Rust on the Hinges of History How Neither the Irish Nor the Jews Saved Civilization Tim Callahan
A review of Thomas Cahill’s
How the Irish Saved Civilization, 1995, 246 pages, $12.95 paperback, ISBN
0-385-41849-3, New York: Nan A. Talese. In case any of you who happen to be gentiles have any pretensions that you as ordinary human beings might actually have either some inborn sense of justice or a basic desire for democracy independent of cultural background, or for that matter that you could have, independently of the Bible, come up with a concept of time that was linear, Thomas Cahill is here to put you in your place. While it is not as blatantly offensive as some forms of historical revisionism—Holocaust denial and extreme Afrocentrism come to mind— the underlying foundation of his book, The Gifts of the Jews, is essentially, if unintentionally, racist. The book also implies—not surprisingly, considering that Cahill is the former director of religious publishing at Doubleday—that the Hebrew scriptures were indeed in some way divinely inspired and not the result, like all other literature, the product of a cultural history. The Gifts of the Jews is the second installment in a series called “The Hinges of History,” the first volume being How the Irish Saved Civilization. This is a look at history which, given the brevity of the books, their lightness of style, and their general lack of intellectual substance, is far from anything approaching the scientific analysis of that subject in such works as Frank Sulloway’s Born to Rebel and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. In other words this is strictly light reading for general consumption. In itself this would not be so bad if the basic assumption behind the series were not flawed. Preceding the table of contents in both books is a page outlining the philosophy of the series. At the beginning Cahill says: We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence, The author goes on to say that there are, however, points at which individuals and peoples become great gift-givers whose unique contributions alter the otherwise dreary cycle of war and outrage. These are the “hinges” upon which the course of history swings. He then gives the view of history he intends to champion: In this series, THE HINGES OF HISTORY, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. There are two basic problems here. First of all it sets up the study of history as being inspiring. Once we are inspired, our mind set becomes poetic (as opposed to scientific). While it may reasonably be argued that our civilization could use a good deal more poetry, when the poetic turn of mind is applied to that which is more properly the province of science, the wrong tool is being used. More importantly, a poetic turn of mind sets the author up to have his views misused in the service of propagandistic claims, or is at very least susceptible to the mythologization inherent in political propaganda by those who might read Cahill’s books yet lack that author’s acknowledged learning, acumen, and intellect. The key to just what sort of propaganda this inspired view of history is likely to lead to is seen in the idea that various peoples gave unique contributions to our civilization. Unfortunately, once we begin to think in terms of unique contributions, the idea that peoples might well be unique slides imperceptibly into the belief that racial differences include unique temperamental and ethical qualities, and that national character is biological rather than cultural. In short, the end point of endowing different peoples with unique qualities is, plainly and simply, racist. While I seriously doubt that Thomas Cahill is a racist, his basic concept runs directly counter to that espoused by Jared Diamond, i.e. that peoples throughout the world possess the same basic qualities but that their cultural levels vary widely because they are subjected to environmental strictures imposed by, among other things, geography. The first volume of the series, How the Irish Saved Civilization, is a good deal less irritating than The Gifts of the Jews in that it deals with a claim of a much more limited scope, despite the rather extravagant title (which in itself recalls the use of hyperbole prevalent in Irish epics). Yet, while the one-eighth of me that is of Irish descent may rejoice in the idea that we saved civilization, the claim is excessively overstated, and my Irish ancestors were no more or less unique than anyone else. What this book deals with is a relatively little known aspect of the early middle ages: the flowering of Irish culture between circa 450 and 800—the very period during which the rest of Europe was plunged into a dark age following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This Irish golden age came about probably because of a happy combination of events, largely—despite Cahill’s emphasis on the unique nature of the Irish—the result of historical trends external to Ireland: geography and climate change. At the point at which the Roman world was collapsing, Christian missionaries began to proselytize beyond the borders of the empire, having first done missionary work in the rural regions within the Roman pale. (Christianity had been a largely urban religion in the first centuries of the common era.) The Christian conversion of Ireland at a time when neither the empire nor the Roman church were in a position