Jewish history and culture

Jewish history was promoted by the scribes or the Levites in early Jewish history and later on the popular educator and teachers promoted learning of the scriptures within the Jewish people so that history would be preserved however, at the time Christianity emerged this factor influenced the ancient writings in terms of how this history was related.

Some of Jewish history is so ancient that it has only been related by word of mouth however, there are writings which support history as it is told of the Jewish people. Furthermore, Christianity's emergence affected the form in which some of these ancient writings were reproduced and even the forms of recorded history characterized as genuine and credible Jewish history.

INTRODUCTION

In the initiative of attempting to understand Jewish history, it is necessary to understand the varying influences upon the recorded history of the Jewish people and it is most particularly to understand the influences that early Christianity had upon Jewish history and its recorded translation.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The work of Spiro (2007) entitled: "The Miracle of Jewish History" states "when we look back at the history of the Jewish people...we have to keep one thing in mind: The very survival of the Jewish people through recorded time is nothing short of miraculous. The very fact that Jews exist as a nation today stands in testimony to the existence of God who acts in history. By any historical measure the Jewish people should have disappeared long ago." Spiro states that Jewish history "simply doesn't comply with the rest of history; it does not make sense." (2007) Spiro notes that Mark Twain, "the great American writer" both an agnostic and had acknowledge that he was a skeptic wrote in an 1899 Harper's Magazine article:

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away. The Greek and Roman followed, made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up, and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?" (Spiro, 2007)

Spiro also notes the statement of Leo Nikolaivitch Tolstoy, a very religious Russian Orthodox Christian who wrote:

The Jew is the emblem of eternity. He who neither slaughter nor torture of thousands of years could destroy, he who neither fire, nor sword, nor Inquisition was able to wipe off the face of the earth. He who was the first to produce the Oracles of God. He who has been for so long the Guardian of Prophecy and has transmitted it to the rest of the world. Such a nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is as everlasting as Eternity itself." (2007)

Spiro additionally notes in his work the statement of Nikolai Derdyaev, a famous Russian philosopher who in 1935 wrote:

The Jews have played an all-important role in history. Their destiny is too imbued with the "metaphysical" to be explained either in material or positive historical terms....Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by special predetermination, transcending the process of adaptation... The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolute peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history; all point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny." (2007)

Spiro states as another reason for the survival of the Jewish people the fact that "they have clung to their religion." (2007) Spiro states that it is more than the Jews having "kept the Sabbath...the Sabbath has kept the Jews." (2007) Spiro states that the 12 to 13 million Jews living in the world today, without the persecution and assimilation of these people would total 500 million. Spiro likens Jewish history to a "6,000- piece puzzle" and states "At the beginning you dump the pieces on the table and it makes no sense. But as you assemble piece after piece, a picture emerges. A picture that records the action of God in history." (2007)

Jewish history begins with the creation of Adam "who is seen as the physical and spiritual pinnacle in terms of the creation of the world." (Spiro, 2007) The Jewish conception of God is "that of Creator, Sustainer, and Supervisor, which means not a God who created the world, and then when on vacation...but an infinite Being who is actively involved in creation." (Spiro, 2007) Jewish history relates that upon God creating Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Bible and other Jewish writings relate that Adam and Even ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God's original plan for mankind involved living in a peaceful place with freedom to fulfill that which human beings were created for in a perfection of our relationship with God and in perfecting the creations of God. The entire purpose of mankind's creation is a lost legacy disappearing in the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Following Adam and Eve having been expelled from the Garden of Eden, over time and in fact within just a "few generations, worship of God was replaced by worshiping nature; the sun, the moon, the trees...God was forgotten and idol worship was practiced by all." (Spiro, 2007)

