The Whole Jewish History in One Hour

i don't give this talk that often anymore but i do uh i do occasionally go to places and give the talk i'm working on a range of other projects at the moment but some of you may have seen this talk before and those of you who have i used to until yesterday i would always make the joke that it's worth seeing again because history is always changing and that's until yesterday because i was on a flight from tel aviv and i met a professor and we started chatting on the plane he's an academic very very respected academic and a professor in israel and he explained to me that he has been working on a paper which will prove who who has heard of the kazaas who has heard of the that's cool that's good that's good that's good that's good that none of you have i love it when audiences don't know what i'm talking about because i can just talk freely and say what i want the kazaars were like a nomadic war-like people living in the caucasus in the 8th century and on mass converted to judaism one could understand that historically because they were living at the border of the christian and islamic worlds and they were very very famous we know this from a famous letter that was written to spain in the 10th century and there's a whole history that emerges the book written by yehuda halevi called the kusari which is one of the great medieval texts of comparative religion and we know all this he's sitting on a plane from tel aviv with me yesterday the kazaas didn't exist didn't happen massive subject in jewish no i said what about the letter of spain forgery what about it nah didn't exist i don't know if he's right he could be wrong but it is definitely an illustration of the fact that history is always changing what i'm going to try and do in this talk is give over a narrative that i think for the best uh certainly from my perception taking a range of different stories we can more or less rely upon there are two dimensions to jewish history one is what we might call the uh theo historical that is that it is where the jewish people emerge from what is perceived to be perhaps a mythic uh theo historical background and there is the jewish people in objective reality when we talk about historical facts and i will show where one goes into the other what's important to stay at the beginning and i know that i'm speaking to an audience that is probably got a few jewish people in it and may have a large number of people who are not so acquainted with the profundity and meaning of jewish history is that jewish history for jews the study of jewish history is actually a commandment in the bible if you look at the book of deuteronomy chapter 32 verse 7 remember the days of the world understand the years of every generation so we have a commandment to study jewish history and for jewish people jewish history provides a great sense of meaning and continuum to what their project actually is in the world if you don't know history you don't know where you're coming from and that's true for any people the problem is that the jewish people have such an enormous a ginormous that's not a word in english a ginormous history that it's difficult sometimes to get our head around it and so we have a talk like this now what i'm going to do just for the next minute i know that i've been talking for five minutes and have not yet said anything of substance and you can and and you can go to sleep for most of this talk but it's probably useful to know how the talk works in case you wake up and you want to know what i'm doing some of you may have noticed that there is paper on all the walls yep okay here's how it works jewish history is 4 000 years that's the picture we're going to look at each wall is a thousand years i'm going to start over here i'm not so sadistic that i'm going to make everyone turn around at this point wow wow well that's useful so the way it works is this each wall is a thousand years that's approximately a millennium i'm going to start i'm going to use the secular counting the jewish people have their own hebrew counting the current year in the hebrew accounting is 5772 but i'm going to use the common counting of the world and i'm gonna start here at minus two thousand that's two thousand bce and i'm going to if that's minus two thousand what is this going to be minus one thousand very very good so that's going to be minus one thousand over there is going to be what zero there was no year zero people didn't wake up on january first and go yeah it's the year zero no but theoretically there's the zero that corner is going to be 1000 ce and we're going to end up approximately approximately where i started in this corner that means that for some of this talk we will be turning around and facing you don't want to pay chiropractic bills for the rest of your life it's best to just turn your chair and face the wall i'm talking about well thank you very very much okay we can get started now you understand why i've never finished this talk in under an hour so that's one wake up moment and now you can go to sleep jewish history begins with the first jewish person and before i talk about the first jewish person i'm going to do something and i need absolute silence do not try this at home especially if you don't have paper on the walls it took me years of practice you will need to be a little careful over there i'm going to be running past you no i really am i'm going to draw the first millennium of jewish history are you ready there done now good we're now going to put in some so call that minus 1500 the first jewish person is of course abraham avraham is the first person to realize that it is possible to have a relationship a direct relationship both collectively and individually with the creator of the universe that is the essential point of monotheistic tradition that is the essential point of judaism by the way just one more moment of staying awake and then go to sleep just one more moment if this is the whole 4 000 years of jewish history and it starts here just so you understand everything up to here everything up to here is the bible all right so we can get a scale of it now even within the bible we have different periods of theo historical and objective history we don't have any evidence for much of this particular period of jewish history there's no rock that says hi i'm abraham i was here but we have emerged as a continuum in the world from obviously a proto-monotheistic culture that emerges in the middle east abraham has this very special relationship that is described in the bible abraham marries a woman called sarah they have a son called isaac this is all the bible i know you know the bible i'm going to do it very quickly isaac has a son called jacob of course this is the period of the avat the great patriarchs of the jewish people all in the book of genesis it's not