Letting them live

Alan Ryan

• A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson
  Weidenfeld, 643 pp, £8.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 297 79366 7
• The Burning Bush: Anti-Semitism and World History by Barnet Litvinoff
  Collins, 493 pp, £17.50, April 1988, ISBN 0 00 217433 2
• Living with Anti-Semitism: Modern Jewish Responses edited by Jehuda Reinharz
  Brandeis/University Press of New England, 498 pp, £32.75, August 1987, ISBN 0 87451 388 X

Not the least of the intellectual legacies of Judaism is the tenacity of the conviction that history must have a meaning. Even the most secular among us wince when Shakespeare tells us the Gods just use us for their sport; even the most imaginative wonder quite how the Greeks coped with the conviction that the Gods intervened in human history to prove a domestic point or fend off boredom. The thought that history needed a plot, that it had purpose, an author and a destination, seems to have been a leap of the Jewish imagination which took the Jews into realms where no other people in classical antiquity had been. Other peoples had founding myths; innumerable petty kings claimed to govern with the assistance of one or a dozen local deities. Somehow, the Jews uniquely seem to have hit on the thought that there was one history, guided by one deity, starring one central collective actor – the Jewish people.