hello I'm sure you're all familiar with the shortest version of Jewish history which goes
like this they tried to kill us we survived let's eat that's invariably recited around the festive
table whenever we have a Jewish holiday I would like to just discuss very briefly a slightly
expanded version a little more sophisticated but still keeping it under 18 minutes let's do all of
Jewish history so let's start first of all with the question who are the Jews well it's easier
to say who they are not than to say who they are actually there are about 15 million Jews
living around the world today primarily in the land of Israel and in the United States but also
in many many other countries virtually every other country in the world they are not a race if you go
to modern Israel to see Jews of many different racial backgrounds whatever that means exactly
they're not even a religion because in according to Jewish thought even when a Jew decides to
adopt another religion they still retain Jewish identity and well there's a lot more to say about
that but this is under 18 minutes they don't have a common language I'm speaking to you in
English for example and they don't have a common geography because of course Jews are scattered
around the world however they do have a historical common language which is of course Hebrew and a
historical common land which is Israel but we'll return to that shortly so then what is the Jewish
people I think the easiest way to define them is really what the great 10th century philosopher
sadhya Gowen called the unity of the Jewish people is in the Torah it is their connection
to the Torah that keeps the Jewish people together now it's also true that many Jews struggle against
the Torah and that is also endemic to the entire Jewish condition as the very name Israel if you
have a look in the book of Genesis the very name Israel means one who struggles with God okay lots
more to say about this but we are going to rush through 18 minutes so let's look at the historical
origins of the Jewish people our best source for ancient Jewish history is without a doubt the
Bible it is also the most difficult source to work with as archaeologists will tell you it's very
difficult to line up the kinds of things that they are slowly discovering about the ancient Middle
East with the text of the Bible but that again we're sticking to 18 minutes here so that will not
detain us there are a few scraps of information from the ancient ancient period like for example
this amazing steal from Merneptah a pharaoh from the 13th century who famously wrote israel is
wasted its seed is no more now if you had a look at Merneptah x' mummy you'll see that he's not
doing so great himself but nevertheless there are only a few scraps of information about the Jews
in the ancient world and much of their distant distant origins are lost in the mists of history
except for the Bible which gives a very detailed account however problematic it is for historians
according to the Bible the Jews first emerged from Mesopotamia the patriarch Abraham and Sarah lived
in the region of what would be today Iraq and they follow the Fertile Crescent up into what
we today Syria and then they descend into Israel proper they make some temporary sojourn in Egypt
but it is only under their grandson Jacob with his large family that Jews actually moved there
on mass and are eventually enslaved now I'm sure you're familiar with of course the famous story of
the exodus which is the second book of the Bible and that talks about how the Jews enslaved cry
out to their God who sends a redeemer Moses and then brings them out of Egyptian servitude having
them wander in the desert for a while until they finally cross over into land of Israel
archaeologist pause it's several other models for how the Jews may have actually settled the Land of
Israel but there's no question that by the time you get to about the Year thousand BCE there's
a significant Jewish presence in the region of Israel they've established a major religious
site in Jerusalem where the temple is located and they go through as described in the Bible
you know a series of kings some civil wars that ultimately end in the eighth century before the
Common Era with a major invasion from the north that takes away than the ten northern tribes
essentially they're the Lost Tribes of Israel and then in the sixth century before the Common Era
then there's another invasion that takes away the southern region now neither of these by the way
our total there are still Jews that are living in the Land of Israel but the Jewish Commonwealth is
destroyed there's no more Jewish political entity at that point the Babylonian exile only lasts for
a few decades however and under Ezra's describe once again in the Bible the Jews returned to
Israel they reestablish the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed in the sixth century and
they begin the second Commonwealth period the most important historical event that begins
to happen in this period the second return to Israel is when Alexander the Great emerges from
Macedonia and creates this massive empire that stretches all the way from Greece throughout the
eastern Mediterranean down to Egypt and way out to Afghanistan and he brings with him Greek culture