just abraham isaac and jacob it's also of course abraham isaac jacob sarah rebecca rachel and leia of course very very topical because in chapter 17 of the book of genesis god lays out to abraham the whole of jewish history basically and says to him your descendants will be around at the end of history and they will not survive randomly they will survive for a purpose that purpose is to reveal the oneness of the divine in the world and to bring peace to the world and that relationship between abraham and god and isaac and god and jacob of god is known in jewish history and in jewish thought we call that the concept of brit the concept of covenant brilliant thank you abraham goes well that's all very well god but could you please go back to the part where i have to circumcise myself that is part of the covenantal relationship that the avat have with god now jacob's other name is israel and jacob has 12 sons and a daughter and the most famous of those sons is joseph and joseph takes the whole family down to egypt for the first of a recurring phenomenon in jewish history that i'm going to do in red called galut galut means exile how do you say exile in german exile what is exile in hebrew galut i do it in red all right for the first and only time we were a slave class a sub population within a wider situation in egypt but eventually fourteen hundred thirteen eleven hundred i'm going to have to start going fast eventually we are we are redeemed from egypt from slavery by god a splitting of the red sea under the administrative leadership of moses and we are brought by this time the twelve sons of israel have become the twelve tribes of the children of israel and we are brought before mount sinai where the covenant that was made with the avatar the covenant with the made the avatar is now reaffirmed with an entire nation we are now no longer just the children of israel we are now um israel at mount sinai god lays out before us in the entire ethical moral spiritual social justice program that is to take us through the whole of history that is called the torah now very important to know at sinai god said many things many things but they can all be boiled down to two words in english i don't know how it's going to work in german it probably is going to work in german as well but there's basically two words be nice be nice don't oppress one another don't exploit the disadvantage in your society don't let the gap between rich and poor become too great if you're going to but make sure people have equal facility before law if you're going to build a society it must be a society founded on social justice i can tolerate many things says god i'm going to have a little problem with idol worship but i can tolerate many things says god but i will not tolerate social injustice now if you're going to build this ideal society you need some way to do it and in fact we have a place to do it because we have a land that was promised to abraham isaac and jacob and that is the land of israel so for the next the last quarter of this millennium 250 300 year period this period in jewish history is known as kibbush the conquering of the land we were technologically disadvantaged we came into the land our main enemy at the time in the land was a people called the philistines whose spiritual and cultural center was in gaza if you're looking for a period in history that most resembles our own it is that amazingly although with some subtle differences obviously it's impossible to understand jewish history without seeing it embedded in world history what is going on at this time in world history like a big event we all learned it at school but i'm just bringing it down for us it is the end of the bronze age and the beginning of the iron age and that is happening right where we are the hittites have worked out how to crank up an oven to 800 degrees celsius they can smelt iron we do not have that technology it took a few centuries for us to eventually in this period settle the land and so we settled that's the land of israel by the way we settle it according to the tribal allotments each tribe has its own chunk of land everybody follows so far but there is no central administration the torah everybody did what was right in their own eyes it was like a spiritual anarchy there was no central administration eventually we get to hear and we go to the spiritual leader of the age the prophet samuel and we say to him we would like a king and samuel says you don't want a king you the jewish people the people of israel you are unique your relationship is directly with god your father in heaven you don't want a king and we go yes we understand but kings are cool we want one samuel goes listen a king is going to rule over you he's going to take your sons and put them in his army he's going to take your daughters and marry them off to his mates he's going to start wars you don't want he's going to build buildings you don't want he's going to he's going to tax you yeah we understand all that but kings are cool can we have one samuel goes to god he goes they want a king god says if they want a king i will give them the king that they deserve so we get this big tall hunky guy called soul from the tribe of benjamin he doesn't quite work out and then we get the big king the big king and the big king is david and david goes bang bang he smashes all the enemies of israel and he turns this little country into a regional superpower in the context of which he also captures the jebusite city of stronghold fortress of jerusalem and turns it into the eternal capital of the jewish people that happens in 1 000 bce 3 000 years ago david is the big king but big kings die david dies and he is succeeded by his son solomon that's how i get my name there but he and in his son king solomon oh i see now i understand the translation you're giving the jokes like five seconds later i get it all right and in jerusalem king solomon the son of king david builds a temple this temple was to be an everlasting eternal building dedicated to god in jerusalem in fact now everything's gone according to plan we have the brit the covenant with the avat we have the galut we come out of galut we get the torah we have the big revelation we conquer the land we get the big king and then the big king's son builds the temple it's done that's the plan we have entered effectively a proto-messianic period but as always there are problems now what's going to happen now what's going to happen now is this don't talk because if you talk it takes a lot longer i would like everyone to swivel their chair 90 degrees so everyone's facing this way trust me if you don't do this it's gonna be much yeah exactly very good now while that's happening i will draw i will draw the second millennium now all right so i'm going to call this minus 500 remember we are still minus 600 minus 700 minus 