Israel, where some 6.9 million of the world’s 15 million identifying Jews currently live, is an astounding success story that appears to defy all the rules of probability. Despite the shattering war that started in October 2023 after the Hamas pogrom, which took young Israelis away from their lives as high-performing professionals to fight on the front lines and which proceeded to paralyse much of the economy, the currency astonishingly remained strong.
The reason was the belief that Israel possessed such innate strength that once the war was over, it would bounce back – for the scale of its achievements within a mere few decades after the creation of the state had the rest of the world rubbing its eyes.
This is in stark contrast to the situation among the Jewish communities of the diaspora. None of these diaspora communities is doing well. Some are doing disastrously. The general trend suggests that diaspora Jewry is declining fast. What accounts for the difference between the vigour of Israeli society and the decline in the diaspora? Is it because, unlike Israel, diaspora Jews face no existential threat that unifies them? That may be part of the answer. But as is suggested by the difference within the diaspora between the rate of increase among ultra-Orthodox Jews and the rest, it’s about much more than that.
'Diaspora Jews are increasingly failing to value the Jewish part of themselves' (Picture: Getty)AFP via Getty Images
Exactly why the biggest sector of diaspora Jews is declining will be explored in detail later in the book – as will Israel’s response to the shock of the October 7 massacre and subsequent war. The key point, however, is that Israeli Jews understand themselves to belong to the nation-state of the Jewish people, a historic identity that – among secular Israelis no less than among those of a religious bent – makes sense of their existence.
The land is studded with relics of the existence there of the Jewish people over the past two millennia. The Hebrew language is a modernised version of the sacred language of the ancient Israelites.
The calendar, the national holidays, the very rhythm of the week all derive from Jewish religious precepts. So do the moral codes that govern Israeli public life. Israeli Jews know and value their ancient identity. They understand where they belong.
By contrast, diaspora Jews are increasingly failing to value the Jewish part of themselves. They are coming to view it as a nuisance, to resent it as an infringement upon what they now think is the actual driving force of their existence: their right to do their individual thing, whatever that is, and not allow Jewish rules, precepts, or traditions to get in the way.
An increasing number are telling themselves that values deriving from a repudiation of the Bible are perfectly compatible with Jewish values. The Jewish element is an increasingly sentimentalised and etiolated add-on, if indeed it is still there at all. As such, these diaspora Jews are ignoring the key lessons of Jewish survival throughout the centuries of dispersion.
A nation is defined by a culture formed by a common language, religion, and institutions that reflect and embody historic experience, principles, traditions, and customs. Culture and nation are symbiotically linked; if one dies, the other dies too. In order to survive, a culture must transmit its core principles and identity down through the generations.
Judaism is all about promoting such continuity and reinforcing its culture and sense of itself as a nation. Among religious Jews, this is indeed a sacred duty laid down as a divine commandment that is eternally binding on every Jew. Significantly, this obligation has also been keenly felt by Jews who don’t themselves observe the rites of the religion and who might even roll their eyes at any mention of the commandments. In every generation, a culturally significant core of the community – at the very least – has been committed to keeping alive the beliefs, way of life, and identity of the Jewish people.
The single most important reason for the Jews’ continued survival, as well as for their extraordinary achievements, is the importance they ascribe to education and the particular form it takes. Judaism is a rabbinic religion. It cannot be understood just by reading the Hebrew Bible. It also requires knowledge of the vast body of laws curated by the rabbis of the Talmud. These furnish a detailed exposition of law, philosophy, the interface between religion and science, and every aspect of how to live.
Reconfiguring the rites of Temple observance into observance by individuals in communities achieved many things. Hitherto, rituals commanded in the Hebrew Bible had been centred around Temple rites performed by the priestly class (even though the lives of many Jews were not Temple-focused). Now, with the removal of those intercessors between the people and their God, every worshipper became in effect his own priest.
'Although the secular world commonly disdains Talmud study as narrow and hidebound, it is in fact arguably the finest method ever developed for training the mind in the exercise of reason' (Picture: Getty)Getty Images
Instead of worship being something that was done to them, every person now became an active creator of a new type of sacred relationship that involved the entire community.