called Hellenism the Jews love Hellenism they go crazy for it it's got so many amazing things
for it but the problem is they have a difficulty figuring out how much Hellenism could be absorbed
by Jewish culture without completely capitulating to Greek influence and as a result there is a
major upheaval in the second century which is really a civil war between traditionalists on
the one hand and Helenus on the other and this is called the Chanukah rebellion ultimately
the traditionalists when they reestablish the traditional worship in the temple which had been
defiled by Greek gods and so on and they start a new Jewish kingdom at that point now even though
the Jews have a strong measure of Independence at this point it doesn't take long before this new
dynasty of Maccabean kings the so called hosmer nians begins to decline and by the year 63 before
the Common Era the state is so weak that Pompey and his armies from Rome invade the region and
Judea becomes a client state of Rome it is in this environment under Rome that there's tremendous
factionalism among the Jewish people there are a group called the Sadducees who basically control
a temple called there are zealots who want to rebel against the Romans there are the
Pharisees who are essentially separating for much of the debate and maintaining charismatic circles
it's try and perpetuate the Torah those are the people who essentially become the modern rabbis
and then of course there are Jewish Christians at this point Christianity is born it's entirely a
Jewish movement at first and only after the first couple of centuries did it really acquire a strong
non Jewish character ethnically and there's a lot more to say about that but you know I only have 18
minutes okay so the the Jews rebel against Rome they lose a major war in and in the year 70 the
temple is destroyed once again they try to rebel again in the second century under a man named Bar
Kochba even more devastation and the Romans take great pains to exile even more of the Jews the
Roman exile which begins formerly in the first century and extends through the second century
becomes even more important and long-lasting than the earlier Babylonian exile it is at this
time however the Jews decide to incorporate many of their oral teachings which had been
handed down for centuries into a core document called the Mishnah which eventually becomes the
the center of a major document called the Talmud which talked about in just a second the Jews who
are living in Babylonia they start to flourish as Israel begins to decline under the Romans and
it is here that the Talmud is created what is the Talmud there's so much to say about this document
but again 18 minutes the Talmud is essentially a long commentary it's a massive document about 20
volumes and it is essentially a commentary on the Mishnah which is in itself sort of like an
extended primarily legal document commenting on the Torah more to say about this but you
have to go look at the other videos I guess so this community begins to flourish and it has a
high point really from the 3rd through the 6th centuries in the 7th century Islam comes into
the region and initially the Jews actually do very well under Islam there's a lot of cultural
similarities between the ancient Jews and Muslim culture this will ultimately decline when you get
to the modern period however now what is medieval Jewish history it's you can define it in a lot of
different I mean we can't really apply the same parameters of Western history to the experience
of the Jews but one thing we can say for sure is the medieval period is when you see Jews begin to
really spread out beyond the ancient Near East itself Jews spreading out across the course of
North Africa major Jewish settlements in Egypt and what would be Morocco and then up into Spain
there are also Jewish settlements forming in Europe as well in southern France in northern
Germany and so on later they would expand even further east to Eastern Europe Ukraine Poland
places like that Jews are involved in all kinds of activities at this time there's a whole wide range
of trades but two are especially important that make a lot of sense one is international commerce
because Jews are of course at this point connected through this massive diaspora and second is money
lending which because of a quirk particularly in Christian theology Jews were essentially given
several centuries of a monopoly of being the only providers of credit in in all of Christian Europe
there is definitely a link between money lending and the growth of anti-semitism which becomes
really bizarre in the medieval period there are earlier roots to anti-semitism beyond the scope
of our 18 minutes but in the medieval period you really see it particularly in Christian Europe
as Christians try to articulate the difference between the dotter religion of Christianity and
the mother religion of Judaism you see it in a lot of artwork like the famous ecclesia at
synagogue image which is repeated hundreds of times throughout European art and monumental
architecture things like that you also see it in the growth of really bizarre ideas blood libel
charge which says that Jews somehow need to drink the blood of Christian children I mean that's what