The work of Dubnow entitled: "Jewish History" states that in making clear "the range of Jewish history, it is necessary to set down a few general, elementary definitions by way of introduction. It has long been recognized that a fundamental difference exists between historical and unhistorical peoples, a difference growing out of the fact of the natural inequality between the various elements composing the human race." (2005) Dubnow relates that the "attribute applied to peoples that have not yet broken away, or have not departed very far, from the state of primitive savagery" is the attribute of "unhistorical." Dubnow states that historical "is applied to the nations that have had a conscious purposeful history of appreciable duration; that have progressed stage by stage, in their growth in the improvement of their mode and their views of life; that have demonstrated mental productivity of some sort, and have elaborated principles of civilization and social life more or less rational; nations, in short representing not only zoological but also spiritual types." (2005) Dubnow relates that the historical nations are divided into three primary groups: (1) the most ancient civilized peoples of the Orient (Chinese, Hindu, Egyptians, Chaldeans; (2) the ancient or classic peoples of the Occident (Greeks and Romans); and (3) modern peoples (the civilized nations of Europe and America of the present day. (Dubnow, 2005) Dubnow writes that the Jewish people "must needs correspond to the aggregate of the concepts expressed by the three-group names, most ancient, ancient and modern." (2005) Dubnow relates that the only applicable description of the Jewish nation is "the historical nation of all times" which is stated to be a "description bringing into relief the contrast between it and all other nations of modern and ancient times, whose historical existence either came to an end in days long past, or began at a date comparatively recent." (2005) Dubnow relates that should the world's history be "conceived as a circle, then Jewish history occupies the position of the diameter, the line passing through its centre, and the history of every other nation is represented by a chord marking off a smaller segment of the circle." (2005) Dubnow relates that the history of the Jewish people "is like an axis crossing the history of mankind from one of its poles to the other. As an unbroken thread it runs through the ancient civilization of Egypt and Mesopotamia, down to the present-day culture of France and Germany. Its divisions are measured by thousands of years." (2005)

Dubnow states that the history of the Jewish people "falls into two parts." (2005) The line which divides the two parts is stated to be "the moment in which the Jewish state collapsed irretrievably under the blows of the Roman Empire (70 C.E.)" (2005) These two periods include:

1) the vicissitudes of a nation, which though frequently at the mercy of stronger nations, still maintained possession of its territory and government, and was ruled by its own laws; and 2) the history of a people without a government, without a land, a people stripped of all the tangible accompaniments of nationality, and nevertheless successful in preserving its spiritual unity, its originality, complete and undiminished. (Dubnow, 2005)

Dubnow relates that on the veneer, the period of independence in the Jewish history, appears somewhat different from the history of other nations and while Jewish history contains the same types of wars, revolutions, quarrels among dynasties, and class conflicts along with economic interests at war with one another, this view is only the veneer. Dubnow relates that if one is to "pierce to its depths, and scrutinize the processes that take place in its penetralia, we perceive that even in the early period there were latent within it great powers of intellect, universal principles, which visibly or invisibly, determined the course of events." (Dubnow, 2005) The Jewish people are "not a simple political or racial entity, but to an eminent degree 'a spiritual people'." (Dubnow, 2005) The national development is based upon a religion that is described as an "all pervasive religious tradition" and one that "lives in the soul of the people as the Sinaitic Revelation, the Law of Moses." (Dubnow, 2005)

The bible verse which states "And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" is stated by Dubnow to convey the thought that the "Israelites people as a whole, without distinction of rank and regardless of the social prominence of individuals, has been called to guide the other nations toward sublime moral and religious principles, and to officiate for them, the laity as it were, in the capacity of priests." (Dubnow, 2005) The priests are stated in Jewish history to have descended through Aaron who along with the servants of the temple, or the Levites which was composed of a class of priests and were the authority of the traditions of religion in the Jewish faith. Early in the history of the Jewish people "there arose by the side of this official, aristocratic hierarchy a far mightier priesthood, a democratic fraternity, seeking to enlighten the whole nation, and inculcating convictions that make for a consciously held aim."

According to Dubnow, it was the Prophets who were "real and appointed executors of the holy command enjoining the 'conversion' of all Jews into a 'kingdom of priests and a holy nation'." (as cited in Dubnow, 2005) These prophets were none other than the popular educators and teacher and "were animated by the desire to instill into every soul a deeply religious consciousness, to enable every heart by moral aspirations. To indoctrinate every individual with an unequivocal theory of life, to inspire every member of the nation with lofty ideals." (20) Dubnow states that this "consciousness gained in strength and amplitude century by century, showing itself particularly in the latter part of the first period, after the crisis known as 'the Babylonian Exile'." (2005) the _Soreijm_ or the 'scribes' are to be thanked for their efforts in bringing popularity to the "Holy Writings' in what was a "formal complement" to the Prophets work.

