Some 3,300 years ago the Children of Israel accepted the laws of the Torah at Mount Sinai. This same system of jurisprudence is alive and vibrant today. All the old religions of the nations have either been abandoned or have been so changed that their founders would not now be able to recognize them. In contrast, despite the vicissitudes of time, the Jews, a stateless and tormented people, retained their portable homeland, the Torah. Indeed, never in Jewish history have so many Jews returned to the Torah and established so many academies of Jewish learning. Moreover, during the past three decades, a veritable renaissance has been taking place in Jewish philosophy. Mathematicians, physicists, and biologists, are interfacing science with the Torah. Torah principles and values are being employed to illuminate and hopefully elevate the character of democracy, now in a state of moral decay. Thus, despite the murderous hatred and humiliation of Jews down through history, Judaism continues to flourish.
To begin to appreciate the concept of the Chosen People, it will be helpful to review what some Gentile philosophers, historians, and statesmen have said about Jews and Judaism.
Ancient and Modern Philo-Semitism
In contrast to the vilification of Jews by the generality of mankind, many of the most learned Gentiles have admired the Jewish people. Theophrastus (372-287 BCE), Aristotle’s student and successor at the Lyceum, referred to the Jews as “a nation of philosophers.”[i] Clearchus, another student of Aristotle, and in the first rank of peripatetic philosophers, records his having heard his master tell of an encounter with a Jew from Judea (the ancient name of “Palestine”). Aristotle relates that the man spoke Greek, and adds: “During my stay in Asia, he visited the same places as I did, and came to converse with me and some other scholars, to test our learning. But as one who has been intimate with many cultivated persons, it was rather he who imparted more to us than we to him.”[ii]
Numenius (fl. 150-176 CE), a Syrian philosopher who is regarded as a founder of neoPlatonism, greatly admired the Jews, especially Moses. He is recorded as having said, “For what else is Plato than Moses speaking Attic Greek.”[iii] Porphyry records a direct quotation from Genesis by Numenius, whose frequent use of both the Pentateuch and the Prophets, which he interpreted allegorically, is attested by Origen (c. 184-254 CE), the well-known early Christian theologian.
Numenius was probably influenced by the voluminous writings of Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE), as was the second century Clement of Alexandria, Origen’s teacher. Thoroughly versed in Greek philosophy and culture—indeed, he was a precursor of neoPlatonism—Philo regarded the teachings of all Greek philosophers and lawgivers as a natural development of the revelatory teachings of Moses. Nevertheless, the influence of Judaism on Greek philosophy, recorded in the fragments of ancient writers, was ignored or denied by modern historians until recent decades.
What made the Jews philosophers par excellence is that they regarded every aspect of existence as part of an integrated whole. Where others saw chance, they saw God incognito. Where others saw blind fate they saw Providence. For the God of the Bible is not only the God of Nature but also the God of History. Hence history has to be rational and purposeful. This Jewish idea, which underlies Western philosophies of history, cannot but elevate the thoughts of statesmen.
John Adams, Harvard graduate and second President of the United States, said of the Jews:
They have done more to civilize men than any other Nation. They are the most glorious Nation that ever inhabited the earth. The Romans and their Empire were but a bauble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of Mankind more, and more happily than any other Nation, ancient or modern.[iv]
Historian and statesman Thomas B. Macaulay declared, in a debate in 1833 in the British House of Commons over whether Jews should have their legal and political disabilities removed by law:
In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown in Athens, when scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this condemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid temple,... their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and poets.[v]
This reference to the Temple of the Jews, as well as to their schools of sacred learning and natural philosophers, suggests that the civilization of ancient Israel harbored no tension or dichotomy between religion and science (i.e., natural philosophy)—which is why Judaism has been called the religion of reason. Friedrich Nietzsche has written: “Wherever the Jews have attained to influence, they have taught to analyze more subtly, to argue more acutely, to write more clearly and purely: it has always been their problem to bring people to ‘raison.’”[vi]
(To be continued)
[i] Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, I, 10.
[ii] Ibid., I, 50. See Josephus, Complete Works, Against Apion, p. 948.
[iii] Stern, II, 210. Numenius lived in Apamea, which had a considerable Jewish population.
[iv] Cited in Pathways to the Torah, p. A6.2.
[v] Cited in Alan M. Dershowitz, Chutzpah, p. 105.
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