Toynbee and the Jews

...On this prejudice against proto-Zionism, Samuel sharply and aptly comments, in chapter VIII, that the British historian "leaves us with the strong presumption that if the Jews had accepted Christianity, he would not have been so hard on Zerubbabel, on Judas Maccabaeus and perhaps even on Alexander Jan-naeus...

...One has not heard of wild pogroms, of autos-da-fe, of mass expulsions and mass appropriations in the history of the Scotsmen in England or the French Canadians in the United States...

...said Churchill with leonine scorn, "Some neck...

...4) in condemning the Israelis' treatment of their Arab neighbors as being no better than the Nazis' treatment of European Jews...

...At any rate, he does not seem to hold it against the Italians, who are Christians, that their ancestors had something to do with the Crucifixion...

...2) in depreciating the ethos of contemporary Judaism...

...His crushing comment on this trivializing comparison is...

...3) in distorting the nature of Neo-Zion-ism and failing to recognize its similarity to the ancient Zionism of which he more fully approves...

...Some remnant...

...But what has recently happened in Palestine is perhaps not immediately relevant either to Toynbee's philosophy of Jewish history or to Samuel's thesis that the world historian's philosophy is based upon ignorance of the true nature of Judaism...

...As an example of Toynbee's "trivi-alization" (a subject illustratively treated in chapter IX), Samuel cites the fact that he has put into the same class the English prejudice against Scotsmen, the American prejudice against French Canadians and "the ghastly phenomenon" of anti-Semitism...

...These include a "blurring effect" of blandly disregarding inconsistencies and deftly transforming conjectures into proved assumptions, a trivializing of significant principles, a failure to acknowledge error in earlier judgments where consciousness of error is apparent in later portions of A Study of History (vols...

...In the second place, as Samuel forcefully demonstrates in chapter V, Toynbee's suggestion that Syriac civilization (meaning that of the ancient Hebrews and Phoenicians) was significantly influenced by the Minoans, specifically the Philistines, is not only unsupported by facts but is largely contradicted by Toynbee's own admission that two of what he considers the three greatest achievements of the ancient West Semites, namely their discovery of the Atlantic and their teaching of a monotheistic religion, owe nothing to the Minoans...

...These charges are made in a tone of marked but by no means shrill intensity and with frequently varied touches of humor, irony and badinage that alternate with passages of almost Biblical vehemence...

...What is more relevant to the central theme of this excitingly argumentative book is that these recent happenings serve to show how alive this "fossilized" Judaism is both in Jewry at large and in the Jewish advocate Maurice Samuel...

...But ultimately one has more dignified reactions...

...First, it emerges from chapters II and IV that a "fossilized" culture could not possibly have produced rabbinic literature, the Kabbalah, Maimonides, Spinoza and the Hasidic piety which, in the form popularized by Martin Buber, has so profoundly influenced contemporary Christian theology...

...Although Samuel is painfully aware of the fact that a considerable number of Palestinian Jewish zealots did commit atrocities against the Arabs, he has, I think, made it perfectly clear that Toynbee has exaggerated the offenses of this Jewish minority and at the same time has either ignored or condoned the atrocities committed against the Jews in Palestine by Arab leaders and their numerous followers over a far longer period...

...Some chicken...

...These few examples of Samuel's argument, presented in the order of their appearance and with ruthless brevity, may suffice to persuade prospective readers of the book that the reviewer's tribute to the author's forensic skill is not altogether undeserved...

...Again one is prompted to paraphrase Churchill's reply to Hitler and to exclaim, "Some fossil...

...There is also a concealed racial prejudice in Toynbee's treatment of the relation of the Jews to Jesus...

...VI-X), and such serious violations of scholarly ethics as suppressio veri and suggestio falsi...

...There is a feeling of admiration for Samuel's sustained logical power, his clarity of perception, his candor in acknowledging the defects of Judaism both in antiquity and today, and his intimate knowledge—an inside knowledge?of his subject...

