greeks, to whom all others were sub-human barbarians and could never be “civilized” regardless of how impressive their cultures were. The Near Eastern religious myths had separated humanities, each created by their own set of gods and ultimately different from one another—“us vs. them” rather than the primordial universalism offered by Judaism.
Likewise, Joshua Berman has highlighted how Judaism’s origin story sharply broke with the hierarchal stories prevalent in Mesopotamian and other ancient religious cosmogonies.
As he notes in Created Equal, the creation myths of Mesopotamia open with accounts of divine hierarchy and are “celebration[s] of social hierarchy” that reinforce such notions to their respective societies. Least of all that humanity is created to be servants to the gods in a strictly hierarchal stratum. “From the beginning of time, the gods have already been divided along social lines. The rebellion of the lower gods [the inferior Igigi] simply serves as an occasion to bring humans onto the scene in order to occupy the lowest run on the ladder. The purpose of humankind is to serve as a toiling servant of the gods,” writes Berman.
This oppressive and stagnant worldview is countered by the creation myths of Genesis, where humanity is created autonomous and free and where no hierarchy is found—either within the realm of the divine, or within nature itself. As Berman notes, “There is not an inkling in Genesis I that either man or the created world around him was created in order to provide for God in any way.” Whereas humanity was created as servants and placed at the lowest rung of the social pyramid in Near Eastern cosmogonies, humanity was created free, rational, an independent according to Judaism and reinforced by two millennia of Christian exegesis (especially from within the Catholic tradition).
The cornerstones of individualism, human autonomy, human universality, and egalitarianism— major principles championed by the West as universal truths—are found in the first book of the Torah.
Berman goes on to assert that the very notion of the rule of law, as Western society understands it, comes out of the Judaic tradition as well. The Book of Deuteronomy, often castigated as a book of legalism, moralism, and “filled with rules,” was really the single most important work in the formation of society guided by law. While Hammurabi’s Code equally set out a legal system, it is more remarkable that Deuteronomy does so in continuation of the Torah.
Indeed, the ideals of Western liberty are contained within law. The liberal Enlightenment tradition is one in which law civilizes humanity out of his primeval barbarism. Law enshrines liberty and protects it. And the first book of law and constituted liberty is Deuteronomy. Even if we—in the 21st century—have long moved past some of Deuteronomy’s more mundane and rather obscure legal prescriptions, its influence has been widespread throughout the ages and in the West’s creedal development of constitutional governance and natural rights. Liberty is measured against law, otherwise you have anarchism. In the same tradition, Hebraic liberty and purity was measured against law which indelible ramifications for the development of European society and their diasporas.
Although no one likes to publically admit it, it is not a secret when one studies the history of the emergence of constitutional orders and the “rule of law” that one finds theologians and theologically-informed philosophers of the early Enlightenment drawing heavily upon the Torah as the source of their authority. As Harvard historian Eric T. Nelson recounted in his work The Hebrew Republic, early Enlightenment thinkers sought Old Testament guidance in their bid to establish republican legitimacy within their own domestic politics. Whether this was misguided or not, the fact remains it is how it played out in our history.
Figures like Hugo Grotius, the father of free international trade, based his argumentation for trade on the high seas from a theological point of view. Francisco Suárez and Francisco Vitoria, two famous Spanish legal architects and theologians, often embedded their understandings of international law as natural law vis-à-vis theology and Old Testament exegesis. Samuel Pufendorf too, was theologically informed in his philosophical and legal writings.
Even America, the purest nation that embodied Enlightenment ideals, drew heavily upon Old Testament writings for its political inspiration and ratification of the Constitution. Samuel Langdon, one of the most ardent supporters of the new constitution—himself a clergyman and theologian by training and profession—often cast the constitutional debates and importance of ratification by appealing to Deuteronomy and noting the importance of law in preventing corruption and limiting power. And as Michael Hoberman notes in New Israel/New England, the New England Puritans were obsessed with Judaism, Jewish history, and Jews and explicitly modeled their politics, understanding of history, and migratory exodus to the New World after the Jews. America’s own image of itself is a secularization of the Jewish pageant.
This, however, by no means validates the Christian Reconstructionist revisionism that America was meant to be a “Christian republic.” The First Amendment invalidates such a claim. But it does point out a truth that modern audiences find—for various reasons—unsettling. Religion was profoundly important in early American thought. (It was also profoundly important in early Enlightenment thought.) During the Seven Years’ War, the French and Indian Wars as it is colloquially known in America, was often cast by American preachers as a religious war between liberty-loving Protestants against the authoritarian “agents of Babylon and Rome” (the French, since they were Catholic). Indeed, many historians maintain that the American Revolution itself was partly influenced by the First Great Awakening.
