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4000 YEARS OF JEWISH HISTORY
A History of the Jews'
Paul Johnson (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987)    

PROLOGUE                                                                                        

Why have I (Paul Johnson) have written a history of the Jews? There are four reasons.

The first is sheer curiosity. When I was working on my History of Christianity, I became aware for the first time in my life of the magnitude of the debt Christianity owes to Judaism. It was not, as I had been taught to suppose, that the New Testament replaced the Old; rather, that Christianity gave a fresh interpretation to an ancient form of monotheism, gradually evolving into a different religion but carrying with it much of the moral and dogmatic theology, the liturgy, the institutions and the fundamental concepts of its forebear. I thereupon determined, should opportunity occur, to write about the people who had given birth to my faith, to explore their history back to its origins and forward to the present day, and to make up my own mind about their role and significance. The world tended to see the Jews as a race which had ruled itself in antiquity and set down its records in the Bible; had then gone underground for many centuries; had emerged at last only to be slaughtered by the Nazis; and, finally, had created a state of its own, controversial and beleaguered. But these were merely salient episodes. I wanted to link them together, to find and study the missing portions, assemble them into a whole, and make sense of it.

My second reason was the excitement I found in the sheer span of Jewish history. From the time of Abraham up to the present covers the best part of four millennia. That is more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilized humanity. I am a historian who believes in long continuities and delights in tracing them. The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives. They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present. Whence came this extraordinary endurance? What was the particular strength of the all-consuming idea which made the Jews different and kept them homogeneous? Did its continuing power lie in its essential immutability, or its capacity adapt, or both? These are sinewy themes with which to grapple.

My third reason was that Jewish history covers not only vast tracts of time but huge areas. The Jews have penetrated many societies and left their mark on all of them. Writing a history of the Jews is almost like writing a history of the world, but from a highly peculiar angle vision. It is world history seen from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim. So the effort to grasp history as it appeared to Jews produces illuminating insights. Dietrich Bonhoeffer noticed this same effect when he was in a Nazi prison. 'We have learned', he wrote in 1942, 'to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of those who are excluded, under suspicion, ill-treated powerless, oppressed and scorned, in short those who suffer.' He found it, he said, 'an experience of incomparable value'. The historian finds a similar merit in telling the story of the Jews: it adds to history the new and revealing dimension of the underdog.

Finally the book gave me the chance to reconsider objectively, in light of a study covering nearly 4,000 years, the most intractable of human questions: what are we on earth for? Is history merely a series of events whose sum is meaningless? Is there no fundamental moral difference between the history of the human race and the history, say of ants? Or is there a providential plan of which we are, however humbly, the agents? No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering. Many of them believe it still. Others transmuted it into Promethean endeavours to raise our condition by purely human means. The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man-made. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose. Does their own history suggest that such attempts are worth making? Or does it reveal their essential futility? The account that follows, the result of my own inquiry, will I hope help its readers to answer these questions for themselves.

EPILOGUE    

In his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus describes Abraham as 'a man of great sagacity' who had 'higher notions of virtue than others of his time'. He therefore determined to change completely the views which all then had about God'. One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity, or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being. Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might eventually have stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption; of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews it might have been a much emptier place.

Above all, the Jews taught us how to rationalize the unknown. The result was monotheism and the three great religions which profess it. It is almost beyond our capacity to imagine how the world would have fared if they had never emerged. Nor did the intellectual penetration of the unknown stop at the idea of one God. Indeed monotheism itself can be seen as a milestone on the road which leads people to dispense with God altogether. The Jews first rationalized the pantheon of idols into one Supreme Being; then began the process of rationalizing Him out of existence. In the ultimate perspective of history, Abraham and Moses may come to seem less important than Spinoza. For the Jewish impact on humanity has been protean. In antiquity they were the great innovators in religion and morals. In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology. Gradually they were pushed from the van and fell behind until, by the end of the eighteenth century, they were seen as a bedraggled and obscurantist rearguard in the march of civilized humanity. But then came an astonishing second burst of creativity. Breaking out of their ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere. Much of the mental furniture of the modern world too is of Jewish fabrication. The Jews were not just innovators. They were also exemplars and epitomizers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and clarified form. They were the quintessential 'strangers and sojourners'. But are we not all such on this planet, of which we each possess a mere leasehold of threescore and ten? The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp? The Jews were fierce idealists striving for perfection, and at the same time fragile men and women yearning for flesh-pots and safety. They wanted to obey God's impossible law and they wanted to stay alive too. Therein lay the dilemma of, the Jewish commonwealths in antiquity, trying to combine the moral excellence of a theocracy with the practical demands of a state capable of defending itself. The dilemma has been recreated in our own time in the shape of Israel, founded to realize a humanitarian ideal discovering in practice that it must be ruthless simply to survive in a hostile world. But is not this a recurrent problem which affects all human societies? We all want to build Jerusalem. We all drift back; towards the Cities of the Plain. It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatize these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their particular fate into a universal moral. But if the Jews have this role, who wrote it for them?