800 minus 900 we are still in the bible this is one of those wake-up moments it's very difficult to understand jewish history without understanding what happens after king solomon dies after he dies for a range of reasons this united kingdom of 12 tribes becomes split in two into two kingdoms one a northern kingdom containing 10 tribes called the kingdom of israel and a southern kingdom containing just two tribes and the city of jerusalem called the kingdom of yehuda or judah for the next 200 years this is all in the bible these two kingdoms are in parallel sometimes at war sometimes ignoring each other sometimes they're cooperating but there are two kingdoms what is very important to understand about this period is we start to see the degradation of social justice particularly in the northern kingdom the gap between rich and poor becomes wider the disadvantaged are exploited there is a rise in the search for power through idol worship everything becomes decayed at a fundamental level in these societies despite the rise of a new institution in the jewish people called the rise of the navy the prophet who is screaming the words of god to anybody who would listen but especially to kings about this fall in social justice eventually the situation got so bad that here in around -720 there's a new power in the region the expanding neo-assyrian empire and there's the northern kingdom and they come and they ethnically cleanse the whole of the northern kingdom the whole of the ten tribes and send them into the dust bin of history we think we have not really seen them since the kingdom of judah struggles on but even that suffers a tremendous degradation and here in minus 586 this everlasting building built by king solomon and delegated the god is destroyed setting the jewish people on a traumatic cataclysm from which in some ways they've never really recovered it is from this point onwards that the people of israel are known as the jewish people the remnant of israel from judah judaism and jewish because we don't know what happened to the ten tribes and the temple in jerusalem is destroyed in minus 586 bce but and of course we go into another galut what is the meaning of the word galut very good this particular hello i didn't see that this particular galot this person understands what i'm saying this particular galut was the babylonian exile but it's famously prophesied by the prophet jeremiah just before the destruction of the temple this exile would last only 70 years and indeed after exactly 70 years we came back because the big bad assyrians were eventually oh the big bad babylonians who were the ones who destroyed the temple were eventually destroyed themselves and overtaken by the new power who were the persians and the big new persian ruler cyrus decreed that not only can the jews go back to jerusalem to rebuild the temple he's going to pay for it he's going to sponsor the project so we come back here and we rebuild the temple now this is a very very important thing i'm going to say what i'm going to say now if you remember nothing from this talk except what i'm going to say now it's this from king david onwards it's possible to understand jewish history i didn't make this up this is jewish history itself in discrete 500 year blocks each five every 500 years the jewish people go through a major phasic transition to another period it's interesting because we're in one of those transitions right now but from king david and possibly even before but we'll go from king david so if we understand the major spiritual project of each epoch each 500 epoch then the details simply fit in and it's possible to get one's head around jewish history that's the whole point of what i want to show you this period here this 500 year period from king david until here is known originally and creatively as that's disgusting the entire thing has emerged right uh i may need i may need some paper towels if anyone is so no no no i'll i'll totally destroy that i'll if it's notice freak yeah at least at least thank you so much oh brilliant brilliant brilliant oh now this period here is known as the first temple period not officially in jewish history this is what we call by it what's the meaning of the word buy it house by what's the meaning of the word richon first this is by it reshon the first house the first temple so when we came back we start the next 500 year phase in jewish history which is known creatively and originally as the second temple period which we called by it the second house the second temple now 400 300 200 100. i'm here to tell you that um scholars have been crawling all over the second temple period for a long time it's a very very complex period the second temple period we have to start looking at in world history terms i'm going to give it to you in about three minutes it is in fact complex but we can understand it we can understand it in four discrete phases don't get don't panic don't panic it's a lot simpler than that the first period of the second temple you see we are basically at this point who's in charge who's in charge who's in charge of the land of israel the persians exactly we are like a colonial outpost of the persian empire so long as we pay our taxes and we don't revolt and we're good boys and girls they leave us more or less alone we're busy do trying to reconstruct an economy reconstruct the society but this is the persian period until here because here everything changes everything changed why because one morning oh dude thank you because one morning probably a tuesday i think a young man wakes up and decides that it would be a good idea he thinks to conquer the world his father had already tried to conquer the world but wasn't quite so successful but young alexander said that whereas his father philip of macedon had felt he was going to succeed and in fact in a stunning series of about 10 years of conquest and military invasions the dude conquers just about the whole of the known world from greece all the way to india including us now you say well what's that going to do with anything because the whole of the rest of world history let alone jewish history is probably just a footnote to that event but he didn't he wasn't just a military conquest who was alexander's teacher i mean not he went to this school and he saw this guy's photo on the wall his actual teacher appointed to him by his father was aristotle aristotle's teacher was plato plato's teacher was socrates in other words our encounter with alexander was an encounter with the very heart of this new ideology in the world called hellenism now i don't need to explain to a learned audience in berlin anything about hellenism but i will spend fifth but i will spend 15 seconds on it if uh people indicate that that would be a good thing because it's very important to understand shall i spend 15 seconds of it okay