The religious hierarchy was abolished. Instead, every Jew became responsible not just for adhering to the commandments but also for safeguarding the onward transmission of the culture. And that in itself was seen as a sacred task. Every family became responsible for this task through both the practices of everyday life and the education of the community. Every aspect of waking life, however basic and mundane, embodied a principle laid down in the five books of Moses, or the Torah. Every individual activity, from bathroom habits to financial transactions, from eating and drinking to the treatment of servants and the poor, from marital relations to remedies for ill health, was to be invested with sanctity by blessings, rituals, and codes of ethics derived from the biblical text.
What became more vital even than religious observance was the study of the Talmud, the product of several hundred years of rabbinical interpretations of biblical precepts. Although the secular world commonly disdains Talmud study as narrow and hidebound, it is in fact arguably the finest method ever developed for training the mind in the exercise of reason. The Talmud is a work of genius whose significance both to the survival of the Jewish people and the development of the West is largely unappreciated.
Regarded by many as a baggy and disorganised accumulation of hair-splitting rabbinic arguments over arcane religious sources and rules, it is in fact a meticulously curated set of disputations and laws that fulfilled the key condition of keeping a culture together – to translate its foundational principles into a practical guide to everyday life, thereby making that culture relevant to all. It was also foundational to Western thinking.
The essence of Talmudic exegesis is a particular type of logical reasoning: deduction from evidence and first principles. Constructed so that the central points of each section and every opinion must be discovered and analysed by the individual student, it accepts nothing on face value.
Many believe that logical reasoning was invented by the Greeks, and there is some evidence to suggest that the hermeneutic principles employed by the Talmud were influenced by Greek rules of logical interpretation. However, it has also been suggested that the tradition of Talmudic hermeneutics can lay claim to having been the origin of the deductive logic used in the West.
Studying the Talmud, with its intricate network of codes and commentaries and commentaries on the commentaries, opens up a mind-blowing fractal of logical reasoning. This mode of analysis lies at the very core of how the West thinks, from the practice of law to the dialectics of Karl Marx.
No less remarkably for a compilation of religious laws, the Talmud is not dogmatic but pragmatic. Drawing upon an understanding of human psychology and behaviour, the rabbis of the Talmud understood that it was fruitless to ordain or proscribe behaviour that went against people’s basic instincts. Instead, they emphasised the “principle of the possible”.
This emphasis on pragmatism over dogma, flexibility over certainty, contingency over predictability is very different from the Western philosophical tradition, which stresses absolutism and universality. This fetters individual creativity and responsiveness. By contrast, Talmudic reasoning goes with the grain of human nature. It makes itself relevant to everyday issues through the fluid, open-ended nature of its arguments.
It is also extraordinarily inclusive. Its arguments are continuous and built upon each other – including arguments over the way the rabbis argued and reached their conclusions. No argument, however convincingly opposed, was considered unworthy of inclusion.
Dissent was baked in as a key ingredient of Talmudic reasoning. Including minority opinions was a way of saying that no one was infallible. There was no absolute truth other than the word of God itself – but the interpretations would always be contestable. While dogma enslaves the mind, Talmudic reasoning empowered it.
Seen from this perspective, the Talmud is not an arcane and anachronistic text of no significance to the supposedly rational West. By its own example, it provokes instead a sobering realisation of the extent to which the West has hollowed out rationality, repudiating open-mindedness and inclusivity through a dogmatic absolutism that ruthlessly excludes the possibility of error by shutting down the argument.
Talmud study also involved embracing a way of life that kept the Jewish people alive by integrating Jewish history and identity, binding the people together through kinship and brotherhood anchored to their origins through memory and remembrance. Its extraordinary structure of debates about debates about debates creates meaning not through new ideas but layers of commentary and interpretation of one governing set of ideas.
This creates an authority of wisdom that venerates tradition and builds on itself, forming an unbroken thread running from the past to the present. This cements succeeding generations into a culture that they feel they share with their ancestors and to which they feel a deep sense of connection and obligation, which creates, in turn, a strong sense of community and social bonds.
Judaism is a formula for celebrating and reaffirming life. It taught the Jewish people how to think, how to behave, and how to survive. The West absorbed the first two into science and the moral basis of its civilisation.
Failing to acknowledge the debt these owed to Judaism, the West never properly acknowledged or understood the third. The results of that are all around us.
‘The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It’ by Melanie Phillips is published by Wicked Son this week
