Shalom Aleichem’s Tevye to Nahman Lichtenstein: Jews, tradition, history & quotes

Wherever one may stand on the “Jewish” scale, certainly the history of tradition is all important. Throughout history, Jews and Judaism have survived and endured despite it all. Some special quotes from a wide host of people on tradition & Jewish history.

• “The Jew – is the symbol of eternity. … He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.” Leo Tolstoy

• “The preservation of the Jew was certainly not casual. He has endured through the power of a certain ideal, based on the recognition of a Higher Power in human affairs. Time after time in his history, moreover, he has been saved from disaster in a manner, which cannot be described excepting as ‘providential.’” Cecil Roth

• “The Jews, your majesty. The Jews.” Otto von Bismarck replying to Kaiser Wilhelm II when asked, “Can you prove the existence of God?”

• “Am Israel Chai – The Jewish People Live” Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach

• “In Jewish history there are no coincidences.” Elie Wiesel

• “God, I know we are your chosen people, but couldn’t you choose somebody else for a change?” Shalom Aleichem’s Tevye

• “Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin.  Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish.  In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?” Ernest van den Haag

• “The resourcefulness of the modern Jews, both in mind and soul, is extraordinary…” Friedrich Nietzsche

• “Energy is the basis of everything.  Every Jew, no matter how insignificant, is engaged in some decisive and immediate pursuit of a goal… It is the most perpetual people of the earth…” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• “The dispersion of the Jews was both a boon and a bane; their nation was disjoined, but their culture was enormously enhanced.  Whereas a unique omneitic outlook set the Jews apart from other peoples, a common language, literacy and learning bound the disparate Jewish communities together and provided a firm foundation for further creativity.  The exercise of this multifaceted creative propensity rebounded to benefit not only the societies that harbored the Jews, but all humankind.” Samuel Karlinsky

• “Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift.” Paul Johnson

• “There is a striking point that runs through Jewish history as a whole.  Western civilization was born in the Middle East, and the Jews were at its crossroads…And now, today, when the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward the Old World and the East rises to renewed importance, there again are the Jews in Israel…” Professor Huston Smith

• “I have already explained with clear proofs that the soul is the dominant factor in the nature of the Jew.” Rabbi Yehuda Loewe

Whether Nahman Lichtenstein in Brooklyn, or a Sephardic Jew in Lod, Israel, Jews today are at all ends of the Earth and our people live on. Am Israel Chai