probably the best way to explain it is like this when a hellenistic man wakes up in the morning what's the first thing he does hellenistic man wakes up in the morning and goes that's fantastic look at that body look at those rippling abs there's nothing i can't do with this body i can run i can swim i can jump i can whoa whoa who's thinking those thoughts what is this amazing precise rational instrument i have in my head called my mind whoa the mind the body poor what a thing to be a man especially in the nude now what does a jew do when what what does what does a jew do when he wakes up in the morning the last thing he's going to look at is his body and he thanks god for returning his soul and he goes about his existence hellenic culture is based on many many external attributes truth beauty harmony all of which are complex concepts but it's very visually oriented jews have always gone according to what they can hear israel we are told and what are we told to listen to that inner voice inside us that tells us the difference between right and wrong between good and evil concepts that greek thought never really got around to doing discussing in other words as someone famously said they gave us art we gave them guilt but this encounter has massive implications for the whole of world history all right so however i'm going to lose track of time for this i mean i enjoy talking about the hedonic so much this period here we are a basketball between when alexander died see that's the problem with young men who try to conquer the world they die and when he died his you know i'm going to show you something i'm going to show you something this is by the way this is -300. i'm going to show you a very complex device what's that that is the mediterranean if you don't believe me go there for those of you who are confused that's the water now when here's the land of israel when alexander died his conquests were divided up amongst his generals but for our purposes we have two big hellenic-based dynasties here the ptolemaic and the cellucid and we are caught in this war it was very trendy in the ancient world to be hellenic these places are trying to out helene each other and eventually by the time we get to here we are definitely in the grip of the cellucid empire and rulers like antiochus the fourth get up and say look i don't have a problem with jews some of my best friends are jews i have a problem with jewish spirituality i have a problem with torah the jews are not hellenic enough so in a series of decrees he bans circumcision and he bans the sabbath and he bans a range of other things but it's particularly those two and eventually the high priesthood in jerusalem itself becomes corrupt and we get to the point where things are so bad that roundabout here we are sacrificing pigs to zeus olympus on the temple mount itself that became intolerable and so we had a ginormous revolt that revolt is of course the story of chanukah that is the uh rejection of hellenic dominion and the re-establishment of an autonomous sovereign jewish state in the land of israel and in the temple by the hasmoneans by the way those of you who are following if that's hanukkah purim by the way happens back here around about the time if it's historical event round about the time of the return of the second temple so i'll do a little ham and touch in there now chanukah who most of a festival that most of you would have heard of at least is really just the warm fluffy pr exercise of the hasmoneans overall they were a disaster and by the time we get to here the situation is so bad after a hundred years of independent hazmony and rule they made several crucial errors what we now know in historical hindsight to be what we think are pretty serious geopolitical errors but by the time we get to hear the situation is so bad that the last two remains of the hasmonean empire these two brothers are actually launching a civil war over the temple mount itself the situation is so bad that we invite invite the new power in the region who is of course rome the romans to come in and that's really the beginning of the end as far as the second temple is concerned so we have four phases of the second temple the persian the greek the hasmonean which was a completely that's why the state of israel bases a lot of its symbology on the hasmonean dynasty because it was a completely independent jewish state in the land of israel and then but by this time we are in rome now one of the mistakes that the hasmoneans had made was the forcible conversion of a neighbouring nation called the edu edumeans under john hurricane round about here that was to have very bad karma because by the time we get to here a descendant of that forced conversion rose up in the ranks too effectively it's a very complex story but eventually got rome to appoint him as king over israel and that of course is herod now herod was one of the biggest despotic maniacal psychotic bastards ever to rule over the jewish people but he was an amazing builder that's why when you go to israel today your tour guide will tell you oh herod built that oh and that's herod oh and herod built that you know he built my side and he built caesar really built two places called herodium and his big project his uber project was in fact to rebuild the whole of the second temple itself which he transformed into the largest and most magnificent religious edifice in the ancient world there's one more thing i need to tell you about before we leave the second temple during the lead up to the end of the second temple for the last couple of centuries already there was a growing conflict in the jewish world about what judaism actually is and there are two conflicting visions one is judaism is about the temple it's about the priests it's about the sacrifices it's all a priestly cult they became a faction known as the sadducees there was another faction that had been collating for a long time the oral and dynamic interpretations of the written torah in applied situations they were the scholars and the sages who went down to take on the brand name of the rabbis the real turning point for the rabbis was the establishment of large schools of thought and the most famous of the early schools of thought is of course the house of hillel and so those of you who are familiar with the thought of hillel took place in historical context gilel is a contemporary of herod however by the time we get to the year zero herod is dead and his sons are fighting for control of the place and rome says we're not going to have any more jewish kings we're going to rule directly from rome through a series of governors that is the situation that is happening as you turn your chairs and face this wall it's only now going to start getting interesting and i have to uh i have to move fast i have to move fast 100 200 300 400 now where do we go