Perhaps the most interesting question to be asked in a survey of the Jews’ place in ancient history is how the Jews managed to retain their ancestral cultural and ethnic identity in the millennium separating Alexander the Great from the Muslim conquests, a timeframe which saw most ancient ethnic groups either vanish off the face of the earth or entirely transformed. To fully understand the import of this question, we may note that whereas in the middle ages there was much external pressure on the Jewish communities of medieval Christendom and Islam - in the form of antiSemitism, ghettoization, special identity markers, and numerous social restrictions - throughout antiquity there were very few such pressures, and the road was wide open for those Jews who wanted to mingle in non-Jewish society and give up their ancestral commitments and ethnic identity to do so. Moreover, the road was wide open for the entire Jewish people to adopt new ways of life, new modes of thought, and new religious beliefs, as they repeatedly did. It is the ability of many generations of Jews to undergo substantial historical and cultural changes without being entirely transformed into oblivion which makes ancient Jewish history so worthy of a closer look.
To see how the Jews managed to survive, we may examine both the cultural and the social mechanisms which enabled, or facilitated, this process. It must be stressed, however, that ancient Jews did not set out to beat some world record of ethnic survival; their own assumption was that they must adhere to God’s commandments until he sends his redeemer to change history for ever; had they known that two thousand years later their descendants would still be around with the redeemer nowhere in sight, they would have been quite shocked and extremely displeased. But it is a habit of teleological religious systems, as of all other ideological movements which influence people’s behaviors through the conceptual frameworks they provide and the promises they make, to achieve great things they never aimed for while failing to fulfill their most basic promises, and Judaism - ancient or modern - is no exception. Long-term ethnic survival, at a time when other ethnic groups gradually vanished into oblivion, certainly was an unintended by-product of the actions taken by many individual Jews over the centuries in their efforts to abide by what they interpreted as their ancestral religious duties, and in the hope of gaining collective and individual salvation.
Among the many mechanisms which abetted the Jews’ survival, we may note especially the presence of the Hebrew Bible, and of its Greek translation(s), as providing those Jews who wanted it with an axis around which to build their lives. The interpretation of the biblical laws was a much contested affair throughout ancient Jewish history, but while the meaning of specific biblical injunctions varied greatly over time (witness the changing interpretations of the Second Commandment), the very commitment to these laws, and the debates about their meanings, often encouraged the creation of Jewish “sects,” but also enabled many Jews to develop new ways of being Jewish and passing their Judaism to their descendants. We may also note that the Jews’ ancestral writings provided them not only with blueprints for life, but also with a map of their own history, distinct from that of all the peoples around them, and that the Jewish synagogues, which clearly served as the places where Jews could read their ancient texts together - in the original, or in a Greek translation - and pray together, were a major facilitator of inner-Jewish social cohesion.
As a second factor, we may stress the Jews’ belief in a single god, and the conviction of quite a few Jews that the gods worshiped all around them were nothing but useless “idols,” as a major factor contributing to setting the Jews apart from their neighbors and preventing their gradual assimilation into their “pagan” environment. It was especially the notion of a wide gulf separating those who had a covenant with God from those who did not that repeatedly enabled ancient Jews to borrow from their non-Jewish neighbors those cultural elements which they found useful or appealing, censor out those which they found offensive, and embed those they were borrowing in a new, and specifically Jewish, cultural framework. Finally, we must note that while the rise of Christianity, and then Islam, spelled the ruin of all other religions of antiquity, Judaism survived - in part because both Christians and Muslims refused to forcibly convert the Jews as they did the “pagans,” in part because the Jews had ready-made answers to the challenges raised by two religions which were quite like their own in so many ways.
While noting the Jews’ survival and analyzing its causes, we should not forget the price they paid for this unintended success. The thousand years between Alexander and Muhammad apparently saw no major growth, and perhaps even much decline, in the number of Jews in the world, a sure result of the unwillingness of many Jews to remain loyal to the ancestral covenant and avoid assimilation into the majority culture (one must stress, however, that we lack reliable data on the size of the Jewish population in antiquity - see McGing 2002). The same period also saw only one major Jewish contribution to world history, which happened to be the one they disliked the most, and the fulfillment of none of the promises they found in their sacred books. And while in the time of Alexander they were mostly living on their own land, recollecting their glorious past and hopeful of a glorious future, the Muslim conquest found them dispersed in many lands but never really at home, still recollecting their glorious past but facing a very uncertain future. Always begging to differ, and always convinced of their own superiority, Jews learned to suffer the consequences, and while in antiquity their haughty exclusivity was mostly ignored by their non-Jewish neighbors, in Christian and Muslim environments it often earned them the ire of their intolerant hosts, who were convinced that it was to them that God revealed his truest revelation, which superseded his revelation to the Jews. Survive the Jews certainly did, but theirs was a very precarious existence.
World History
