The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels

A caravan of Semitic traders of the patriarchal period, painted by an Egyptian artist for a tomb at Beni-hasan c. 1900
B.C.

A caravan of Semitic traders of the patriarchal period, painted by an Egyptian artist for a tomb at Beni-hasan c. 1900
B.C.
The figure leading the procession (just after the two Egyptian officials pictured at right) wears a “coat of many colors,” as does Joseph in the Book of Genesis.

I
NTRODUCTION
 
The Jews Are It

T
he Jews started it all—and by “it” I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. And not only would our sensorium, the screen through which we receive the world, be different: we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.

By “we” I mean the usual “we” of late-twentieth-century writing: the people of the Western world, whose peculiar but vital mentality has come to infect every culture on earth, so that, in a startlingly precise sense, all humanity is now willy-nilly caught up in this “we.” For better or worse, the role of the West in humanity’s history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the inventors of Western culture, is also singular: there is simply no one else remotely like them; theirs is a unique vocation. Indeed, as we shall see, the very idea of
vocation
, of a personal destiny, is a Jewish idea.

Our history is replete with examples of those who have refused to see what the Jews are really about, who—through intellectual blindness, racial chauvinism, xenophobia, or just plain evil—have been unable to give this oddball tribe, this raggle-taggle band, this race of wanderers who are the
progenitors of the Western world, their due. Indeed, at the end of this bloodiest of centuries, we can all too easily look back on scenes of unthinkable horror perpetrated by those who would do anything rather than give the Jews their due.

But I must ask my readers to erase from their minds not only the horrors of history—modern, medieval, and ancient—but (so far as one can) the very notion of history itself. More especially, we must erase from our minds all the suppositions on which our world is built—the whole intricate edifice of actions and ideas that are our intellectual and emotional patrimony. We must reimagine ourselves in the form of humanity that lived and moved on this planet before the first word of the Bible was written down, before it was spoken, before it was even dreamed.

W
hat a bizarre phenomenon the first human mutants must have appeared upon the earth. Like their primate progenitors, they were long-limbed and rangy, but, with unimpressive muscles and without significant fur or claws, confined to the protection of trees, save when they would tentatively essay the floor of the savannah—hoping to obtain food without becoming food. With their small mouths and underdeveloped teeth, their unnaturally large heads (like the heads of primate infants), they were forced back on their wits. Their young remained helpless for years, well past the infancy of other mammals, requiring from their parents long years of vigilance and extensive tutelage in
many things. Without planning and forethought, without in fact the development of complex strategies, these mutants could not hope to survive at all.