right so we have a series of governors this is look look if we met for two hours every day for the next six months we would not be able to cover everything that is contained in just this hundred years this hundred years itself is its own subset of jewish history known as first century palestine in fact everything i'm talking about tonight is only headlines of headlines each detail is a doorway that you can go into we're just looking at a framework now by which we can understand the narrative but basically what's happening here very complex a series of governors each governor was a bigger psycho than the one before and eventually it gets the point where the random decrees are so great that in the year 66 we can't take it anymore and we revolt by the way by this time by this time there is a the land of israel is still the center of the jewish world but there is a growing and dynamic diaspora that is happening we have large communities in uh babylonia we have uh even a community in rome and we have a very big community in alexandria in egypt which is like the new york of its day but the center is still the jewish as the jewish world storm of israel and in 66 we just can't take it and we revolt against roman rule the emperor at the time is nero and nero scent in one second thank you nero sends his top soldier vespasian with a ginormous army and they marched through the land destroying all resistance eventually they get in around 68 they get to jerusalem and they surround jerusalem and they seige it obviously inside the city is panic and pandemonium however the spiritual leader of the age a student of hillel gets himself smuggled out of the city and has a conversation with vespasian i know says jochen and zakai to vespasian that if you don't destroy this temple somebody else will because the divine presence left the building some time ago however judaism does not belong in a building we are a people we have a god we have a land we have a torah there is only one thing that is going to ensure the survival of the jewish people for all generations apart from the protection of god and the memory of this place there's only one thing and that one thing and that one thing alone is jewish education give me the town of yavner he said where i can it's coast small coastal town near the coast of uh of israel and i can rebuild the spiritual and educational and social infrastructure of the jewish people the spirit seems very impressed he gives them the town of yavin and the vespasian himself goes back to become emperor and his son titus in the year 70 there's no more no smoke because the sacrifices have finished comes and destroys the temple now if the romans rule over you in the ancient world they have a very unique way of doing things if the romans rule over you and you revolt they come and they kill you however killing you is only the warning if you revolt again they come and they completely crush you and wipe you from history we revolted against the romans three times and we are still here and the romans apparently are not that is the testament to the power of yochana ben zakai's vision and of this project of yavner the second revolt happened in 115 to 117 under the emperor trajan but the big daddy revolt is here 132-135 this is the big papa revolt hadrian is the emperor and hadrian says something like look i don't have a problem with jews some of my best friends are jews i have a problem with jewish spirituality in a series of decrees which started with no circumcision no public observance of sabbath shabbat but it was the third decree no public teaching of torah that caused the great spiritual leader of the age rabbi akiva to back the revolt of barkokba and you know first barak ba has some limited but significant success they create a little state there with jerusalem as its capital hadrian goes ballistic literally sends a gus william that's not a number just made it up but big number of soldiers from all over the empire and in 135 at baytar they completely crush barracuda's resistance army something conservative estimates say something like half a million jewish soldiers died he raises jerusalem to the ground and he changes the name of the place from eudaia to after our traditional enemies from the bible the philistines he changes the name to palestina that is hadrian he ends all jewish sovereign autonomy in the land of israel until here think how amazing it is that we live in a generation where there is jewish autonomy in the land of israel however all of these tragic and terrible events actually have nothing to do with what this 500 year period is actually all about now i have to move really quickly this 500 year period here is known in jewish history not by me officially but it's known as the talmudic you see yavner produced some impressive projects and products and by the time we get to here minus around -200 all of the many many thousands of recorded dynamic interpretations of the torah are now codified and written down in a tremendous one of the jewish people's most tremendous contribution to world spiritual and legal culture a document called the mishnah and remember we produce the mishnah when most people in the world are still eating and worshipping cockroaches the mishna for the next 300 years is disgust and dice i know that's a bit rough disgust and dissected and explored in its underlying principles discovered and whatever and that discussion of the mishnah is known as the gomara and we the equation is equals talmud and of course speaking the jewish people we have two talmuds we have one talmud same mishna but because the conversation happened in the land of israel that's the jerusalem talmud but it also happened in the dynamic new center of babylonia and then became the big babylonian talmud which was sealed around here the jerusalem talmud was sealed here this period is famous for its spiritual project and its product it's the talmudic period which is using the principle of the what we call the dignity of the human being as its guiding light is the mishnah it dynamically interprets the written torah for everyday situations but it's impossible to understand jewish history of that thing embedded in world history and i just have to spend one minute on this because many of you are sitting there going oh i can't believe he's not talking about this and i'm going to talk about this back here a jewish boy wakes up one morning probably a friday and he said well you know maybe he is maybe he is a bit special but a boom bag his friends and he goes and i so often happens to young jewish boys who think they might be the messiah who have encounters with the romans he dies now it's important to understand that the early christian church is really a persecuted sect of judaism there was a persecuted religion and we were doing a lot of the persecuting the big turning point for christianity as many