The Jewish Civilization That Might Have Been

PELONI:  In his provocative essay, Victor Satya asks a question that should unsettle anyone who looks at history as an unrelated book of past events: What would Jewish civilization have become had it been allowed the ordinary luxury of simply existing?

Reflecting on the documentary Civilization and the Jews by Abba Eban, Satya considers the counterfactual possibilities and in doing so, reframes the reflection of the Holocaust from it representing Jews as being not merely a people who survived that slaughter, but a people whose survival came at a cost which was paid by the entire modern world, in ideas we never received, in possibilities never inherited, due to the lives that were both lost and their successive generations which were ended before even being conceived.

Victor Satya

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What would the Jews have become had history been a little kinder to them?

It is a question that has occupied my imagination ever since I encountered Civilization and the Jews, the extraordinary historical documentary presented by Abba Eban. Not what the Jews became, for that is remarkable enough. Nor merely how they survived, although the answer to that question could keep historians employed for several centuries. I mean something rather more unsettling.

What might Jewish civilization have accomplished had its energies not been so frequently diverted toward the elementary business of remaining alive?

Imagine, for a moment, a people who produced prophets, philosophers, poets, physicians, mathematicians, scientists, and statesmen while periodically having to abandon their homes, surrender their possessions, flee their neighbours, and explain to successive rulers why they should be permitted to exist.

Now imagine what those same people might have accomplished had they been allowed the rather extravagant luxury of an ordinary historical existence.

The mind begins to wander. And the further it wanders, the more one begins to suspect that the history of the Jews is not merely the history of what one people endured. It is also the history of what the rest of humanity may have lost.

This is what I found myself contemplating as Eban’s magnificent historical panorama unfolded before me. Empires appeared and disappeared. Civilizations rose, conquered, legislated, persecuted, and eventually retired to the archaeological department. The Jews, meanwhile, continued the inconvenient practice of existing.

The Egyptians had their dynasties.

The Babylonians had their empire.

The Greeks had their philosophers.

The Romans had their legions.

Each, in its own time, appeared to possess the necessary qualifications for historical permanence. The Jews had something rather less impressive to the imperial imagination: a covenant, a collection of sacred writings, a stubborn attachment to an ancestral homeland, and an apparently incurable determination to remember who they were.

History, which is usually generous with military victories and rather careless with memory, would eventually discover which inheritance proved more durable.

A Civilization That Refused to Become a Museum

One of the first things Eban’s historical account compelled me to reconsider was the nature of Jewish identity itself. I had previously imagined the Jews as a people held together principally by religious uniformity. Their extraordinary continuity seemed to suggest an equally extraordinary agreement about what it meant to be Jewish.

It turns out that the Jews have spent a considerable portion of their history disagreeing about precisely that question.

They disagreed about religious authority, the interpretation of sacred law, the nature of Jewish communal life, the meaning of modernity, and the proper relationship between Jewish tradition and the surrounding world. They produced Pharisees and Sadducees, rabbinic scholars and mystics, Hasidim and their opponents, Reformers and traditionalists, secular nationalists and religious Zionists.

A people apparently united by an exceptional ability to argue. And yet the arguments did not dissolve the people.

Consider what followed the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. For many ancient peoples, the destruction of their central sanctuary and the loss of political independence might have marked the beginning of cultural disappearance. Yet Jewish religious life underwent a profound transformation. The rabbis and scholars developed institutions of learning, interpretation, prayer, and communal practice that enabled Jewish tradition to continue without the Temple.

Rome possessed an empire.

The Jews possessed an inheritance that did not require an empire to survive.

The Extraordinary Business of Giving the World Ideas

To my mind, the greatness of a civilization is measured principally by what it contributes to humanity. And by that measure, Jewish civilization occupies an extraordinary place.

Consider the religious and moral revolution associated with ancient Israel. In a world populated by competing gods, divine genealogies, and sacred powers attached to particular cities and territories, the Hebrew tradition developed and transmitted an uncompromising vision of one God whose moral authority extended beyond any single kingdom.

Its prophets spoke of justice, righteousness, mercy, and the responsibilities of rulers toward the vulnerable. Kings were not necessarily righteous because they were kings. Power did not automatically confer moral legitimacy.

The Intellectual Geography

As a Christian, I cannot contemplate that inheritance without recognizing how profoundly my own religious world has been shaped by Jewish history. The scriptures through which I understand God, morality, human responsibility, and the meaning of history emerged from the religious life of the Jewish people.

The prophets were not Scandinavian.

Moses did not receive the commandments in Rome.

Jesus was not an English gentleman who happened to spend his childhood in the Middle East.