to impose strictures on the insular church gave the Irish literacy without destroying their native culture. This included the Celtic view of spirituality, which was a good deal freer, kinder, and less legalistic than the form of Christianity which had been co-opted and brought to heel in the service of the Roman state at the time of St. Patrick’s (ca. 389-ca. 461) contemporary, Augustine (354- 430). At this same time—though Cahill fails to mention it—there was a major climactic change in Europe, a warming trend which caused the Mediterranean regions to dry up and made northern Europe much more amenable to agriculture. There were even vineyards in the British Isles during this period. Thus, at the same time that Christianity and literacy arrived in Ireland, there was an increase in the standard of living, with a concomitant rise in population. There was at the same time a cultural vacuum in which to expand, and Ireland was protected by the comparative geographical isolation of the island from either barbarian incursions or any last attempts by the dying empire to impose its will either culturally or politically. This protective isolation ended—and with it Ireland’s golden age—with the onset of the Viking incursions, beginning with the sacking of the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne in 793. Ironically—though again Cahill fails to mention this—the same climactic change that helped launch the Irish golden age helped end it, since the sudden appearance of these sea raiders in Europe resulted from population explosions in Scandinavia brought on by increases in agricultural yield due to the warming of northern Europe. The Vikings were also helped by the fact that in destroying the power of the Frisians, a sea-going Teutonic people living in the general region of the Netherlands, Charlemagne had inadvertently created a navel power vacuum in the North Sea, which the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes happily filled. So Ireland’s brief golden age was the result of forces quite outside the scope of the Celtic culture to control—forces of climate, geography, and the tides of religion and politics generated by the collapse of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. By the time Ireland had freed itself of the Viking menace—following the Battle of Clontarf in 1011 when the Irish decisively beat the Norse rulers of the Irish cities, and the destruction of Herald Hadrada’s Norwegian army by the Anglo- Saxons at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, just prior to the Battle of Hastings (an event which virtually ended the Viking Age) the rest of Europe had caught up to and surpassed the Irish in literacy, philosophical speculation, and missionary zeal. Did the Irish save civilization during their brief golden age, as Cahill asserts? The basis for his claim is that, while the Greek manuscripts were being copied in the Eastern Roman Empire, Latin manuscripts would have been lost had Irish monks not copied them (193). Thus, without the Irish there would have been no transmission of Latin literature to western Europe. Certainly the Irish had an impact on early medieval Europe far in excess of their numbers or political power. Yet Cahill nowhere gives any proof of a dearth of manuscript transmission in the monasteries of continental Europe, and we must assume, unless proof can be given to the contrary, that the monks or Ireland were not behaving any differently than those elsewhere in western Christendom with respect to the preservation of culture. Certainly there had to be some work being done in Rome itself, which, despite the assaults of the Vandals and the Lombards, still housed the papacy during the early middle ages. That the Irish impact on Christian thought proved ephemeral despite the large numbers of Irish clerics and philosophers—such as John Scotus Eriugena (“John the Scot from Ireland”) at the court of Charles the Bald—is attested to by Cahill himself. He notes that, sadly, few Celtic ideas took hold in the Roman church (178): It is a shame that private confession is one of the few Irish innovations that passed into the universal church. How different might Catholicism be today if it had taken over the easy Irish attitudes toward diversity, authority, the role of women, and the relative unimportance of sexual mores. In one of Cogitosus’s best stories, tenderhearted [St.] Brigid makes the fetus of a nun (whose womb had, “through youthful desire of pleasure…swelled with child”) magically disappear (“without coming to birth, and without pain”), so that the nun won’t be turned out of her convent. Given the Catholic prohibition of not only abortion, but even artificial methods of birth control, given also its intolerance of premarital sex, it is rather obvious that, while the Irish golden age is an interesting historical phenomenon, the Irish neither saved nor greatly altered civilization. Medieval Europe would probably have developed the way it did regardless of what the Irish had done. Cahill’s view of the unique nature of peoples flowers more fully in The Gifts of the Jews where he states right off the bat (3): The Jews started it all—and by “it” I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings. I was able to speak to Cahill by calling in to Larry Mantle’s “Air Talk” show on Southern California’s KPCC when he was being interviewed about The Gifts of the Jews. I said that I hoped he