of you know comes here because the emperor constantine fights a battle in the name of christianity and he wins so now christianity is a tolerated religion and about 20 years later when constantine is cocking it he converts and what happens when the emperor converts to religion it becomes the religion of the champagne in other words from here onwards rome is officially christian and that is not good news for the jews second thing we need to understand is this we have in fact three domains of influence and i'm going to put them here there's the mediterranean as i say if you don't believe me go there this is spain that's italy that's greece that's turkey that's egypt this is north africa there's the land of israel there's babylonia everybody follow now there's still some people there's the water right now here the roman empire was affected most historians say around about here the roman empire is pretty much certainly the western roman empire because the roman empire had become split between east and west the western roman empire got sacked by the vandals the physical and so on and we plunged into the dark ages the eastern roman empire the split was here the eastern roman empire went on to take on the fancy brand name of byzantium but we have a third sphere of influence with the biggest jewish community in the world now in babylonia and this is the newly reconstituted sassanid persian empire so these three domains are really fighting it out but this one is really now there are dotted jewish communities slowly taking place in other places but this is the center of the jewish world at the moment but none of these can see the big the big historical tsunami that is about to come and wipe everything away because six 800 900 1000 because here in 570 is born muhammad and as you know in 610 around the age of 40 he's wandering around those caves outside mecca you know the ones and he has this revelation with the archangel gabriel who dictates to him the quran and so it is that within an unbelievably explosive space of time islamic persian empire gone byzantine empire now obviously that has ramifications for the world the big turning point for islam comes in the year 7-eleven what happens in 7-eleven in 7-eleven islam conquers spain and i don't need to remind you that spain is a european country that sent shock waves through the world then as it probably would now however it was conquered by like these chilled islamic guys called the moors and the moors said we like jews and we want to invite jews in to help us build a new magnificent civilization and whoever whichever jews can get here can basically do what they want they can pursue what they want they just have to get here it's not yet the golden age of spain but it's laying the groundwork for it however the center of the jewish world is still babylonia this period in jewish history this 500 year period is known in jewish history as the gaonic who were the ghanim in babylonia we had two massive academies surah and pompadita the heads of those academies were not just the spiritual leaders of babylonian jewry they were the spiritual leaders of the whole of the jewish world if you were sitting in cologne in the fifth century and you put a meat spoon in a milk cup and you didn't know what to do you would have to write three months to babylonia and get an answer they were in fact guiding the whole of the jewish world from babylonia however the really important thing to realize and of course of course this is beautiful this this is this is where is meant to be the cazars they're gone now uh however and you can see why the kazaars will become the khazars they're sitting here anyway here's a wake-up moment over the course of the last couple of centuries of this period there is a slow inexorable leak from babylonia in other directions west not a result of any one cataclysmic event but jews are on the move some jews are building communities here going mostly through christian countries and they're having very different experiences from jews going through these countries the primary thing about the onic period is that it establishes the foundations of what we now call the jewish community if the talmudic period was discussing what judaism should look like the garnic period was trying to discuss what judaism does look like what does it mean to be a diaspora what are the essential facilities and institutions that we need in jewish communities communal kashrut i don't know how you would trade today the calendar all of the different the siddhur the prayer books all of these different manifestations we now take for granted formal judaism really takes its form in the onick period but there is by the time you get to the e1000 the last of the great gonim very cool name high where if hygon gets up and looks around and he says i'm basically gone over no one there's no one left here where have they all gone now as i said the jews traveling here had different experiences from the jews traveling here the first jews to get to places like germany and western europe saw a local people who saw their own roots as being in the spiritual roots as being in scandinavia which they called shikanzia and the jews went ah that sounds very much like one of the great exilic destinations mentioned in the bible the bible predicts the jews will go on this massive exile and there'll be two great destinations that sounds a lot like the lands of ashkenaz this must be ashkenaz and the jews who went this way through north africa and on to spain said well if that's ashkenaz this must be the other great exilic destination mentioned in the book of over this must be the lands of sparad so the distinction not so much ethnic but more cultural and geographic between ashkenazic and sephardic jewry also takes its rise from the late garnic period when jews were massively on the move creating communities we see evidence of that today by the way germany is a fantastic place to see evidence of that if you go to somewhere like curtin you will actually see there's like a 6th century mikvah in the in the center of the town uh deep in excavation all right however now i have to do this massively quickly and i have to summarize this and i i don't know how we're going to go but i'm going to try the later we get in history the more we know therefore it gets very very complex and not only that the real key to this 500 year block which is known in jewish history as the period of the rich chonim that's from our perspective the reason why mean the first ones and i i will hopefully try and explain that in the next two minutes there is no center of the jewish world now it's not just that we have first of all we have an amazing community and situation taking on in spain by the time we get to you've got to pretend this doesn't exist okay this doesn't exist right i go from here to here don't get confused don't think