(Page 2 of 8)

Greek culture was more tempting than Babylon's, and the spectrum of adaptations from isolation to apostasy set the precedent for all future Jewish cultural encounters. But Greek anti-Semitism set limits on assimilation, and rabbinical Judaism was born. For the Jews at least, the ascent of Rome was a disaster, because Rome was the Stalinist Russia of its time. Severe oppression including thousands of crucifixions created seething rebellion, zealotry, messianism, and magic that gave rise to the mission of Jesus, as well as to two Jewish-Roman wars. Rome's genocidal response to those wars ended Temple Judaism and drove most of the Jews out of their land.

Rabbinical - talmudic - Judaism was now the religion of the Jews, as they spread over much of the civilized world. But as Christianity acquired political power Jews were increasingly defined as the enemies of Christ and were treated as such - humiliated, beaten, exiled, and murdered again and again. This now helped define their culture. Jews living under Islam were also considered inferior, but enjoyed much more tolerance. Islamic culture shaped the Jews, who participated in it at all levels, and who brought the benefits of this higher culture to their central European brethren. In Islamic Spain, the Jews wrote troubadour poetry in Hebrew, served as military leaders, and made great contributions to philosophy.

They also developed a mystical tradition in Spain and Israel, paralleled by folk beliefs about imps and demons. But the mainstream of Jewish thought went through rabbinical academies, where the best minds gathered, competed, were nurtured, and were married off in every generation, creating a kind of cult of the intellect. With the opening of European secular thought to Jews, these outsiders' contribution was way out of proportion to their numbers. They have continued to be overrepresented in every secular intellectual enterprise that humanity has turned its mind to.

Jews are not called wanderers for nothing, and their travels have reached the ends of the earth. Thriving and substantial Jewish communities existed for centuries in Arabia, Ethiopia, India, and China, while smaller numbers of Jews settled in the mountains of the Caucasus, on the island of Curaçao, and on the Alaskan frontier, to name just a few examples. Jewish communities have played a role beyond their numbers in Australia, South Africa, and Argentina. The common threads of these far-flung cultures tell us much about the essence of Jewishness. Exotic Jewish communities may not be the norm today, but they reflect the process that began Jewish life in every location outside of Israel.

Less exotically, Jews settled in central and eastern Europe, where they built the culture that dominates the Jewish world today. They created Yiddish, making it a language of everyday life as well as a literary language. They developed a variety of rabbinical traditions, and reached the pinnacle of excellence in Torah and Talmud study. These Jews were largely murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in all occupied countries. So were the Sephardic Jews of the northern Mediterranean. But enough survived to carry on most Jewish traditions. They fought against their oppressors in many ways, and they won important victories. Tempered in this crucible of death, many of the survivors were hardened fighters who would help create the state of Israel.

Jews, or at least conversos, may have come to the Americas with Columbus. By Washington's time there were several established communities, mainly Sephardic Jews, and they committed themselves to the Revolution with blood and treasure, as Jews have done in every other war the United States has fought. This was the greatest diaspora, and the one in which Jewish life would become most normal. The huge influx of Ashkenazic Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed them and their new country both. Their (mainly temporary) involvement in organized crime, their immense contribution to entertainment and the arts, and their achievements in science, technology, and business brought respect. But it was their continual legal testing of America's stated ideals, both on their own behalf and that of others, that would be their greatest contribution.

Beginning in the nineteenth century the ages-old trickle of Jews back to Israel widened to a rivulet, then a stream, then a river. Legendary fights against swamps, malaria, and hostile Arabs marked several generations. The kibbutz, the world's most successful invented society, played a critical role in addressing these and other challenges. Hebrew was revived as a modern language, the only ancient language that has ever been reborn. A culture of sacrifice and militancy arose to protect this fragile entity from its far more numerous enemies. But great divisions created tensions and inequalities, not least with respect to whether and when the Palestinian people will have a state of their own.

Despite men's domination of Jewish life, women have emerged from the shadows since biblical times. They have led armies, defied kings, contributed to the Talmud, built multinational business empires, written memoirs and letters, resettled Israel, led it, given their lives in heroic actions against their enemies, helped end apartheid in South Africa and segregation in America, sat in the Senate and on the Supreme Court, and helped create the labor movement and the feminist revolution - all while producing the next generation of Jews. However, the history of Jewish women is in some ways just beginning.

Jewish life will survive future threats just as it has survived all past ones. Jews have suffered, but not lying down. They have a tradition of arguing with God, and have pursued social justice by arguing with kings. They will continue to be hated, to achieve great things for themselves and others, to defend their ancient homeland, and to face the world with the proud yet open-minded stance that has allowed them to survive for more than three millennia. There is every reason to believe that they will be here for the next.

While this is an anthropologist's view of Jewish culture and history, it is also inevitably a personal view, and so it seems wise to say who I am. I was born in Brooklyn and raised in a "modern Orthodox" family. I went to public schools where about a third of the students were Jewish, and I was in the local Orthodox synagogue - Ahavath Israel, Avenue K and East Twenty-ninth Street - every day of my life between ages eight and seventeen, five days a week for classes, the other days for services. The leader of that congregation, Rabbi Bernard L. Berzon, remains incandescent in my memory four decades later. Friday evenings in his home were almost as likely to include discussions of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky as Talmud and Torah. But he glowed with a love for the Jewish people, the Jewish Torah, and the Jewish God.

I lost my faith at seventeen amid the rebellions of the sixties, a philosophy course in my first semester in college, and of course a great love. At the beginning of that semester I used to walk halfway across Brooklyn to see the young lady on Friday nights; at the end of it I no longer saw the meaning of God. I never regained my faith, and I was largely out of touch with anything Jewish for fifteen years. I had reconstructed a worldview based on science - evolution, anthropology, and behavioral biology would eventually explain my nature and that of every other human being. But unlike some nonbelievers, I considered my loss of faith precisely that - a loss.

Still, I maintained what I considered a strong inner Jewish identity. With my name, average looks, and nondistinctive voice I could easily have passed, but I always found an excuse to let people know that I was Jewish. During those years I read extensively about the Holocaust, married someone at least nominally Jewish, followed the novels of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow very faithfully, and ate bagels and lox. That was about it.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D., the author of nine books, is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he teaches in the anthropology, human biology, and Jewish studies programs. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Science, and the New England Journal of Medicine.