In later centuries, Jewish thinkers, artists, scientists, and writers made remarkable contributions to European and global culture:

Baruch Spinoza helped reshape modern philosophical inquiry.

Heinrich Heine enriched German literature.

Albert Einstein transformed modern physics.

Franz Kafka changed the possibilities of literary imagination.

The Cost of Being Allowed to Exist

There is a peculiar temptation in the telling of Jewish history. We admire the survival so greatly that we sometimes risk making the suffering sound like a necessary ingredient in the achievement.

A people should not have to be persecuted in order to demonstrate that it possesses a remarkable civilization.

Consider medieval Europe and the tragic expulsions—from England in 1290, from France at different periods, and from Spain in 1492. Spain offers a particularly haunting example. For centuries, Jewish intellectual and cultural life had flourished under Muslim and Christian rulers, only to be abruptly uprooted.

When a civilization is repeatedly disrupted, the losses extend beyond the visible destruction:

A burned library is a measurable loss. The books that might have been written by its future readers are not.

A murdered physician is a human tragedy. The patients that physician might have treated are lost to an unknowable future.

A destroyed community is a historical event. The civilization that community might have helped build is a question no historian can answer.

We know what was taken. We cannot know everything that was prevented from coming into existence.

The Curious Gratitude of Civilizations

There is another feature of Jewish history that I find difficult to ignore. Civilizations are often remarkably enthusiastic about receiving ideas and rather less enthusiastic about acknowledging where those ideas came from.

The Hebrew Bible became foundational to Christianity. Yet Christian societies also produced centuries of anti-Jewish hostility. Here were societies drawing spiritual nourishment from Jewish scripture while frequently treating living Jews as undesirable inhabitants of the Christian world.

There is a particular historical irony in admiring the prophets while persecuting their descendants.

Antisemitism has never been one unchanging doctrine. Its religious, economic, racial, and political forms emerged under different historical circumstances, proving disturbingly adaptable into the modern age.

The Catastrophe That Silences the Imagination

No reflection on the unrealized possibilities of Jewish civilization can avoid the Holocaust.

The Nazis and their collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews. Entire communities were destroyed. Families disappeared. Centuries of Jewish life in European towns and cities were shattered.

When we remember the Holocaust, we rightly remember the victims as human beings, not as hypothetical contributors to science or culture. Their lives possessed value independently of anything they might have accomplished. That moral distinction is indispensable.

Yet the destruction also raises a question about the future that was taken from them:

The generations that might have followed,

The institutions they might have built,

The books they might have written,

The discoveries they might have made.

We can count the dead. We cannot count the descendants who were never born.

A People Who Remembered a Homeland

Yet Jewish history does not end in the ruins of Europe. For centuries, Jewish communities preserved memories of Jerusalem, the ancestral homeland, and the hope of return through prayer, literature, and communal tradition.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 therefore represents something remarkable within the longer history of Jewish civilization. A people whose identity had survived repeated losses of sovereignty established an independent state in its ancestral homeland, giving Jewish national self-determination an institutional and political expression.

And yet even here, my central question persists: What might Jewish civilization have become had so much of its intellectual and communal energy not been consumed by the struggle against exclusion, displacement, and destruction?

What History Owes the Future

Every civilization inherits something from those that preceded it. Ideas, institutions, languages, moral traditions, scientific knowledge, and cultural achievements pass between generations and across borders. But no generation receives the achievements of the past as a private possession without obligations to the future.

The Jewish experience offers a profound lesson in preservation. But that lesson must be accompanied by another:

A civilization’s greatness is not measured only by what it manages to preserve for itself, but also by what it allows others to become.

We are accustomed to judging history by its visible achievements—the empires established, the wars won, the monuments built. But perhaps we should also learn to contemplate its absences: the cities never built, the libraries never existed, the possibilities extinguished before anyone could give them a name.

The Civilization We Shall Never Know

I began with a question. What would the Jews have become had history been a little kinder to them?

After following the long journey of Jewish civilization—from ancient Israel through the great transformations of religious life, the achievements of the diaspora, the persecutions of medieval and modern Europe, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty—I find the question more compelling than when I first asked it.

The achievements are extraordinary.

The continuity is astonishing.

The contributions to humanity are immense.

We know the Jewish civilization that survived. We know its prophets, its scholars, its literature, and its extraordinary influence upon the world. We know enough to recognize its greatness.

But somewhere beyond the reach of historical inquiry lies another Jewish civilization—a civilization of unwritten books, undiscovered ideas, unrealized talents, and generations that never came into being.

And here lies the final irony:

Humanity has spent centuries discovering how much it owes to the Jewish people. It may never discover how much more it could have owed them.

That is the Jewish civilization that might have been. And its absence belongs to all of us.

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