there's like 200 years that we don't know about it's like here now this is the golden age of spain jews are not only becoming jews in their own right they're becoming contributors to civic society people like shmuel hanagid who is the general of the army of granada people like hasta ibn chaprutu was effective the treasurer of spain and i don't think we've ever had it so good until maybe 20th century america as in the golden age of spain so that was one thing that was going on but in europe and the rest of europe as in much of the world things were very very bad for the jews the whole of the immediate medieval period is a period of massacre and awful exiles and expulsions and forced conversions and blood libels and book burnings and more massacres and random taxations and more massacres it is a miracle that the jews survived in europe this entire period although in spain the situation was a lot better obviously and not to mention the fact that here all right all right all right guys i wasn't going to say this i wasn't going to say it they said don't go to germany and say this don't say this there but i'll say it but i'll say it should i say it should i say it will you forgive me can i apologize in advance okay what all right who's this who's this that is urban the second job description pope and he is announcing the first crusade as you know the crusades are an awfully miserable project that landed everyone exactly where they started at the cost of millions of lives and awful misery it was an attempt by western christianity to get the holy land back from the muslims now this is in 1095 as we know what this is just an example of the sort of thing that was going on in the middle ages the first crusading army under godfrey they said ah we don't need to go all the way to the holy land to kill non-christians we've got them right here and they massacre all of the jewish communities in the rhineland all of them so people go you know this is this is the controversial bit right you ready people go you know i have students who come and they go ah they don't realize they don't realize that the showa is not an isolated event the project to exterminate the jews of germany happens here and here and here and here and here and here and so people say so why did jews keep going back to germany i mean it's a stunning country we all know that but why did jesus keep going back and i say look at your own generation only half a century after the holocaust and what is the largest growing jewish community in the world outside of israel it's germany and yet and here's the really controversial bit and i apologize in advance surely surely the lesson of this entire wall is that jews should not be living in germany we hope and we pray that that's i know i know people look at me going i can't believe he said that but at the end of the day in hundreds of years i'm hoping that look if i start explaining that more i'm going to get further and further into problem so i'm going to stop let's go back to history now i can tell by your faces that i probably went too far now there is no center in 1148 in 1148 the good times end in spain because the al-muhads come through and an islamic talibanic zealot oppressive regime put it into the good times of course the person who the greatest figure of this maimonides is born just before that he was the greatest product of the golden age of spam and never really got to enjoy the golden age of spain for very long they came through in the year of his bar mitzvah but the situation goes worse and worse for jews all over europe now and eventually even spain which has had this phenomenal massive dynamic large community even they even they in 1492 of course not just in the same year not just in the same month not just in the same week but on the very same day that columbus set sail for china he said sail for china he thought he was in india in fact he was in america so obviously he had a jewish navigator as well this period is a period of the rise of codes we don't have a center so our center is the text it is telling jews how to behave as jews in the world and some of the great codes were written by maimonides by the reef in north africa and spain by the rush in germany and all of these great codes were written and then they were synthesized just after the expulsion by a young boy who escaped from the expulsion with his family and grew up in the newly renaissant land of israel because the ottoman empire had opened up its doors to jews who could make it there and that person yosef karo synthesized all of the great codes and created the last universally accepted book of jewish law called the aruh that is the definitive book of jewish law it is a synthesis of all of the medieval codes of jewish law does everybody follow it's a little complex but it's important to understand that we also have codes in another sense the right the the rise of jewish mysticism i'm going to be talking about kabul on wednesday night the rise of jewish mysticism with the revelation of the zohar here and the rise of an understanding of why are the jewish people going through all this what is the purpose in the world what is our relationship with god what is the real meaning of exile why are we caught between these two big ideologies christianity and islam who both seem to have originated from the bible but are fighting over effectively us i mean i know the jewish people sometimes see themselves in the center of the world but it really was the case that they were fighting either over the land of israel or over what the role of the jewish people why are we in exile now i have gone over time the last 500 years you know anyway so i'm going to finish with a story this is a story that if you understand the story it's very quick it will enable you to understand the whole of the rest of jewish history for the last 500 years which i'll touch as you know roundabout this is the expulsion from spain when a new anti-semitic idea comes into the world it soon becomes very trendy people go oh that's a very good anti-semitic idea i think we'll try that here now there is a new idea that comes in here and that is let's take all of the let's take all of the jews of the place and let's put them in one area let's build a big wall around it and so that if we need to know where the jews are we can find them that idea is called of course a ghetto and the most famous of the early ghettos is what venice has anyone been to the venice ghetto yep it's amazingly mystical place all right so around about here in around 1520 the venice ghetto is very new and i a man turns up at the venice ghetto and he's very weird looking he's like four and a half feet tall and he's got a big flag and he's got some bizarre clothing and he gathers all the leaders of the jewish community of venice together and he says to them get me an audience with the pope