Social Paradoxes of
Jewry
By Vlad
Melamed
If
one is to adhere to the viewpoint of traditional
history, then social rules, in practice, do not apply to
Jews. This
persecuted people has managed to execute dizzying
somersaults, settling in all the countries of the
medieval world, taking control of the finances of many
countries and putting together international financial
networks under conditions of complete totalitarianism.
The
view of the classical Russian historian, Nikolai
Berdyaev, who virtually surrenders scientific positions,
embracing religious mysticism where the Jews
are concerned in his book "The Meaning of History," is
typical in this regard.
"To the Jews belonged an absolutely
extraordinary role in the origin of the perception of
history, in an intense feeling of historic destiny,
namely the start of the 'historic' was introduced into
the worldwide life of mankind by the Jews.
The Jews have a central significance in history.
The Jewish
people are, predominately, a people of history, and in
their historic destiny is felt the inscrutability of the
divine decrees. When a
materialistic sense of history attracted me, when I was
trying to test it for the destinies of peoples, it
seemed to me that the historical destiny of the Jewish
people was the greatest obstacle to it ; from the
perspective of the materialistic, this destiny is
completely inexplicable. It must be
said that from any materialistic and positivistic
historical point of view, this people should have ceased
to exist. (Emphasis mine). Its existence is
a strange, mysterious and wonderful phenomenon, which
shows that special designs are connected with the
destiny of this people. The survival of
the Jewish people in history, their resistance to
destruction, their existence as one of the most ancient
peoples of the world in completely extraordinary
conditions, that fateful role which this people plays in
history - it all points at the particular, mystic
foundations of its historic destiny. A particularly
strained dramatic quality of history plays out around
the destiny of the Jews."
What
then so striking did Berdyaev find in the Jews?
