The Jewish Civilization That Might Have Been

Albert Einstein transformed our understanding of the universe. But somewhere in the long history of Jewish persecution lies a more unsettling possibility: another Einstein who never reached a classroom, another Maimonides who never opened a book, another Kafka whose story ended before it began.

What would the Jews have become had history been a little kinder to them?

It is a question that has occupied my imagination ever since I encountered Abba Eban’s Civilization and the Jews. Not what the Jews became, for that is remarkable enough. Nor merely how they survived, although the answer could keep historians employed for several centuries. I mean something rather more unsettling. What might Jewish civilization have accomplished had its energies not been so frequently diverted toward the elementary business of remaining alive?

Imagine a people who produced prophets, philosophers, poets, physicians, mathematicians, scientists, and statesmen while periodically having to abandon their homes, surrender their possessions, flee their neighbours, and explain to successive rulers why they should be permitted to exist. Now imagine what those same people might have accomplished had they enjoyed the rather extravagant luxury of an ordinary historical existence.

Eban’s magnificent historical panorama takes us through a succession of civilizations, each arriving upon the world stage with the confidence of an empire that has mistaken its present circumstances for eternity. The Egyptians had their pharaohs. The Babylonians had their empire. The Greeks had their philosophers. The Romans had their legions. Each possessed impressive qualifications for historical permanence. The Jews had something rather less impressive to the imperial imagination: a covenant, sacred writings, an ancestral homeland, and an apparently incurable determination to remember who they were.

The empires eventually became subjects for archaeologists. The Jews remained available for argument.

And argue they did.

One of the revelations of Eban’s account, at least to me, was discovering how mistaken I had been in imagining Jewish civilization as a great assembly of religiously uniform people proceeding through history in solemn agreement. The Jews have disagreed about religion, authority, philosophy, tradition, and virtually every other subject upon which human beings are capable of disagreeing. They produced rabbis and mystics, traditionalists and reformers, religious scholars and secular intellectuals.

Apparently, one can disagree about almost everything and still belong to the same people.

Yet beneath these differences persisted something extraordinary: a civilization held together by historical memory, religious inheritance, communal belonging, and a conception of peoplehood that could survive even the disappearance of political sovereignty. When Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, it might reasonably have expected Jewish national and religious life to diminish beyond recognition. The Romans understood the destruction of buildings, the defeat of armies, and the humiliation of conquered peoples. These were, after all, among their principal professional accomplishments.

What they encountered was a people capable of transforming catastrophe into institutional renewal. Jewish religious life increasingly revolved around scholarship, prayer, sacred texts, and communal practice. The Temple was gone, but the civilization had not obligingly disappeared with it. Rome could demolish a sanctuary. It could not so easily demolish a civilization that had learned to carry its inheritance in memory. But survival, however astonishing, is not the highest measure of civilizational greatness. A civilization becomes truly remarkable through what it contributes beyond itself.

And here the Jewish achievement becomes almost embarrassing to the arithmetic of history.

From ancient Israel emerged a religious and moral inheritance that profoundly influenced the development of Christianity and, through it, much of Western civilization. The Hebrew prophets articulated demands for justice and righteousness, insisting that rulers were answerable to moral obligations extending beyond their personal convenience. The Jewish conception of one universal God helped reshape humanity’s understanding of religion, morality, and human responsibility. These ideas developed alongside other intellectual traditions, but their influence upon the world remains immense.

As a Christian, I find this inheritance particularly striking. The scriptures through which I understand God, morality, and human purpose emerged from the religious life of the Jewish people. Christian civilization inherited an extraordinary amount from Judaism, although parts of Christendom subsequently behaved as though the inheritance had arrived without its original owners. The prophets were not English gentlemen. Moses did not receive the commandments in Rome. Jesus was not a European philosopher who happened to conduct fieldwork in Galilee.

The historical address matters.

And Jewish contributions did not end with the biblical world. Medieval Jewish scholars enriched philosophy, medicine, literature, and religious thought. Maimonides engaged the intellectual traditions of Judaism and the wider Mediterranean world. In modernity came Spinoza, Heine, Einstein, Kafka, and countless others whose achievements transformed philosophy, literature, science, and culture.

One begins to wonder whether the Jews ever found time to do anything besides think, write, discover, argue, and occasionally flee for their lives.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable part.

There is a temptation to celebrate Jewish resilience so enthusiastically that persecution begins to sound like an indispensable ingredient in Jewish greatness. The Jews were expelled, and they rebuilt. They were attacked, and they endured. Their communities were destroyed, and new communities emerged. Wonderful. Inspiring. Almost enough to make one forget that the expulsions, attacks, and destruction were entirely unnecessary.

