[Jeremiah 12: 9]

barely set foot on that land before history condemned them to ten centuries of warfare, migration, and slavery. Finally, fleeing Egypt under Moses, they began their forty-year trek back to the hills of Judea to found their first sovereign state.

Its apogee, under David and Solomon, lasted barely a century. Living at the crossroads of the caravan routes of Europe, Asia, and Africa, installed on a land that was already a beckoning temptation to every nearby civilization, the Hebrews endured a millennium of unremitting assaults. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, each in turn sent its cohorts to conquer their land. Twice, in 586 B.C. and in A.D. 70, their conquerors inflicted upon them the supreme ordeal of exile and destroyed the Temple they had built in Jerusalem’s Mount Moriah [to JHVH, their one and universal deity]. From those dispersions and the suffering accompanying them was born their tenacious attachment to their ancient land.

Reinforcing its appeal, giving it a continual contemporary urgency, was the curse of persecution which followed the Jews into every haven in which they had sought shelter. [The pharaohs of Egypt, who tried to reduce the Jewish birth-rate, the Hamans of Persia, the persecutions of Antiochus and the Greeks, and finally Rome, first under pagan emperors ... then finally ...]

How ironic that following the Christianization of the Roman Empire [under Constantine] so much of Jewish suffering grew out of the actions of people whose religion, paradoxically, was dedicated to the love of man for man. Burning in the ardor of their new faith to convert the pagan masses, the early fathers of the Christian Church strove to emphasize the differences between their religion and its theological predecessor by forcing upon the Jews a kind of spiritual apartheid. The Emperor Theodosius II gave those aspirations legal force in his code, condemning Judaism and, for the first time, legally branding the Jews a people apart.

Dagobert, King of the Franks, drove them from Gaul; Spain's Visigoths seized their children as converts; the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius forbade Jewish worship. With the Crusades, spiritual apartheid became systematic slaughter. Shrieking their cry "Deus vult! God wills it!," the Crusaders fell on every hapless Jewish community on their route to Jerusalem.

Most countries barred Jews from owning land. The religiously organized medieval craft and commerce guilds were closed to them. The Church forbade Jews to employ Christians and Christians to live among Jews. Most loathsome of all was the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to stamp the Jews as a race apart by forcing them to wear a distinguishing badge. In England it was a replica of the tablets on which Moses received the Ten Commandments. In France and Germany it was a yellow O, forerunner of the yellow stars with which the Third Reich would one day mark the victims of its gas chambers.

Edward I of England [1290] and later Philip the Fair of France expelled the Jews from their nations, seizing their property before evicting them. Even the Black Death was blamed on the Jews, accused of poisoning Christian wells with a powder made of spiders, frogs' legs, Christian entrails and consecrated hosts. Over two hundred Jewish communities were exterminated in the slaughters stirred by that wild fantasy.

During those dark centuries, the only example of normal Jewish existence in the West was in the Spain of the Caliphate, where, under Arab rule, the Jewish people flourished as they never would again in the Diaspora. The Christian Reconquista ended that. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain. The next day, August 3 1492, Columbus set sail.

In Germany, Jews were forbidden to ride in carriages and were made to pay a special toll as they entered a city. The republic of Venice enriched the vocabulary of the world with the word ghetto from the quarter, Ghetto Nuovo -- New Foundry -- to which the republic restricted its Jews. In Poland, the Cossack Revolt, with a ferocity and devotion to torture unparalleled in Jewish experience, wiped out over 100,000 Jews in less than a decade. When the czars pushed their frontier westward across Poland, an era of darkness set in for almost half the world's Jewish population. Fenced into history's greatest ghetto, the Pale of Settlement, Jews were conscripted at the age of twelve for twenty-five years of military service and forced to pay special taxes on kosher meat and Sabbath candles. Jewish women were not allowed to live in the big city university centers without the yellow ticket of a prostitute. In 1880, after the assassination of Alexander II, the mobs, aided by the Czar's soldiers, burned and butchered their way through one Jewish community after another, leaving a new word in their wake: pogrom.

Bloody milestones on the road to Hitler's gas chambers, those slaughters succeeding one another through the centuries were the constant of Jewish history, the ghastly heritage on an oppressed race to whom the crematoriums of the Third Reich might seem only the final, most appalling manifestation of their destiny.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem!

Let me be a little meeker
To my brother who is weaker,
Let me think more of my neighbor
And a little less of me.

-----The Unquiet Grave, 1945

As Isaiah Berlin notes, 'The Jews are a peculiar and difficult people in many ways, not least because their history has contradicted most of the best-known and most admired laws or theories of historical causation.' By which he meant that according to the best-known laws or theories of history, the Jews -- like many other minorities long since destroyed -- should have disappeared. But they did not, and their remarkable survival in the face of oppression (and the re-creation of the state of Israel) confounds everything we are supposed to know about historical causation. Historians such as Arnold Toynbee spent a lifetime trying to understand how Jews have managed to survive -- despite Toynbee's conclusion that they should have been wiped out 2,000 years ago -- and Toynbee wound up explaining it away by saying that the Jews are 'exceptional.' Perhaps, but it may not completely explain why Jews have managed to survive a history that began with ostracism, passed to expulsion, and wound up in destruction -- all for the single crime of being Jewish.

"Never has one being, before or since, been the focus of passions that have altered the course of history, changed international boundaries, and so thoroughly possessed the souls of men and women. Never has anyone been so glorified, received such homage, adulation, and reverence.

"The name of Jesus is on the lips of millions of believers as they rise in the morning and retire at night. For many, life itself would be devoid of purpose and meaning without the comfort of Jesus.

"When one realizes the total impact of his life and deeds, there is no need to be told how vital Jesus is to Christian beliefs. I wonder, though, if Christians realize how significant Jesus has also been to people of Jewish faith."

Yet the religion founded in [Jesus'] name ignores his philosophy of love by debasing the Jews -- his own people, his earliest followers. For centuries [Jews] have been viewed by the Church as culpable for their alleged role in his crucifixion, though, in fact, Jews were among Jesus' most ardent supporters. His immediate followers considered themselves the most fortunate of Jews. They could participate in all Temple rites, never questioning their Jewishness, in addition, Jesus, their rabbi, was considered a messiah.

All early Christians were Jews. [All is italicized]

Edith Shaeffer, author. Title: Christianity is Jewish.
Malachi Martin, author. Title: The Encounter.
Eugene Fisher, author. Title: Faith Without Prejudice.
Father Edward Flannery, author. Title: The Anguish of the Jews.
Pinchas Lapide, author. Title: Signposts for the Future
Pinchas Lapide, author. Title: Three Popes and the Jews
Abraham Katsh : The Biblical Heritage Of American Democracy. KTAV Publishing, Hoboken NJ Dagobert Runes: The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization
Ken Spiro: Worldperfect, the Jewish Impact on Civilization
Cecil Roth: Tthe Jewish Contribution to Civilization
Roy Eckardt, author. Title: Elder and Younger Brothers
Roy Eckardt, author. Title: Jews and Christians
Roy Eckardt, author. Title: No longer aliens, no longer strangers
{Franklin Littell}
Jacques Maritain, author. Title: Redeeming the Time

Jesus, according to Christian belief, was crucified shortly after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. His crucifixion has been the central theme of Christianity since its foundation. The crucified one stands with outstretched overlooking Christian history since the time of Peter and Paul. In another and real sense, the Jew .... has been the crucified one of Christian history. Between Jesus the Jew and the Jew of history there is surely more than the affinity of race. The Jew lies with arms outstretched on the road which Christianity travelled. For Christians made of him the object of their hate and their sacred brutality.