History of the Jews

Preface [to the Sixth Volume]

This Sixth Part is the last part of the “First Period” of Jewish history, which we have called “Israel in its Land.” Part Seven, which follows, will be the first part of the “Second Period,” which will be called “Israel among the Nations.”

It would have been correct to place this preface as introductory to Part Seven, in which even a weak eye would be able to see the great and miraculous transformation that our people underwent when this great nation was displaced from its land of birth to a foreign land, yet survived.

But the beginning of this great miracle, the like of which had never happened or been witnessed concerning any nation, started to occur a whole era previously, and so we also predate our preface an entire era before the center of Jewish life entirely moved to Babylonia.

The Jewish nation suffered an awful calamity with the destruction of the Temple. The wholesale exile from its land that commenced now and would eventually leave it without a foothold or stake in its ancestral homeland was preordained from that date, even though the Land was not entirely bereft of our forefathers until some generations later. The infamy of this destruction casts its awful shadow over later generations, yet it hardly occurs to anyone that it was also a day of unsurpassed victory, for it laid bare an inexhaustible fountain of life and a treasure of strength beyond measure or searching—a mighty gushing and flowing fountain that would never dry up, and before which every tyrannical power exhausts itself in vain to stop its flow.

To the hidden victory, to the revelation of the mighty strength that will not allow Israel to exhaust itself or die even after its fall, we invested our whole heart. The majority of writers of our history gave it no consideration, and the few who intuited it did not tend to understand it fully, so that the ordinary scholars who are accustomed to measure every nation by the same criteria, the uniqueness of this phenomenon was considered an aberration, for they had not seen the like of it in the history of any other nation, and so they glossed over it and ignored it.

This great phenomenon, which others more or less neglected, we have made a chief cornerstone, for it alone fully demonstrates to us the essential character of our nation, which makes it a unique formation in the world, unique in every sense of the word. The distinction that was manifested in our people at that time, compared with all other nations, is comparable to the distinction between the animal and the plant kingdoms. For Israel did not wither even after being plucked from its land, unlike all other nations, who in similar circumstances died out quickly. In lieu of the soil of its homeland, which had been snatched away from under its feet, our people fashioned its spiritual legacy, bequeathed by its prophets, into a complete world—a sanctuary whose firm security could not be dislodged by the hands of Israel’s enemies besieging it for two millennia; a peaceful haven against which all the calamities and troubles cast at it by its ruthless enemies could not disturb, nor their evil spirit penetrate; to a school of divine wisdom and moral instruction, whose words partake of the truth of eternity and are not the fruit of an intellectual fashion adopted one day and discarded the next—from the heavenly abode, from which emanates the breath of the Almighty, enlivening it and destined ultimately to be the breath of life in all who dwell on earth. To transform them with another heart, to cast from their hands the idols of the false cultures that blossom and wither, and to dedicate their hearts in the culture of the Torah, which alone stands in perpetuity.