did not mean that if the Jews had not existed that no one else would have given us our basic sense of justice and whatever other qualities he saw as being uniquely Jewish in origin. He answered that in fact that was what he meant. If the Jews had not given us the Bible, no one else would have given us anything of comparable worth. We would not have our sense of justice, any basis for democratic leanings (a gift usually attributed to the Greeks by those who believe in unique national characteristics), or even a linear sense of time. Cahill begins this rather idiosyncratic view of the origins of modern thought with a pair of highly questionable assumptions. The first of these is that the Jews had a concept of a linear view of time, beginning with Abraham, that was much opposed to the cyclic view prevalent in the ancient Near East. His second assumption, or more properly collection of assumptions, involves the patriarch Abraham himself. Not only does Cahill assume that he was indeed a real person (though it is far more probable that he was a character of legend) he seems to think that Abraham (originally Abram; Cahill renders that name as Avram) was the first person in all history to embark on a journey into the unknown (63): So, “wayyelekh Auram” (“Avram went”)—two of the boldest words in all literature. They signal a complete departure from everything that has gone before in the long evolution of culture and sensibility. Out of Sumer, civilized repository of the predictable, comes a man who does not know where he is going but goes forth into the unknown wilderness under the prompting of his god. Out of Mesopotamia, home of canny, self-serving merchants who use their gods to ensure prosperity and favor, comes a wealthy caravan with no material goal. Out of ancient humanity, which from the beginnings of its consciousness has read its eternal verites in the stars, comes a party traveling by no known compass. Out of the human race, which knows in its bones that all its striving must end in death, comes a leader who says he has been given an impossible promise. Out of mortal imagination comes a dream of something new, something better, something yet to happen, something—in the future. Cahill goes on say that if we had been around in the “second millennium B.C., the millennium of Avram,” and had canvassed all the nations of the earth they would have seen Avram’s journey as pure foolishness. To accept Cahill’s view we would have to assume that no great human migrations took place either before that of the largely mythical Abram and that they could not have taken place after his time independent of the mind set that one would have had to have gotten from Abram or his descendants. This simply is not true. Abram’s journey, which only took him from Harran to the Negev—a trek only comparable to the distance between between Los Angeles and San Francisco—could hardly have been the earliest great migration, particularly since modern humanity fairly rapidly spread over the earth from Africa toward the end of the Pleistocene. Think of the untold heroes who pioneered migrations across the dangerous seas to Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, or the fearless voyagers who made their way across the frozen Bering straight from Asia into North America. Furthermore it certainly did not involve “traveling by no known compass.” By Abram’s time Bronze Age trade routes stretched from the British Isles to the Persian Gulf and the Nile delta, and from those places east to India and south nearly the horn of Africa. In fact the lack of a linear view of time does not seem to have stopped other peoples from taking gurneys that really could be seen as traveling without a compass. Certainly the Polynesians who crossed the uncharted expanse of the Pacific didn’t have the benefit of Abram’s world view. The same can be said of the initial Viking explorers who crossed the Atlantic to colonize Iceland. And Eric the Red, the founder of the Icelandic colony at Greenland was a staunch pagan who was quite disgruntled when his son Lief returned from Norway a Christian. If anything, the Norse world view—that the gods would be destroyed by the forces of chaos at the end of time—was even more pessimistic than any view found in ancient Sumer. In short, not only was Abram’s journey not the first, but the view of time as cyclic and the ultimate view that no human achievement was lasting or could change the future of the world, did not stop grand explorers such as the Polynesians and the Vikings from daring uncharted waters. Furthermore, given its comparatively short distance, Abram’s journey to the Negev was hardly a leap into the unknown. The Mesopotamian peoples of his day certainly knew of Egypt and thus had to know of Canaan. Once again, Cahill is letting the poet run wild, then claiming the poetic hyperbole historical truth. So intent is Cahill on pressing the dichotomy between the Jewish concept of linear time and the Sumerian and Babylonian concept of cyclic time that earlier in the book he distorts the nature of Mesopotamian literature, saying of Sumerian writings (19): Even their stories miss a sense of development: they begin in the middle and end in the middle. They lack the relentless necessity that we associate with storytelling, from which we demand a beginning, a middle and an end: a shape. But all Sumerian stories are shaggy-dog stories, sounding sometimes like the patter