Historians should beware of seeking providential patterns in events.  They are all too easily found, for we are credulous creatures born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme.  Yet excessive scepticism can produce as serious a distortion as credulity.  The historian should take into account all forms of evidence, including those which are or appear to be metaphysical. If the earliest Jews were  able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it. They always knew that Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race. That Jewish dilemmas, dramas and catastrophes should be exemplary, larger than life,  would seem only natural to them. That Jews should over the millennia attract such unparalleled, indeed inexplicable, hatred would be regrettable but only to be expected. Above all, that the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted or vanished into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable. How could it be otherwise? Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed. The historian may say: there is no such thing as providence. Possibly not. But human confidence in such an historical dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them. The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one. They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves. Therein, perhaps, lies the key to their story.

FOREIGN EMPIRES THAT RULED IN ISRAEL
Israel Science and Technology Directory
Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.
This article is also available in a PDF form:
"A Brief History of Israel and the Jewish People"
published in the Knowledge Quest magazine.

Quote from Charles Krauthammer - The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

The people of Israel (also called the "Jewish People") trace their origin to Abraham, who established the belief that there is only one God, the creator of the universe (see Torah). Abraham, his son Yitshak (Isaac), and grandson Jacob (Israel) are referred to as the patriarchs of the Israelites. All three patriarchs lived in the Land of Canaan, that later came to be known as the Land of Israel. They and their wives are buried in the Ma'arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, in Hebron (Genesis Chapter 23).

The name Israel derives from the name given to Jacob (Genesis 32:29). His 12 sons were the kernels of 12 tribes that later developed into the Jewish nation. The name Jew derives from Yehuda (Judah) one of the 12 sons of Jacob (Reuben, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yisachar, Zevulun, Yosef, Binyamin)(Exodus 1:1). So, the names Israel, Israeli or Jewish refer to people of the same origin.

The descendants of Abraham crystallized into a nation at about 1300 BCE after their Exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses (Moshe in Hebrew). Soon after the Exodus, Moses transmitted to the people of this newly emerging nation, the Torah, and the Ten Commandments (Exodus Chapter 20). After 40 years in the Sinai desert, Moses led them to the Land of Israel, that is cited in The Bible as the land promised by G-d to the descendants of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Genesis 17:8).

The people of modern day Israel share the same language and culture shaped by the Jewish heritage and religion passed through generations starting with the founding father Abraham (ca. 1800 BCE). Thus, Jews have had a continuous presence in the land of Israel for the past 3,300 years.

The rule of Israelites in the land of Israel starts with the conquests of Joshua (ca. 1250 BCE). The period from 1000-587 BCE is known as the "Period of the Kings". The most noteworthy kings were King David (1010-970 BCE), who made Jerusalem the Capital of Israel, and his son Solomon (Shlomo, 970-931 BCE), who built the first Temple in Jerusalem as prescribed in the Tanach (Old Testament).

In 587 BCE, Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar's army captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and exiled the Jews to Babylon (modern day Iraq).

The year 587 BCE marks a turning point in the history of the region. From this year onwards, the region was ruled or controlled by a succession of superpower empires of the time in the following order: Babylonian, Persian, Greek Hellenistic,

Period Empire Major Events

587 BCE Babylonian   Destruction of the first Temple.

538-333 BCE Persian Return of the exiled Jews from Babylon and construction of the second Temple (520-515 BCE).

333-63 BCE Hellenistic Conquest of the region by the army of Alexander the Great (333 BCE). The Greeks generally allowed the Jews to run their state. But, during the rule of the king Antiochus IV, the Temple was desecrated. This brought about the revolt of the Maccabees, who established an independent rule. The related events are celebrated during the Hanukah holiday.

63 BCE-313 CE Roman The Roman army led by Titus conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple at 70 CE. Jewish people were then exiled and dispersed to the Diaspora. In 132, Bar Kokhba organized a revolt against Roman rule, but was killed in a battle in Bethar in Judean Hills. Subsequently the Romans decimated the Jewish community, renamed Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and Judea as Palaestina to obliterate Jewish identification with the Land of Israel (the word Palestine, and the Arabic word Filastin originate from this Latin name).

