A World W/O Jews Chas Vi-shalom

Paul Johnson, a Catholic writer in Britain, has written one of the great histories of the Jewish people. In summing up the vast history of the Jews he says: “one way of summing up four thousand years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves what would have happened to the human race had no Jewish people had come into being? Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place, humanity might have eventually stumbled along the great Jewish discoveries but we can’t be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they are revealed but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. “To them,” writes Paul Johnson, ”we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human, the sanctity of life, the dignity of the human person, of the individual conscience and possible redemption, of the collective conscience, and social responsibility, peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items that constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews, the world might have been a much emptier place."