of small children who imitate the jokes they have heard from older children without realizing that there has to be a punch line. Since Cahill makes it quite plain that only the Jews had a sense of linear time, we would have to assume that Greek myths, most of which were certainly written down before the ancient Greeks had any communication with Israel, would also lack the beginning, middle, and end of normal storytelling, The same would also have to be true of American Indian tales, particularly since Cahill goes to the trouble to place a quote from Black Elk as to the cyclic nature of the Indian’s world view on a page preceding the table of contents. Yet the fact is that most, if not all Greek myths do have a beginning, middle, and end. The same is true of most American Indian stories. One I might cite in particular is a Biloxi Indian tale that is one of many worldwide versions of the tar baby story. In fact it is virtually identical to the Uncle Remus tale, except that the roles of both Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox are taken by “the Frenchman.” It is even highly doubtful that Cahill can support his assertion about Sumerian stories, since he cites none of them. In fact the only story he does cite is the Epic of Gilgamesh. This began as a Sumerian tale but was refined by the Akkadians. Gilgamesh certainly holds a world view of the futility of struggling against one’s fate, yet it, like the Greek myths, has a beginning, middle and end. Briefly, the story begins when the gods, hearing of how overbearing Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, has become, decide to take him down a peg by creating his equal in the form of Enkidu. The two heroes wrestle, and Enkidu does take Gilgamesh’s measure. But the result of the contest is that the two admire each other, become friends and go on quests together. They excite the love of the goddess Ishtar, who, when she is spurned by Gilgamesh and insulted by Enkidu, decides to destroy them. This eventually results in Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh goes to visit his friend in the underworld and is so distressed by the dreary state of the dead that he goes on a quest for immortality. He fails miserably and finally has to reconcile himself to the all too human fate of death. So there it is: beginning, middle, and end. Gilgamesh ends up a sadder but wiser man. What is almost equally odd about Cahill’s assertion of the different Jewish mind set is that he seems well aware that the world-weary tone of Gilgamesh is prevalent in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Yet this does not faze him in the least despite the fact that Ecclesiastes represents not only a strand of Jewish thought, but that, despite the fact that it purports to be the words of Solomon, it is in fact a very late book, certainly one dating from after the exile, that is later than 538 B.C.E. Let us consider just one among many of its sentiments, Ecc. 3:14, 15: I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor any thing taken away from it; God has made it so, in order that men should fear before him. That which is, already has been; and that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks that which has been driven away. The phrase, “God seeks that which has been driven away,” means that God causes the past to be repeated. Clearly the author of this late book, which is part of the Hebrew canon, here demonstrates a decidedly cyclic view of time. And it is the very perfection of God that makes time cyclic and human striving futile. This sentiment is expressed over and over throughout the book. Repeatedly the author of Ecclesiastes says of whatever activity he considers that it is “vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecc. 1:14; 2:11, 26; 4:4, 13). The Hebrew word translated as “vanity” is hebel, which also means a breath, or something as insubstantial as a breath. In other words, everything we might think worthwhile is nothing more than a vapor chasing the wind. This is not only the very state of mind Cahill seems to think the Jews abandoned starting with Abraham, it restates even in similar words what the Epic of Gilgamesh (Old Babylonian version, Tablet III line 8) says regarding the futility of human endeavor: “Whatever they achieve is but the wind.” So it would appear that Cahill is quite wrong. The linear view of time does not seem to have been a Jewish invention after all. In fact one would have a hard time getting a clear view of time from reading the Bible if one read it in the original Hebrew, which only has two tenses: the imperfect, which may be present or future, and the perfect, which may be present or past. The idea of a clearly delineated view of time fits far more logically the defined Aristotelian way of thinking in which things are “either/or” rather than “both/and.” This is a view which actually runs counter to the mind-set of the ancient Near East—including ancient Israel, and it is of course the product of the secular philosophy, independent of established religion, that was invented by the Greeks. Cahill’s attempt to make the biblical traditions unique in the ancient world continues as he summarizes the tale of Moses in the bulrushes. This is done less by what the author says than by what he leaves out. And what he leaves out is that the tale of Moses set adrift in the waters of the Nile delta is derived from the story of the birth