The work of Raz-Karakotzkin, writes that Josef Hayim Yerushalmi in his work "Jewish History and Jewish Memory" writes that Jewish history "necessary means the negation of what he describes as 'traditional Jewish memory', namely historiography is indeed modern and demands to be taken seriously, it must at least functionally repudiate premises that matter, not on this or that detail, but concerning the vital core, the belief that divine providence is not only an ultimate but an active causal factor in Jewish history and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself." According to Raz-Krakozkin the writing of Yerushalmi states the claim that "only in the modern era do we really find, for the first time, a Jewish historiography divorced from Jewish collective memory, and in crucial respects, thoroughly at odds with it." (2007) Dubnow writes that Jewish history is "again and again intersected by the chords of the historical circle." (2005)

STERN: EARLY JEWISH BOOKS & JEWISH READING

The work of David Stern entitled: "The First Jewish Books and the Early History of Jewish Reading" informs this study that "among the earliest surviving dated Jewish books that is codices, are a group of Bibles that were produced in the Near-East - Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Tunsia, and Iraq- between the early tenth and mid-eleventh centuries. Stern relates the following facts:

1) This group includes one complete text of the Hebrew Bible, several codices containing either the Pentateuch or large sections of the Prophets and the Hagiographa and more than a few scattered groups of leaves representing lost codices. All in all, twenty-one separate dated works are represented; in addition, there are eight or nine other manuscripts without colophons.

2) All these texts contain vocalized texts of the Hebrew Bible with cantillation marks and the scribal notes known as the masorah.

3) On account of the latter, these codices are known as Masoretic Bibles. Because these manuscripts show extraordinary scribal sophistication, they were clearly products of a tradition of codex-production that must have begun centuries earlier. (2008)

Stern argues that the codices "mark a watershed moment in the history of Jewish reading and its technology; indeed they are our first evidence for 'professional' Jewish readers of the Bible." (Stern, 2008) Stern states that the all of the masoretic codices have common features and "have more or less the identical page format." (2008) Stern states that there are three elements that are "basic components of the masoretic Bible page and define these codes as a book genre" which are those of:

the vocalized; the punctuated; and the accentuated. (2008)

Stern relates that the Jewish culture in the ancient world treated reading and writing as separate skills.." that were not necessarily taught together; and the degree of reading and writing capability varied widely, with the latter often consisting of not much more than being able to write ones' name. Teaching to read furthermore, was not simply a matter of learning the alphabet (or the aleph-bet) and then reading a text. Since in rabbinic culture the only text that was normatively written down and regularly read from written transcription was the Bible, instruction in reading must have been directed primarily toward the skill of reading the Bible, specifically in the liturgical context of the synagogue, where reading required memorization of the cantillation notes. The extraordinary demands of this skill were made even more formidable by the consonantal character of Hebrew writing, which lacks all vowels, and even more so by the sheer difficulty of the Bible's Hebrew, a language that was already archaic in the rabbinic period. Indeed, these challenges were so formidable that one scholar has claimed that "a child or adult who had not received from his teacher the tradition for the reading of a given passage did not know how to read it correctly. What this means, in short, is that reading was a skill that a student acquired by hearing the Torah read aloud in the synagogue or by listening to his (or her) teacher read a biblical text aloud and then memorizing what s/he had heard." (2008)