they call in Hebrew meshugganah totally crazy but nevertheless from the 13th century this becomes
a very powerful myth that pervades right up until the 20th century so these kinds of things actually
drive a lot of Jews towards Eastern Europe where the anti-semitism initially initially at least is
quite a bit more muted we should also mention this point the really bizarre and fascinating story of
the Jews of Spain while the Jews in Spain they have this tremendous Renaissance from the 9th to
the 13th centuries in particular where there was this flourishing of Jewish culture for a
variety of reasons the fact is it's a triangular culture with Jews Christians and Muslims forced to
interact in a non binary way like they would Jews versus Muslims or Jews versus Christians elsewhere
in Europe secondly it's on the periphery from the Muslim world so a lot of things that could happen
in Muslim Spain could not happen let's say in Baghdad and there are incredible figures that rise
up at this time it declines in the 12th century with the invasion of more extremist Muslims that
drive for example Maimonides and his family out of Spain and towards Egypt but it represents a real
high point in Jewish culture it will unfortunately decline even further as the Christians conquer the
Iberian Peninsula and Institute an inquisition to try to try to drive out those new Christians
that is forcibly converted Jews in the pogroms of 1391 and this ultimately results in an expulsion
of Jews a major expulsion in 1492 one of many expulsion that occurred throughout Europe for
a wide variety of reasons primarily economic in nature driving the Jews out of Spain and
throughout the Mediterranean Basin oh my gosh I only have about four and a half minutes left so
I got a rush through modern history the Western European experience is quite different from the
Eastern European Western Europe tends to modernize quite a bit faster and the Jews of Western Europe
start to adopt all kinds of new technologies like printing for example which is something that Jews
really love to adopt right away in Eastern Europe there's a major uprising under a man named bohdan
khmelnytsky in 1648 this is followed by a mass movement to follow a false messiah named Shaba
tights bein in the 1660s and then about a century later the rise of a populist movement called Casa
de zhim which really you know made a huge impact on the experience of Jews in Eastern Europe
rushing ahead now when we get to the contemporary period and by this I'm talking about the the
modern area the last hundred years Western Europe there's been a large push towards emancipation
that is the granting of equal rights to Jews it happens all of a sudden in France in 1791 shortly
after their revolution and then slowly slowly begins to creep up in Germany and other countries
as well truth begins who would take advantage of this and start studying in universities and so
on and they begin to really express themselves as major members of nineteenth-century culture Jews
are also emigrating in very large numbers from Eastern Europe to America and to a lesser degree
in Israel South Africa and elsewhere as Russian persecution increases under the Tsar's you begin
to see the development of many Jewish political movements including that of Zion has been so on
when we get to the 20th century certainly the most horrific moment in Jewish history as a whole is
the Holocaust when you have the combination of a devastating first world war economic depression
and the legacy of anti-semitism all focused then the leadership of Adolf Hitler and this creates
a move in which we cannot possibly do justice to in such a short treatment but the end result is
as I'm sure you're aware six million Jews were killed in Eastern Europe that's fully one out
of three Jews throughout the world at the time but in the amazing whipsaw like nature of Jewish
history the Jews reestablished themselves in the modern State of Israel 2,000 years after their
expulsion under the Romans the amazing thing Israel goes through it's a difficult birth
Israel goes through a lot of difficult changes they fight major Wars in 1948 with independence
in 1967 the famous six-day war 1973 and they have ongoing conflict with the indigenous Arab
population the Palestinians and that is far from solved although major steps were made with the
1993 peace accords in Oslo and with the withdrawal from Gaza which is also a very problematic event
in the year 2005 and that basically brings us up to the present day Jews still have a tremendous
amount of challenges to contend with it is not an easy history nothing happens automatically but I
have managed to squeeze this under 18 minutes and you may be wondering why 18 minutes why
not 20 or why not 10 18 minutes is two things first of all it is an easy-to-remember number
because that's the amount of time it takes for unleavened bread to become leavened making it
not kosher for Passover but more importantly the number 18 is written as a word in Hebrew the word
is high in life so as the saying goes in Hebrew AM Yisrael high the Jewish people live I hope
you found this very brief overview of Jewish history useful and if you want to learn more I
got lots of videos on all kinds of periods of Jewish history thanks very much for watching
you