of Sargon the Great, king of Akkad ca. 2600 B.C.E., who was set adrift on the Euphrates by his mother in order to save his life. Even Cahill’s translation of the text of Exodus 2:3 seems designed to avoid any connection with the older Mesopotamian tale. His translation speaks of the basket as being coated with (102) “loam and pitch.” This is a bit of a departure from most translations. For example, the King James Version (KJV) renders the words as “slime and pitch.” The Hebrew word rendered by the KJV as “slime” and by Cahill as “loam” is chemar, a word derived from a verb meaning “to bubble up” and is usually taken to mean bitumen. In fact, more modern translations generally use bitumen in place of slime. The Hebrew word translated as “pitch” is zepheth, deriving from a verb meaning “to liquefy,” is more accurately translated as asphalt. While bituminous tar was to be found in the vicinity of the Euphrates—it was used in the story of the tower of Babel as the mortar for the bricks made of baked mud (see Gen. 1 1:3)—it is not found near the Nile delta. By referring to the substances as “loam and pitch,” the translation used by Cahill implies that the coating of the basket was a mix of earth and pine sap, thus neatly avoiding the Mesopotamian connection (although pine tar would also have been difficult to come by in the largely treeless Nile delta). Writing on the Ten Commandments and Jewish law in general, Cahill says that, while such aspects of it as the lex talionis (“law of retaliation”) of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” may seem harsh to us, ancient Israelite law represented an over all softening and humanizing trend, that in comparison other ancient law codes were markedly unfair, favoring propertied classes over commoners. To some degree this is quite true. For example the law stated in Deut. 25:15,16 must have been quite revolutionary in the ancient world: You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose, within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him. This is quite startling. Hammurabi’s code specified the death penalty for anyone harboring an escaped slave. On the other hand, the death penalty could be invoked in Israelite law for failure to show respect to one’s parents. Exodus 21:15 gives the death penalty for striking one’s parent, and Ex. 21: 17 hands out the the same ultimate sentence for cursing one’s parent. Cursing a parent also merits the death penalty in Leviticus 20:9, and Deut. 21:18-21 specifies that the parents of a stubborn, rebellious son are to take him to the gates of their city, where the men of the city will stone him to death. Deuteronomy 27:16, one of a series of curses on those who violate the law, says “Cursed be he who dishonors his father and mother.” To most of us today, all this seems a bit exaggerated. We must remember, however, that in ancient times cursing a parent was considered as much an assault as a physical attack. For all that, Hammurabi’s code is a bit milder, only demanding that the son who strikes his father will have his hand cut off. While a son could be put to death for striking his father in ancient Israel, the same was not true for the parents. Not only could they beat their children, they were urged to, as we see in the following examples from the Book of Proverbs:
Pro. 13:24:
Pro. 23:13, 14:
Pro. 29:15: These verses are often used by believers to defend the practice of corporal punishment. Yet what is urged here, particularly in Pro. 23:13,14 is not spanking or even switching the back of the legs. The Hebrew word translated as “rod” is shebet, which means a stick, such as a staff or walking stick. So parents are urged in these verses to beat their children with a stick. As to what part of their anatomy was to be beaten these verses do not specify, but we might get a clue from Pro. 26:3: “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, / and a rod for the back of fools.” So much for the softening of harsh ancient Near Eastern law. Despite Cahill’s claim that the Jewish sensibility—which he sees as unique in the ancient world—began with Abraham, the people we call the Jews cannot be said to have come into being until after the return of the exile community to Judah following the decree of Cyrus the Great of Persia in 538 B.C.E. Was this community unique in its sense of justice, which Cahill claims they bequeathed to us? Not entirely, as we can see from the actions of Nehemiah, governor of the Persian province of Yehud (Judah) under Artaxerxes I. While he went to great lengths to redress injustices within the Jewish community, he was less than charitable toward miscegenation. In the book of Ezra those having erred through mixed marriages bind themselves to a voluntary agreement to give up their foreign wives and to disown the children of such unions (so much for family values). But according to Neh. 13:23-25, this was actually accomplished by petty bullying: In those days also I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon and Moab; and half their children spoke the language of Ashdod, and they could not speak the language of Judah, but the language of each people. And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, “You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves.” Nehemiah used similar tactics against priests who had married into the families of rival factions such as that of Sanballat, governor of Samaria, who