Jewish foundations to the West

For all the people suddenly discovering their inner historian whenever Jews are mentioned, here’s an uncomfortable fact:

The people of Israel didn’t suddenly appear in 1948. They were a nation and a people long before the modern concept of the nation-state even existed. Long before there was a Republic of France, a United Kingdom, or a United States, there was the people of Israel.

In fact, the Jewish people served as an inspiration even to America’s founders.

America’s early political culture was soaked in the Hebrew Bible. The Founders regularly compared the American colonies’ struggle against Britain to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson even proposed a national seal depicting Moses and the crossing of the Red Sea. The idea of a free people governed by laws rather than kings resonated deeply with the republican ideals that helped shape the United States.

And the connection runs far deeper than America.

The Jews are not merely one people among many in Western history. They sit near the very foundation of the West itself. Christianity emerged directly from Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. His disciples were Jews. The earliest Christians were Jews. The Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament. For nearly two thousand years, the stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jerusalem have been among the central stories of Western civilization.

The moral vocabulary of the West — law, justice, covenant, human dignity, and moral accountability — owes an enormous debt to traditions that originated among the Jewish people and were carried throughout Christendom.

Which is why the modern obsession with portraying the Jews as foreign interlopers in the West is so strange. The Jews are not outsiders to Western civilization. They are one of the peoples from whom it emerged.