Jewish civilization did not require persecution to discover the value of learning. It did not need massacres to develop communal solidarity. Its intellectual achievements were not gifts bestowed by the generosity of its tormentors. The Jews possessed remarkable strengths before suffering tested them. And although adversity sometimes reinforced communal bonds, it also destroyed lives, institutions, opportunities, and possibilities. Consider medieval Spain, where Jewish intellectual and cultural life flourished during different periods under Muslim and Christian rule. Jewish scholars contributed to philosophy, poetry, medicine, and the exchange of knowledge across the Mediterranean.

Then came the expulsion of 1492.

We can trace the displaced communities and examine the consequences. What we cannot do is count the books never written, the discoveries never made, or the talents never developed because families were uprooted and institutions shattered. Civilizations have often been remarkably enthusiastic about benefiting from Jewish contributions while displaying considerably less enthusiasm for Jewish people themselves. Christian Europe inherited Jewish scripture while periodically persecuting Jews. Jewish merchants, physicians, and scholars participated in societies that sometimes welcomed their expertise while restricting their rights.

The arrangement was curious. Jewish ideas were useful, Jewish services occasionally indispensable, but Jewish existence remained negotiable.

Antisemitism, moreover, demonstrated a remarkable talent for changing costumes. Jews were condemned for remaining separate and suspected when they assimilated. They were blamed for poverty and feared for wealth. They were accused of possessing too little power and, somehow, of secretly controlling everything. It is difficult to satisfy accusations whose principal requirement is that the accused must always be guilty. The modern world did not invent this hostility. It inherited older prejudices, transformed them, and occasionally supplied them with the latest intellectual vocabulary.

Then came the Holocaust.

The victims must never be valued according to the achievements they might have produced. Their lives mattered independently of whether they would have become scientists, poets, teachers, or simply ordinary people enjoying the unremarkable happiness of existence. Yet their murder also annihilated futures. Among the dead were scholars who might have taught generations, and countless people whose contributions would never have appeared in any history book. We can count the murdered. We cannot count the descendants who were never born. And the losses did not belong exclusively to the Jewish people. Humanity, too, was deprived of possibilities it will never be able to identify.

Yet Jewish history did not end in Europe’s ruins.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 represented a remarkable transformation in the circumstances of Jewish political existence. The attachment to the ancestral homeland had persisted through centuries of dispersion, preserved in prayer, memory, culture, and the continuing presence of Jewish communities in the land. Modern Zionism emerged from particular political and historical circumstances, but the longing for return was considerably older than the nineteenth century. After generations in which Jewish communities frequently depended upon the goodwill of rulers who could revoke their tolerance with alarming speed, Jewish national sovereignty acquired renewed political expression.

It did not end the difficulties of Jewish existence. But it demonstrated again the extraordinary capacity of Jewish peoplehood to survive circumstances that might have dissolved many other communities.

Still, my original question remains unanswered.

What might Jewish civilization have become under less destructive historical conditions?

I do not imagine a perfect Jewish civilization, free from disagreement, political conflict, or the ordinary complications of human nature. Nor do I suppose that other peoples escaped catastrophe. Human history contains enough suffering to discourage any competition over who endured the most. But the recurrence and geographical breadth of Jewish persecution make the question impossible for me to dismiss. What additional philosophical traditions might have emerged? What scientific discoveries might have been made? What cultural institutions might have flourished? What intellectual inheritance might humanity possess today?

We cannot know.

And perhaps that is the most disturbing conclusion.

History records what happened. It is considerably less forthcoming about what was prevented from happening. We celebrate the books that survived, the discoveries that transformed civilization, and the extraordinary people whose achievements entered the historical record. But what of the unwritten books? The undiscovered ideas? The communities that might have flourished? The children who never lived to become anything at all?
These questions are not merely exercises in historical imagination. They concern our responsibilities toward future generations. Every civilization inherits something from the past, and every generation possesses the power either to enrich that inheritance or diminish it.

I began by asking what the Jews might have become had history been a little kinder.

After contemplating their extraordinary endurance and immense contributions to humanity, I find myself increasingly troubled by the answer we shall never possess. We know the Jewish civilization that survived. We know its prophets, philosophers, scholars, scientists, writers, and remarkable influence upon the world. But somewhere beyond the reach of historical inquiry lies another Jewish civilization: not a perfect civilization, but one whose talents were not so frequently interrupted, whose communities were not so often uprooted, and whose possibilities were not repeatedly extinguished.

A civilization of unwritten books, undiscovered ideas, unrealized talents, and generations that never came into being.

Humanity has spent centuries discovering how much it owes to the Jewish people.
It may never discover how much more it could have owed them.
And that, to me, is the most haunting part of Jewish history.