The remaining Jewish community moved to northern towns in the Galilee. Around 200 CE the Sanhedrin was moved to Tsippori (Zippori, Sepphoris). The Head of Sanhedrin, Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi (Judah the Prince), compiled the Jewish oral law, Mishna.

313-636 Byzantine

636-1099 Arab Dome of the Rock was built by Caliph Abd el-Malik on the grounds of the destroyed Jewish Temple.

1099-1291 Crusaders The crusaders came from Europe to capture the Holy Land following an appeal by Pope Urban II, and massacred the non-Christian population. Later Jewish community in Jerusalem expanded by immigration of Jews from Europe.

1291-1516 Mamluk

1516-1918 Ottoman During the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566) the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem were rebuilt. Population of the Jewish community in Jerusalem increased.

1917-1948 British Great Britain recognized the rights of the Jewish people to establish a "national home in Palestine". Yet they greatly curtailed entry of Jewish refugees into Israel even after World War II. They split Palestine mandate into an Arab state which has become the modern day Jordan, and Israel.

After the exile by the Romans at 70 CE, the Jewish people migrated to Europe and North Africa. In the Diaspora (scattered outside of the Land of Israel), they established rich cultural and economic lives, and contributed greatly to the societies where they lived. Yet, they continued their national culture and prayed to return to Israel through centuries. In the first half of the 20th century there were major waves of immigration of Jews back to Israel from Arab countries and from Europe. During the British rule in Palestine, the Jewish people were subject to great violence and massacres directed by Arab civilians or forces of the neighboring Arab states. During World War II, the Nazi regime in Germany decimated about 6 million Jews creating the great tragedy of The Holocaust.

In 1948, Jewish Community in Israel under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion reestablished sovereignty over their ancient homeland. Declaration of independence of the modern State of Israel was announced on the day that the last British forces left Israel (May 14, 1948).

ARAB-ISRAELI WARS

A day after the declaration of independence of the State of Israel, armies of five Arab countries, Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq, invaded Israel. This marked the beginning of the War of Independence. Arab states have jointly waged four full scale wars against Israel:

• 1948 War of Independence
• 1956 Sinai War
• 1967 Six Day War
• 1973 Yom Kippur War

Despite the numerical superiority of the Arab armies, Israel defended itself each time and won. After each war Israeli army withdrew from most of the areas it captured (see maps). This is unprecedented in World history and shows Israel's willingness to reach peace even at the risk of fighting for its very existence each time anew.

Note that with Judea and Samaria Israel is only 40 miles wide. Thus, Israel can be crossed from the Mediterranean coast to the Eastern border at Jordan river within two hours of driving.

(Editor’ Note  In addition Israel has been involved in minor wars in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria and Interfada by the Palestinians).

INGATHERING OF THE ISRAELITES

This drawing by Dr. Semion Natliashvili depicts the modern ingathering of the Jewish People after 2,000 years of Diaspora.

he center image of the picture shows young and old man attired in prayer shawl and reading from a Torah scroll that has united the Jewish People. The written portion shows Shema Yisrael Adonay Eloheynu Adonay Echad (Hear, Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One).

The Star of David symbolizes the gathering of the Jewish People from all corners of the world including Georgia (country of birth of the artist), Morocco, Russia, America, China, Ethiopia, Europe and other countries joining together in dance and celebration. Other images inside the star symbolize modern Israeli industry, agriculture and military. The images on the margins of the picture symbolize the major threats that the Jewish People faced in Exile starting from the Exodus from Egypt, followed by Romans, Arabs and culminating in the gas-chambers of the Holocaust in Europe.

RENAMING JUDEA AND JERUSALEM

Wikipedia Between 132–135, Simon Bar Kokhba led a revolt against the Roman Empire, controlling parts of Judea but seemingly not Jerusalem, for three years. As a result, Hadrian sent Sextus Julius Severus to the region, who brutally crushed the revolt. Shortly before or after the Bar Kokhba's revolt (132–135), the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the name of the Judea province and merged it with Roman Syria to form Syria Palaestina, while Jerusalem was renamed to Aelia Capitolina, which certain scholars conclude was done in an attempt to remove the relationship of the Jewish people to the region.