...It is difficult in the space of a brief review to substantiate the opinion, held by the present writer, that the amateur historian Samuel has with devastating finality convicted the professional historian Toynbee of ignorance and prejudice in setting forth his peculiar philosophy of Jewish history...

...And there is a feeling of moral indignation at Toynbee's provincial narrowness in perpetuating age-old charges, motivated by odium, theologicum, against a people or an ethnic religion that, after being threatened with extermination by the Nazis, is now insulted by comparison with the Nazi exterminators...

...Reviewed by Ralph Marcus Professor of Hellenistic Culture, University of Chicago One of the most heartening bits of official rhetoric to come out of the early days of the war against Hitler was Churchill's comment on the Fuehrer's boast that he would destroy England as one wrings a chicken's neck...

...Furthermore, as Samuel protests with righteous indignation, it is wickedly disingenuous of Toynbee to say that "in act and word Johanan ben Zakkai was proclaiming his conversion from the way of Violence to the way of Gentleness...

...In the last third of the book, the author eloquently defends the policies and practices of modern Zionists and the State of Israel against the charges of reckless nationalism and atrocious violence (after the Nazi pattern...

...Samuel indicts Toynbee's A Study of History for wilfully misrepresenting four aspects of Judaism: (1) in characterizing post-Biblical Judaism as a fossil...

...Some remnant...

...Third, Toynbee's claim that the originally peace-loving Pharisees degenerated into preachers of violence is contradicted by, among other things, the fact that the Pharisaic leader Johanan ben Zakkai, who lived in the second half of the first century A.D...

...So, too, on reading Maurice Samuel's vigorous polemic against Toynbee, who believes or professes to believe (he is not altogether consistent) that Judaism is the fossilized remnant of an extinct "Syriac" civilization, one is moved to exclaim, "Some fossil...

...If there were not such grave issues involved, one could appreciate the virtuosity of the author's style in more detached fashion...

...As for the third great achievement, the invention of the alphabet (or, more accurately, consonantal writing), the vast majority of experts consider it a Canaanite and not a Minoan achievement...

...Fourth, as we are shown in chapter VI, Toynbee is almost frivolously inconsistent in sometimes indicating that he regards Christianity as merely one of the "higher religions" and sometimes stating in traditional language that Christianity is the true religion and that Jesus was uniquely the son of God sent to save mankind...

...and is praised by Toyn-bee as an exemplar of what is best in Judaism), was consistently a peace-loving Pharisee...

...In the course of this indictment, Samuel makes impressively clear what techniques the magisterial philosopher of history has employed in his misleading exposition...

...Even on the basis of the account given by the anti-Zionist British historian George Kirk in a work prepared under the editorship of Toynbee himself, Samuel has been able to show how prejudiced and distorted is Toynbee's account of the founding of the State of Israel...

...This Pharisaic leader was never "converted" to pacifism for the simple reason that he had never been anything but peace-loving...

...Incidentally, Samuel in a magnificent aside reminds us that the Israelites' discovery of the uniqueness of God was less important than what they did with that discovery...

...As Samuel effectively phrases it, "When it is a question of Jesus's ministry, and his message and his inspiration, he is entered in the register us the scion of 'forcibly converted Galilean Gentiles.' When he is 'done to death' with the approval or assistance of the Scribes and Pharisees, he is "one of their very own race.' " A fifth count in the long indictment is that Toynbee unfairly condemns the Jews of the time of Zerub-babel for refounding their state after the Babylonian exile, since they were only trying to re-establish the kind of religious culture that the generation of Moses and Joshua had created in the newly conquered land of Canaan...

...But, what is more painful, Toynbee condemns the Jews for not recognizing the messianic character of Jesus, although this was an ineluctable tragedy, according to Christian theology, and he dismisses post-Christian Judaism as a spiritually meaningless survival because of this non-recognition...

...made by Toynbee against the Jewish community in Palestine...