despite biblical prejudice against the Samaritans, was also probably a worshiper of Yahweh (Neh. 13:28): And one of the sons of Jehoida, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was the son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite; therefore I chased him from me. Nehemiah’s petty nastiness does not mesh well with Cahill’s assertion of what the Jews and only the Jews gave us (239, 240): The Jews gave us a whole new vocabulary, a whole new Temple of the Spirit, an inner landscape of ideas and feelings that had never been known before. Over many centuries of trauma and suffering they came to believe in one God, the Creator of the universe, whose meaning underlies all his creation and who enters human history to bring his purposes to pass. Because of their unique belief—monotheism—the Jews were able to give us the Great Whole, a unified universe that makes sense and that, because of its evident superiority as a world view, completely overwhelms the warring and contradictory phenomena of polytheism. It would seem that Cahill is saying here that monotheism is the source of any concept of a comprehensible universe. This would further imply that science would not have been possible without this uniquely Jewish concept of monotheism. In point of fact the ancient Greeks were beginning to make sense of the universe much the way Western Civilization was to do later: by simply dumping religious concepts and approaching the study of the natural world with a secular mind-set. Not only does the author see the comprehensible universe as a gift of the Jews, he also sees every movement of social justice as being in some way derived from the Bible (248-249): These movements of modern times have all employed the language of the Bible; and it is even impossible to understand their great heroes and heroines—people like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Helder Camara, Oscar Romero, Rigoberta Menchu, Corazon Aquino, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Charity Kaluki Ngilu, Harry Wu—without recourse to the Bible. Two things are striking about this list. First of all Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu all had to struggle against racist systems which were imposed by believers in biblical values, since slavery in the United States was justified by biblical arguments just as abolitionism was, and since the Afrikaners had their origin, and the origin—as members of a predestined, elect community—of their racist assumptions in Dutch Calvinism. But what is most striking about the list is its inclusion of Mahatma Gandhi, whose non-violent tactic of passive resistance derived from the spirituality of his Hindu religion. That Cahill blithely co-opts Gandhi as only being understandable in terms of the Judeo-Christian Bible is the height of ethnocentric arrogance. While as a group the Jews have produced individuals of genius out of all proportion of their numbers, this has been at a cost that few of us would be willing to pay if we could avoid it. That cost has been intermittent persecution through the ages from C.E. 70 on to the present. The business acumen stereotypically seen as a Jewish heritage resulted from centuries of being either not allowed to own real estate or having to be able to convert their wealth into a movable form in case of sudden eviction or pogroms. One guard against being summarily uprooted was the development of higher levels of literacy then those prevalent in the gentile populations in which the Jews were submerged, making them as professional people more valuable to the powerful among the gentile societies. Thus, a respect for learning had a survival value among European Jewry. In spite of this, purges and expulsions could come at any time. In such an unpredictable world the slow and the rigidly non-adaptive were cruelly taken. Hence the resilience, cultural tenacity, and high level of achievement among the Jews. Nevertheless, it is a bit insulting—not to mention absolutely unprovable—to assert that the rest of us are such clods that we would not have come up with the concepts of justice and democracy or even a comprehensible view of time and the universe without Judaism. My wife, Bonnie, pointed out to me that Cahill, in using the Irish and the Jews in his two opening volumes, has focused on two peoples who have both suffered greatly at the hands of the powerful as well as both enduring excessive racist denigration during much of their history. The Irish suffered the effective loss of their own language, wholesale destruction of their culture, genocide under Cromwell, famine, domination by a foreign power in their own land, and the loss of most of their population through emigration (roughly four fifths of those of Irish descent live elsewhere than Ireland, mostly in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand). The Jews suffered expulsion from their native land, intermittent racial victimization and, of course, the Holocaust. Perhaps in his third volume Cahill will choose yet another group that has been harshly winnowed, Given, however, that this author has arrogated so many of the sources of what he refers to as “the patrimony of the West” to the Jews, one wonders what will be left for future installments of the “Hinges of History” series to portion out as qualities unique to other racial and nationalistic preserves.
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