The past: blueprint or prison?

Mark Twain once marvelled at the Jews — how a people so small could outlast empires so vast. Kingdoms rose, ruled, and disappeared; the Jews, somehow, did not. Their influence was outsized, their survival inexplicable. What he framed as a riddle has never really stopped demanding an answer.

J.R.R. Tolkien, writing from a very different world, posed a question that gets closer to one: “What punishments of God are not gifts?” Strip away the theology, and what remains is something harder, sharper, and far more uncomfortable — the idea that catastrophe can force a people to become something new, or disappear. I would like to offer an idea, framed by the musings of these two literary greats: perhaps it is Judaism’s early catastrophic losses — the destruction of the Second Temple and the obliteration of the Bar Kochba Revolt, that are the reason that we remain.

If there is a single thread running through Jewish history, it is this uneasy pattern: devastation followed not by collapse, but by reinvention. You see it most clearly in the lead-up to Tisha B’Av, the Jewish calendar’s annual descent into grief for Temples lost two millennia ago. This is not passive remembrance. It is choreographed mourning — the stripping away of comfort, the deliberate narrowing of life, the demand that each generation experience this loss as if it were its own. Jews are not asked to remember Jerusalem’s destruction. They are asked to feel it.

And yet, the historical irony is hard to ignore: the destruction of the Temples, the defining trauma commemorated on Tisha B’Av, may also be the reason Judaism survived at all.

When Rome destroyed the Second Temple, it didn’t just level a building — it erased the centre of Jewish religious life. What followed could have been the end. Instead, it became a new beginning. Out of the wreckage emerged rabbinic Judaism: portable, text-based, decentralized. A religion no longer tied to one place, and therefore one that could endure displacement.

The same pattern repeated after the Bar Kochba revolt. The Roman response — mass death, expulsion, and the renaming of Judea as Syria Palaestina — rendered the Jewish position in the land nearly untenable. In the aftermath, Jewish leadership faced a stark choice: attempt to restore a lost past or construct a viable future under radically altered conditions. The message was clear: the old world was gone. The only question was whether the Jews would go with it.

They didn’t. They adapted.

This is the part of the story that often gets flattened into something inspirational, but it shouldn’t be. There was nothing inevitable about it. The choice was stark: cling to what was lost, or build something that could survive without it. Jewish leadership chose the latter — preserving memory, yes, but refusing to be trapped endlessly in loss. That decision — to remember without being destroyed by that remembrance — may be the single most important political and cultural instinct in Jewish history.

It is why the Jews outlived the empires Twain listed: Rome, Persia, Babylon, and countless others. Those civilizations were rooted in power, territory, and dominance. When those foundations cracked, they collapsed. The Jews, forced early on to live without those things, built something far more durable. This tension — between memory and forward motion — didn’t end in antiquity. If anything, it became more pronounced in the twentieth century.

After the Holocaust, the greatest rupture in Jewish history, the instinct could have been paralysis and collapse. Instead, within three years, there was a state. The establishment of Israel was not a “response” to the Holocaust in any simple sense, but it was undeniably shaped by the same historical reflex: catastrophe does not end the story unless you let it.

This brings us to a far more uncomfortable comparison — one that sits at the centre of modern political debate. Much of today’s discourse treats Jewish and Palestinian national movements as mirror images, locked in an inevitable and symmetrical conflict. But history tells a more uneven story. In the early and mid-twentieth century, both movements faced similar questions: how to respond to loss, how to navigate external control, how to prepare for self-determination.

Jewish leadership, however imperfectly, tended to accept partition as a path forward — in 1937, again in 1947. Palestinian Arab leadership, along with the surrounding Arab states, universally rejected those frameworks, framing the conflict in absolute terms. Not compromise, but reversal of Jewish existence in Palestine completely.

That distinction matters.

Because it reflects something deeper than politics — a difference in orientation. One movement, shaped by centuries of forced adaptation, was conditioned to build within constraints. The other, shaped by a different set of historical experiences, often defined success as undoing an outcome it viewed as unacceptable.

You see the consequences of that divergence in concrete ways. During the British Mandate, the Yishuv built institutions: governing bodies, defence organizations, economic networks. When statehood came, they were ready. Palestinian Arab leadership, fractured and often focused on opposition rather than construction, was not. Although the statement is in some ways reductive, Ernst Bevin centred in on the core difference between the two groups in 1947: “For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”

You see it again in the aftermath of 1948. Jewish refugees from Arab lands were absorbed — imperfectly, painfully, perhaps mired in the ma’abarot, but decisively — into a new national framework. Palestinian refugees, by contrast, became part of a system that preserved their status across generations, keeping the idea of returning to a past now long since lost alive. The mandate of UNRWA, unique in its hereditary definition of refugee status, has institutionalized a political and social orientation toward return. The concept of a “right of return,” something not affirmed for any other refugee group, is also inherently retrospective: it seeks to reverse the demographic and territorial outcomes of 1948 rather than reconcile with them and move forward. It fundamentally seeks to undo the results of a war started, and then lost, by Arabs themselves.

None of this is meant to argue that Palestinians deserve their suffering or that it was inevitable. They are a group that is often powerless at the hands of larger forces and leadership motivated not by the practical best interests of their people. But it does point to a harder truth: how a society understands its past can shape whether it has a future.

The Jewish story suggests that survival depends on a kind of discipline — the ability to carry loss without being immobilized by it. To remember, but not to wait for history to reverse itself.

Which brings us back to Twain, and to Tolkien.

The question is not whether suffering is a gift. History offers no such comfort. The question is what people do with it. Some losses remain wounds. Others become turning points. Jewish history suggests that, at critical junctures, catastrophe has compelled precisely this transformation. The destruction of the Temples, the failures of multiple revolts, and even the trauma of the twentieth century did not erase loss — but it did force Jews to produce adaptive strategies that enabled continuity. 

In a world governed by questions of historical and epigenetic trauma, the question of who has suffered most and how that impacts their ability to be successful is ripe with discomfort and difficulty. This debate is, perhaps, most seen in the intense social conflict around Israel & Palestine. There are many reasons for the different trajectories of the two peoples and national movements in the twentieth century; perhaps, however, the difference between the two is not the scale of the tragedy — but the willingness to build after it.