and they say well maybe but who are you and he said my name is david and i am a representative of the last 10 tribes that have been living all this time on the other side of the mystical river sabbation that can only be crossed on shabbat and i'm here to tell you that the time of your redemption is at hand they go wow and within a few weeks ravenna is on a horse and he's walking into the vatican the pope at the time is clement vii one of the medici posts one of the actually very very warm to the jews and clement likes revenge and he gives him letters of introduction to go to communities all around the mediterranean he ends up in portugal remember that portugal is still in the grip of the inquisition and king john of portugal welcomes him with diplomatic honors because he's not technically a jew he's a member of the house of israel now at the court of king john is a young man called diego perez diego perez was born into a converso family that means that a couple of generations earlier under the pressure of the inquisition his family had converted to christianity but he knew his roots and he was very taken by the charismatic revenge and he goes to ravini one night and he says to him circumcise me and rouveni says no thank you two reasons one no thank you secondly you do realize how much trouble we'll both be in if i do that so diego goes home and he circumcises himself overnight i don't know why out of that he circumcises himself and the two of them have to get out of portugal el toronto they go on this big mystical tour yosef caro writes that he remembers seeing them in adrian opal in 1927. this is all documented stuff we have the diaries we have evidence we even have rovini's flag and eventually in around 1530 diego creatures who changed his name to says i have to go where all jewish boys have to go if they think they might be you know a bit special i have to go and i have to see the pope raven has already been to the pope so mulhol goes to the pope he goes to me clement clement really likes malcolm now malcolm says this clement we have an idea let's get all of the armies of christian europe together with the armies of the ten tribes of israel who are on the other side of the mystical river somewhat john they can only be crossed on shabbat let's get them all together and have one last great crusade we'll get rid of the muslims out of the holy land and we will establish an independent jewish state backed by western christianity because you know clement you know that you have to have an independent jewish state in the land of israel backed by western christianity before the messiah can come clement goes cool but i'm only the pope i don't have an army you have to go back and speak to the christian kings of europe they go back to portugal they speak to king john king john says well if clement's in i mean but i don't call the shops around here anymore you have to go and speak to charles v the deute of the habsburg empire living in reagan's bank charles v the grandson of ferdinand and isabella who kicked the jews out of spain charles v whose uncle had just taken an entire country henry the eighth second entire country england out of the church charles v who was just presided over the deity worms that excommunicated luther was in no mood for these two jewish boys coming to him he took molho and he burned him and he sent rovani back to spain in chains this story has a tragic ending but it is a huge story for the next 500 years of jewish history because it is the first time that a consciousness comes back into the jewish world that we can potentially have our own homeland in the place that was promised to the forefathers of the jewish people that those events lead on obviously obviously on the other side of the enlightenment but lead on to the famous events of sabbatianism here the famous uh false messiah that rocked the whole world effectively but the 18th century if you want to know the origins of our jewish world today it is in the 18th century the rise of all of the great movements that are in the jewish world today the rise of progressive reform judaism the rise of the scala the jewish enlightenment the rise of hasidism all of which were responses to the pressures of the enlightenment but all focused to the search for the redemption from exile of the jewish people the 19th century is the story of emancipation most people don't realize that the fact that jews have equal rights with other human beings in the world is no older than 150 years in most countries and even less in most countries of the world and of course in the 20th century in the in the 20th century you have two massive events that would be big on anywhere in this entire room one of course is the showa and the other is the rise of the state of israel and they happen within three years of each other so from here from here this is where this period here this period of the assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom that is already the first time we really have an objective presence in the world we probably for sure existed before then but we actually have corroboration in various archaeological and chronic events here but we have six periods we have that we're looking at we have all this is still within the bible if you understand the major spiritual project by trishan the first temple the second temple the talmudic each one 500 years the gaonic the rishonim and what we call the acharonim and obviously many of you realize many of you realize that i have absolutely skimmed at rocket speed over most of the detail but we ran out of time you have been an awesome audience and i thank you for listening to everything i've talked about this evening i'm going to do something unusual because i sense an energy it is never ever ever my intention to offend anybody the comment i made about germany is an interesting observation that i make to some of my students who ask me why the jews keep going back to certain places where there seem to be constant recurring problems this is not necessarily a belief that i have about the future obviously it's a totally different thing and it wasn't meant in any sense about germany today or anyone in the audience can everyone accept that that i was illustrating a point okay so i just want people to know that uh i apologize if if anyone took offense at that but it because i i actually am totally in love with you it's one of the few places i actually come back you

Channel: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

Views: 604,140

Keywords: History, Speech, Talk, Presentation, Jewish History

Id: GUlM2a2tsOM

Length: 69min 12sec (4152 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/gannetpeas]

How about the three-second summary?

"They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat."

[u/Safgaftsa]

The Whole Jewish History in One Hour

"...and then it got worse."