Stern relates that knowledge of 'mikra' was one of "auditory memorization." Stern also relates that "even if the text of the Torah was transmitted in written form and could be read or consulted in a scroll, the limited evidence we possess strongly suggests that the Bible was in practice known primarily as a heard text which had been memorized from hearing it read aloud. This conjecture is supported, in turn, by the little knowledge we have about ownership and distribution of books during this period. With the possible exception of the Qumran community, there is no evidence for mass production of biblical manuscripts among Jews. So, too, there is no evidence that even rabbis or students of rabbis, let alone primary school children, possessed their own Torah scrolls." (2008) Scrolls were scarce at this time and it is almost certain according to Stern that a common community scroll existed because the "costs of commission a scribe to write a Torah scroll was almost certainly prohibitive for all but the wealthiest persons." Stern writes that auditory memory or "memorized knowledge of a text can be as precise as that acquired by having read a text on a page, sometimes even more so..." (2008) The work of Richard Lim entitled: "The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic and Christian Traditions" states that the libraries located in Alexandria and Pergamum "in the Lennelnistic age helped institutionalize book collection and cataloguing, leading to a call for a set of 'scientific' techniques to discern the authorship of the hitherto freely circulating works." (2006) Lim relates that one of the first questions asked relating to ancient literary work is "Who is the author?" Lim states that "Ascension of Authorship traces the convoluted history of Hellenistic "attribution analysis" the critical literary method that Greek grammarianas and scholars progressively refined, which informed how later Jewish and Christian authors would construct their own notions of authorship." Robert A. Kraft writes in the work entitled: "The Codex and Canon Consciousness" that in the first century during the emerging movement of Christianity "it is probably not irresponsible to assume that "in the beginning was the scroll" as this appears to have been the predominant form for literature during this time in history. Scrolls, according to Kraft "contained various kinds of writings intended for repeated use within a 'literary' context - nonephermeral in nature." Kraft notes that at the time Christianity moved into the realm of the Romans in the first part of the fourth century "a radical change in literary format is evidence throughout the Greco-Roman world, but especially in emerging classical Christian circles. We are told that more than half of the surviving "pagan" texts from that period are in codex format, and the codex is almost universal for the identifiable Christian texts. More important, for my present purposes, is the observation that it is from this period that we get references to officially sponsored large scale codices of "sacred scriptures" --in essence, The Bible as a single book, with its contents roughly the same as it came to be known in classical (Greek and Latin) Christianity. Although this practice of collecting the entire "Bible" in a single codex did not prevail during the following millennium, suspect that it did effect a major "paradigm shift" in how Christians who were familiar with the new phenomenon henceforth thought about their "Bible" and its canonical cohesiveness. That is, "biblical canon" took on a very concrete meaning in the shadow of the appearance of the Bible as a single book." Larry Hurtado writes that one of the questions that is the most puzzling is "why early Christians so emphatically embraced the codex over the scroll as the preferred format for their books."

The Ecole Initiative work entitled: "Jews and Judaism in Christina Writings of the Second Century" states that the 'Didache' is a document which "illustrates well the kind of ambiguous relationship early Christians had with Judaism. It is a practical document dealing with the form and content of early Christian worship. The Didache is interwoven with Jewish teachings and Jewish influence." This work states that there are two areas "where it is possible to see a process of differentiation taking place: fasting and prayers (public and private)." On the surface it appears "as if these Christians were attempting to maintain contact with Judaism by keeping the overall structure of the prayers and practice of fasting." The Ecole Initiative document states that it is important to remember that this: "...was the only form of worship known to them. There was not a great deal of choice in the matter. For example, the Didache begins with the thoroughly Jewish teaching on the Two Ways but then proceeds to replace, and in some cases Christianize, some of the central Jewish prayers and practices, which would have been cherished by Jews, even former ones. Thus the Didache illustrates well the tension which appears to have co-existed in late first/early second century Christian teaching. As we will see, it is a tension that appears to have been noticed only by a few later writers." (2007)

The work of Jonathan Elukin entitled: "Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages" states: "but the fundamental truth or meaning of Jewish history in the Middle Ages -- "if we are right to apply such a term as meaning -- "is the continuity of relatively stable relations between Jews and Christians." Eugene Fisher writes in the work entitled: "Jewish Christian Relations 1989-1993" that: "Revising Christian understanding of the writings of St. Paul has been a major agenda item since the Second Vatican Council relied so heavily on Romans 9-11 to advance its more positive appreciation of the role of Judaism and the Jewish people in God's plan of salvation."

SUMMARY

It is clear that the early Christians had a great impact on the recounting of Jewish history and that scholars are now acknowledging that fact and even attempting to rectify the specific dissociations from relevant historical fact of the Jews perpetrated by early Christians.

CONCLUSION

Clearly, a newfound emphasis on the reality and truth of Jewish history has been advocated by Christians and Jewish people alike. Most recently noted is an attempt to investigate the polarization that has occurred between Christian and Jews relating to historical accounts in the initiative to clear up some of the fuzzy material that was created during the early days of Christianity relating to Jewish history.