Moreover, secularism is also deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian theology and philosophy despite not realizing. First, as we covered in this post, the proper understanding of “The Fall” was humanity’s rejection of reason (Logos) which led to the fall into concupiscence and the struggle to re-harmonize reason with desire. Secularism speaks the same language of having “fallen from reasonableness into superstition.” Likewise, the impetus of proclaiming God – since God is Truth and Reason itself in Judaism and Christianity – we see the same old canard peddled by the “New Atheists” who have inherited the old Judeo-Christian metaphysical story and simply dropped God from Truth and Reason.
Furthermore, Judaism itself was a revolutionary movement promoting a form of secularism by the very nature of its understanding of God. Whereas the “pagan” religions of the Near East were premised on the idea of fertility cults and an enchanted world, post-Prophetic Revolution Judaism postulated a single, universal god apart from the world. God’s “otherness” dichotomized a natural world and a divine world in which humans were part of the natural world but not the divine. Additionally, God’s abstraction and otherness stood in stark contrast to the pagan cosmogonies and mythologies of gods entrenched in the world and secretly behind the affairs of men. (One only needs to read Homer’s The Iliad or Odyssey to understand the enchanted mythology that even the Greeks subscribed to.)
In Judaism’s assertion of a single, universal, god—and in this god’s otherness from the world inhibited by humans—Judaism was engaging in a primordial secularization of the enchanted polytheistic worldview common in the Near East and Europe. (And Christianity only furthered this de-mythology of the pagan religions as it expanded.) The problem, of course, is this proto-secularization destroyed the enchanted worldview that made possible—through God’s otherness—to reject his existence outright.
In its more modern form, as Oxford Professor Larry Siedentop writes, secular liberalism “preserves Christian ontology without the metaphysics of salvation.” A myriad of other scholars, from Karl Löwith, Charles Taylor, David Biale, and R.A. Markus have also noted to the deep theological origins of secularism and its paradoxical roots in both the Old and New Testament, but especially the Old Testament.
Apart from the ideals of egalitarianism, rule of law, and secularism having their earliest roots in Judaism, the idea of historical progress too met great culmination in Jewish theology. Paul Johnson long ago wrote, “No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a common destiny.” And while the Western metanarrative of progress is little more than a secularized variation of the Judeo-Christian story of salvation as Robert Nisbet makes clear in The History of Idea of Progress, the story of the Jews is even more striking and relatable for audiences of all times.
Taken in its entirety, the story of the Jews as recounted in the Old Testament is the universal story of humanity. It is the story of a people lost, in search of a home, in search of comfort and security; of war, peace, conquest and every facet of the human condition: occupation, liberation, trial and jubilation. It is a story of progress, even to this day. So not only do some of our most precious ideals come out of Judaism, so does the narrative of progress.
Perhaps this is the problem with Judaism—the story of the Jews, from the time of the Bible to the present, is a story that all can relate too. It is a story of a people with a destiny, first shackled and oppressed, then migratory, eventually reaching a “promised land,” only to have it wrestled away, returned, and wrestled away again.
The Jewish story is also the bedrock of American mythology. America’s story follows the Jewish tale almost piece by piece. America is a land with a destiny, that “shining city upon a hill” to give guidance and aspiration to all much like how Isaiah’s Israel was “to be a light to the nations.” Both Jewish and American history starts with a people oppressed in a land of kings seeking liberty. The first pilgrims traveled to find a new promised land, arriving to establish a just and righteous community of liberty not all dissimilar to the story of the Jewish exodus out of Egypt into the land of Canaan. Just as the Jews were to serve as role models for the gentiles, America serves as a role model for all aspirant, liberty-yearning, and migratory people searching for freedom of any kind. Many of America’s early religious dissident pilgrims envisioned themselves as the New Israelites out of build the New Jerusalem, moving history forward to its glorious consummation.
The idea of historical progress, and the role people play in the unfolding of history—an idea that was captured in all its utility by Enlightenment thinkers—is, again, deeply embedded in the story of Judaism.
But the Western liberal—progressive—tradition, the tradition of the Jews without the Jews, has always had a tenuous relationship with Judaism even when acknowledging the intellectual debt owed to Judaism. Hannah Arendt astutely pointed out the myriad of egalitarian contradictions promoted by American and European societies that always sought to assimilate Jews without truly assimilated them.
The greatest irony in the history of the West and its contingent relationship with Judaism is the opposite of conventional wisdom—Judaism assimilated Western civilization precisely because Western civilization comes from Christianity, which came out of Judaism, and whatever the tenuous (if not hostile) relationship the two fostered over the ages the West could never escape its intellectual foundations. Yes, Christian philosophers and theologians—like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—“baptized” Greek philosophers into their tradition, but they were really baptizing Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus into the Jordan River and making them part of the Jewish drama.
This heritage, of course, has been somewhat lost through the advent of postmodernism and cultural relativism. And in the new age of nice, we shouldn’t forget that the most cherished of ideals of Western civilization grew out of the Jewish historical and theological tradition. Indeed, without Judaism, that oft romanticized world of pagan heroes and hierarchal tyrants—that Thrasymachian disposition of the powerful over the weak—would likely be the world we inhabit today; no doubt some people actually want that.
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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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