Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR MAX I. DIMONTS
JEWS, GOD AND HISTORY
Done with warmth and vitality. Written for laymen by a scholarly layman who has a passion for his theme.
MAX LERNER
By far the liveliest popular history of the Jewish people that I have ever read. In many ways, a strikingly original synthesis of Jewish history.
RICHARD B. MORRIS,
author of The Forging of the Union, 1781-1789
and Witnesses at the Creation
MAX I. DIMONT, author of The Indestructible Jews, The Jews in America, The Amazing Adventures of the Jewish People, and Appointment in Jerusalem, was born in Helsinki, Finland, and came to the United States in 1930. He taught himself English by reading Shakespeares plays, the Bible, and American plays translated into Finnish. After serving in intelligence with the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked in public relations and employee relations for Edison Brothers Stores in St. Louis. Following the first publication of the bestselling Jews, God and History, he lectured extensively on Jewish history throughout the United States, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, and Finland until his death in 1992.
OTHER BOOKS BY MAX I. DIMONT
Appointment in Jerusalem
The Indestructible Jews
The Jews in America
The Amazing Adventures of the Jewish People
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First Signet Classics Printing, June 2004
Copyright Max Dimont, 1962 Copyright renewed Max Dimont, 1990 Copyright Ethel Dimont, 1994
eISBN : 978-1-101-14225-7
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This book is respectfully dedicated to
my late father, Hyman Dimont,
a humanist in the great Talmudic tradition,
who early taught me to cherish the proverb
of Solomon: To know wisdom and instruction;
to comprehend the words of understanding;
to receive the discipline of wisdom, justice,
and right, and equity.
PREFACE
At the time of his death in 1992, Max Dimont was in the process of updating Jews, God and History. Having worked with him from the time he started thinking about writing this book in 1955, I feel he would have wanted the task finished. I have used as much of his material as possible and tried to keep faith with his ideas, concerns, and beliefs in Jews and Jewish history, but I ask the readers understanding of what might be obvious differences in style. No one can write like Max Dimont; I certainly cannot.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Maxs readers for having made Jews, God and History a classic in its own time, and to have done so while he was still alive to appreciate it.
Just as with all his other works, our daughter Gail Goldey was always there, with her sharp pencil and discerning mind, to come to my aid in completing this manuscript.
Ethel Dimont 1993
Most history books about Jews are written by Jews for Jews, or by scholars for scholars. But Jewish history is too fascinating, too interesting, too incredible to remain the private property of Jews and scholars. This book is a popular history of this amazing people, written without bowing to orthodoxy or pandering to anti-intellectualism. It will furnish the arguments, the data, the ideas, but the reader will have to furnish his intelligent understanding. The author is not seeking to convince anyone or change anyones opinion. This book is designed to entertain, to inform, and to stimulate.
The real history of the Jews has not yet been written. It took Europe sixteen hundred years after the decline of Greece to realize that her literature, science, and architecture had their roots in Grecian civilization. It may take another few hundred years to establish that the spiritual, moral, ethical, and ideological roots of Western civilization are embedded in Judaism. To put it differentlythe furniture in the Western world is Grecian, but the house in which Western man dwells is Jewish. This is a viewpoint which is beginning to appear more and more in the writings of both churchmen and secular scholars.
Jewish history cannot be told as the history of Jews only, because they have nearly always lived within the context of other civilizations. The destiny of the Jews has paralleled the destinies of those same civilizations, except in one important respect. Somehow the Jews managed to escape the cultural death of each of the civilizations within which they dwelled. Somehow the Jews managed to survive the death of one civilization and continue their cultural growth in another which was emerging at the time.
How did they survive?
To tell this four-thousand-year story of survival on four continents and in six major civilizations, this book makes use of a new method of viewing Jewish history. It presents the general history of each of these civilizations, analyzes Jewish events within the framework of these other cultures, and then examines those ideas, unique to the Jews, which enabled them to survive as a national group and which gave them the vitality to continue as a culture-producing society. Thus Jewish history becomes part of world history, and the reader will be able to correlate Jewish events with contemporary events.
This book attempts to portray the broad sweep of Jewish history, the grandeur and humor of the Jewish comdie humaine, and to present Jewish history through the eyes of a twentieth-century Western man rather than a sixteenth-century ghetto Talmudist.
Many dates in Jewish history are subject to controversy, but as long as the logic of Jewish history itself is not affected we have arbitrarily chosen one date without interrupting the flow of the narrative to debate the merits of other dates. So, for instance, we begin Jewish history with 2000 B.C., around which time Abraham is reputed to have left the city of Ur, though some scholars place this event several centuries later. We date the beginning of the Jewish sojourn and subsequent captivity in Egypt from 1600 to 1200 B.C., the beginning of the settlement of Canaan after 1200 B.C., and so on, again with the full awareness that these dates are still debated by some historians. As a rule, the dates favored are those used in