Wikipedia  In 135 CE, the Greek "Syria Palaestina" [b] was used in naming a new Roman province from the merger of Roman Syria and Roman Judaea after the Roman authorities crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

During the Byzantine period c.390, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was reorganized into: Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda,[24] and Palaestina Salutaris. Following the Muslim conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic. The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English,[26] was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. In the 20th century the name was used by the British to refer to "Mandatory Palestine", a mandate from the former Ottoman Empire which had been divided in the Sykes–Picot Agreement. The term was later used in the eponymous "State of Palestine". Both incorporated geographic regions from the land commonly known as Palestine, into a new state whose territory was named Palestine

Wikipedia   Aelia Capitolina (/ˈiːliə ˌkæpᵻtəˈlaɪnə/; Latin in full: COLONIA AELIA CAPITOLINA) was a Roman colony, built under the emperor Hadrian on the site of Jerusalem, which was in ruins since the siege of 70 AD, leading in part to the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 AD. Aelia Capitolina remained the official name of Jerusalem  until 638 AD when the Arabs conquered the city and kept the first part of it as 'إلياء' (Iliyā'). Aelia came from Hadrian's nomen gentile, Aelius, while Capitolina meant that the new city was dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus, to whom a temple was built on the site of the former Jewish temple, the Temple Mount. (The Latin name Aelia is the source of the much later Arabic term Iliyā' (إلياء), a 7th-century Islamic name for Jerusalem.)

The city was renamed "Aelia Capitolina", and rebuilt it in the style of a typical Roman town. Jews were prohibited from entering the city on pain of death, except for one day each year, during the holiday of Tisha B'Av. Taken together, these measures (which also affected Jewish Christians) essentially "secularized" the city. The ban was maintained until the 7th century, though Christians would soon be granted an exemption: during the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine I ordered the construction of Christian holy sites in the city, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Burial remains from the Byzantine period are exclusively Christian, suggesting that the population of Jerusalem in Byzantine times probably consisted only of Christians.

The city was without walls, protected by a light garrison of the Tenth Legion, during the Late Roman Period. The detachment at Jerusalem, which apparently encamped all over the city’s western hill, was responsible for preventing Jews from returning to the city. Roman enforcement of this prohibition continued through the 4th century.

LINKS    

The Centre for Online Judaic Studies

Judaism and Jewish History Curricular Resource Packet

Homeland – searching for an alternative Jewish home

Proposals for a Jewish state

Jewish Migration 1492-1948 by Tobias Brinkman

Wikipedia  Jewish History

Go to
Jewish Timeline  A Brief History of the Jewish People on One Page
then, at the bottom of the page, you will see
‘Click on any of the following titles to expand its contents

Jewish Demography - Population and Immigration

Control Over the Land of Israel

Rabbinical Era

World History - Main Events

Jewish Historical Figures

Jewish Literature

SUMMARY

_________________

In 1987 Paul Johnson wrote a Jewish history classic entitled 'A History of the Jews’. He started with a Prologue explaining why he, a Christian, decided to write this history.  He concluded with an  Epilogue saying what he found out.  They are reproduced below.  In doing this he covered a period of nearly 4,000 years.  

Judea was renamed Palestina and Jerusalem Aeolia Capitolina by the Romans after the defeat of Bar Kochba in 135CE to make the Jewish names names disappear from the map

From Charles Krauthammer in ‘The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store."

_______________________________________________________________________________

THE RETURN OF THE VIOLIN

Czestochwa, Poland,
where 40,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis.

Sigmund Rolat tells the story of a Stradivarius violin
belonging to the great Bromislow Huberman.
It is a story that connects the
great violinist Joshua Bell, Huberman, the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich,
the creation of the Israel Symphony Orchestra, Toscanini and a Conneticut jail.

Go To

The Hebrew Bible

The Jewish Law

Jewish Festivals

Survival of Hebrew

Antisemitism

4000 YEARS OF JEWISH  HISTORY

        Abraham                                     Exile                                   Israel

From:  The History of Israel

- A Chronological Presentation

The Red Line shows
Israel’s borders,
Gaza and the Golan Heights

From PRESCRIPTION FOR SURVIVAL  (From Indestructible Jews pp17-24

(Max I Dimont, 1971)

Our first act, extending in time from Abraham to Jesus, will serve to prepare the Jews emotionally and intellectual­ly for survival in a Diaspora. Our second act, extending in time from Jesus to Ben-Gurion, will show the Jews strewn as “exiled lights” throughout the Diaspora in order to accomplish their mission. Our third act, extending in time from Ben-Gurion to 2,000 years into the future, will usher in the final accomplishment of the Jews—the mes­sianic age of man on earth.

We propose, in this book, to present the idea of Jewish history dramatically, by transposing Luria’s three stages into three acts, each act 2,000 years long. We shall fit the 4,000-year history of the Jews into the first two acts. Then we will permit ourselves to speculate about Jewish and world destiny in the subsequent 2,000 years—the third act.

THE

INCREDIBLE

STORY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE