Judaism is not a major
player in the history of humankind
One of the
most important and most beautiful values of Judaism is modesty. We would do
well to take this value to heart when considering the religion's impact on
humankind through the ages.
By
Yuval Noah Harari
It is certainly true that Judaism
begot Christianity, and influenced the birth of Islam – two of the most
important religions in history. However, the credit for the global achievements
of Christianity and Islam, as well as the guilt for their many crimes, belongs
to the Christians and Muslims themselves, rather than to the Jews. Just as it
would be unfair to blame Judaism for the mass killings of the Crusades
(Christianity is 100 percent culpable), so also there is no reason to credit
Judaism with the critical Christian idea that all human beings are equal before
God (an idea that stands in direct contradiction to Jewish orthodoxy).
The role of Judaism in the history
of humankind is a bit like the role of Newton’s mother in the history of
science. It is true that without Newton’s mother, we wouldn’t have had Newton,
and that Newton’s personality, ambitions and opinions were likely shaped to a
significant extent by his relations with his mother. But when writing the
history of science, nobody expects an entire chapter on Newton’s mother.
Similarly, without Judaism you would not have had Christianity, but that
doesn’t merit giving much importance to Judaism when writing the history of the
world. The crucial issue is what Christianity did with its Jewish legacy.
It goes without saying that the
Jewish people is a unique people with an astonishing history (though this is
true of most peoples). It similarly goes without saying that the Jewish
tradition is full of deep insights and noble values (though it is also full of
some questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes). It
is further true that, relative to its size, the Jewish people has had a
disproportional impact on the history of the last 2,000 years. But when you
look at the big picture of our history as a species, since the emergence of
Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago, it is obvious that the Jewish
contribution to history was very limited. Humans settled the entire planet,
adopted agriculture, built the first cities, and invented writing and money
thousands of years before the appearance of Judaism.
Even in the last two millennia, if
you look at history from the perspective of the Chinese or of the Native
American Indians, it is hard to see any major Jewish contribution except through
the mediation of Christians or Muslims. Thus the Hebrew Bible eventually became
a cornerstone of global human culture because it was warmly embraced by
Christianity. In contrast, the Talmud – whose importance to Jewish culture
surpasses that of the Bible – was rejected by Christianity, and consequently
remained an esoteric text hardly known to the Arabs, Poles or Dutch, not to
mention the Chinese and the Maya. Though Jewish communities that studied the
Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play a key role in
the building of the Chinese empires, in the early modern voyages of discovery,
in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution.
The coin, the university, the parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing
press and the steam engine were all invented by gentiles.
Ethics before the Bible
Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes
had moral codes tens of thousands of years before Abraham. When the first
European settlers reached Australia in the late 18th century, they encountered
aboriginal tribes that had a well-developed ethical worldview despite being
totally ignorant of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Indeed, scientists nowadays point
out that morality has evolutionary roots, and that it is present among most
social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys. For example, when wolf
cubs play with one another, they have “fair game” rules. If a cub bites too
hard, or continues to bite an opponent that has rolled on his back and
surrendered, the other cubs will stop playing with him.
In one hilarious experiment, the
primatologist Frans de Waal placed two capuchin monkeys in two adjacent cages,
so that each could see everything the other was doing. De Waal and his colleagues
placed small stones inside each cage, and trained the monkeys to give them
these stones. Whenever a monkey handed over a stone, he received food in
exchange. At first the reward was a piece of cucumber. Both monkeys were very
pleased with that, and happily ate their cucumber.
After a few rounds, de Waal moved
to the next stage of the experiment. This time, when the first monkey
surrendered a stone, he got a grape. Grapes are much more tasty than cucumbers.
However, when the second monkey turned over a stone, he still received only a
piece of cucumber.
The second monkey, who had
previously been very happy with his cucumber, became incensed. He took the
cucumber, looked at it for a moment in disbelief, and then threw it at the
scientists in anger, jumping and screeching. He’s no sucker. Equality and
social justice were central values in capuchin monkey society hundreds of
thousands of years before the prophet Amos complained about social elites “who
oppress the poor and crush the needy” (Amos 4:1), and before the prophet
Jeremiah preached, “do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow”
(Jeremiah 7:6).
Meanwhile in Egypt – centuries
before the birth of Moses – scribes wrote down “the story of the eloquent
peasant,” which tells of a poor peasant whose property was stolen by a greedy
landowner. The peasant came before Pharaoh’s corrupt officials, and when they
failed to protect him, he began explaining to them why they must provide
justice and in particular defend the poor from the rich. In one colorful
allegory, this Egyptian peasant explained that the meager possessions of the
poor are like their very breath, and official corruption suffocates them by
plugging the passage through their nostrils.
Many biblical laws copy rules that
were accepted in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan centuries and even millennia
prior to the establishment of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. If biblical
Judaism gave these laws any unique twist, it was by turning them from universal
rulings into tribal codes aimed primarily at the Jewish people.
Jewish morality was initially
shaped as an exclusive tribal affair, and remained so to some extent until the
21st century. The Bible, the Talmud and many though not all rabbis maintained
that the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a gentile, which is
why, for example, Jews are allowed to desecrate the Shabbat in order to save a
Jew from death, but are forbidden to do so if it is merely to save a gentile
(Babylonian Talmud, Yoma, 84:2).
Some Jewish sages argued that even
the famous commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” refers only to Jews,
and there is no commandment to love gentiles. Indeed, the original text from
Leviticus says: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your
people, but love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), which raises the
suspicion that “your neighbor” refers only to members of “your people.”
It was only the Christians who
selected some choice morsels of the Jewish moral code, turned them into
universal commandments, and spread them throughout the world. Indeed,
Christianity split from Judaism precisely on that account. While many Jews to
this day believe that the so-called “Chosen People” are closer to God than
other nations are, the founder of Christianity – Saint Paul the Apostle –
stipulated in his famous Epistle to the Galatians that “there is neither Jew
nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are
all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
And we must again emphasize that
despite the enormous impact of Christianity, this was definitely not the first
time a human preached a universal ethic. The Bible is far from being the
exclusive font of human morality (and luckily so, given the many racist, misogynist
and homophobic attitudes it contains). Confucius, Laozi, Buddha and Mahavira
established universal ethical codes long before Paul and Jesus, without knowing
anything about the land of Canaan or the prophets of Israel. Confucius taught
that every person must love others as he loves himself about 500 years before
Rabbi Hillel the Elder. And at a time when Judaism still mandated the sacrifice
of animals and the systematic extermination of entire human populations (the
Amalekites and Canaanites), Buddha and Mahavira already instructed their
followers to avoid harming not only all human beings, but any sentient beings
whatsoever, including insects.
Jewish physics, Christian biology
