JUDAISM AS A HIGHER RELIGION AND THE LAPSE INTO MILITANCY
1.
IN THE OPINION of Toynbee the outstanding event in the history of the West was the rise of Christianity.1VII/446-47. As in the case of all other Higher Religions, Christianity too emerged from the clash between two civilizations. Since, however, the two civilizations in question were the “Syriac” (standing here for Jewish) and the Hellenic and, especially, since Christianity was originally the answer of Jewish souls to the challenge inherent in the conflict, an understanding of Judaism and Jewish history becomes one of the keys to the understanding of the pattern and the “laws” that Mr. Toynbee believes he is able to discern in all history. The Christian response to the challenge was successful; the Jewish response, a warning failure for all generations. No wonder, therefore, that for exceedingly long stretches through nine of the ten volumes2A Study of History is actually completed with Volume IX; Volume X might appropriately be considered an annex to the rest of the work. of A Study of History the author seems to be waging a running battle against Judaism and Jewry.
It seems, though, that Judaism was not always a failure. Its fall dates from the epiphany of Christianity. Originally, Judaism represented one of the noblest manifestations of the Spirit. The Syriac civilization, the larger unit to which Israel and Judah belong according to Mr. Toynbee’s method of classification, is perhaps “the most brilliant and most original representative of the species”; and of “the three great feats to its credit … the greatest creative achievement … was neither its discovery of the Atlantic nor its discovery of the Alphabet,” the achievement of the other Syriac peoples, but its Jewish discovery of God. The “particular conception of God” of the early Hebrew tribes “is common to Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam, but alien from the Egyptiac, Sumeric, Indic, and Hellenic veins of religious thought.”3The quotations are taken from II/50 and 386-87. The essence of Judaism at this early stage is summed up in the Biblical tale about the Choice of Solomon. “Ask what I shall give thee,” God said to the King in a dream; and Solomon asked not for riches or honor but for “an understanding heart.”4I Kings, III/5 and 9. Mr. Toynbee comments: “This fable of Solomon’s Choice is a parable of the history of the Chosen People. In the power of their spiritual understanding, the Israelites surpassed the military powers of the Philistines and the maritime powers of the Phoenicians. They had not sought after those things which the Gentiles seek, but had sought first the kingdom of God; and therefore all those things were added to them.…”5II/55.
However, soon after the death of Solomon the Hebrew tribes, “betrayed by what is false within,” in fratricidal warfare brought about the beginning of the breakdown of the Syriac civilization. Thus, true to the general pattern of history, this civilization too was launched toward its inevitable “Time of Troubles,” which began when the Assyrian colossus, practically invited by the breakdown, marched into the Syriac arena.6IV/68. Fortunately, this crisis turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for it was the challenge that stimulated the “Syriac” people of the Jews to respond with the most magnificent flowering of their spiritual creativity. It was in this Time of Troubles that Judaism truly developed into one of the great Higher Religions of mankind. One might single out some of the phases in this development which are discussed by Mr. Toynbee. If the breakdown is due to “what is false within,” then of course it is logical to seek for salvation by what is true within or, as it may also be put, by the transference of action from the material to the spiritual level, “from the Macrocosm to the Microcosm.” That, indeed, is the secret of creativity and the “sign of growth.” It was the message conveyed to Socrates by his “daimonion … after he had grown in wisdom and had put away childish things”; it was the intuition of Lao-tse; and it was perceived in “the still small voice in which Elijah heard at last the Godhead whom he had not seen in the fire and not encountered in the earthquake and not felt in the great and strong wind which had rent the mountains and broken in pieces the rocks.”7III/187. Later in Jewish history this experience of Elijah is crystallized by the pre-exilic prophets of Israel into the corporate response of the Jewish people to Assyrian and Babylonian militarism. It confounds the crushing military superiority of the adversary because it is not a retort “in kind,” but the answer “to a physical challenge on a spiritual plane.”8VIII/467. In terms of the Study one may discern several features in this response. It contains an explanation of the disaster that overtook the people, the reason for which—and this is decisive—is not sought in obvious external causes, like the military might of the enemy, but in guilt within, in a realization of sin and personal failure. The explanation implies acceptance of the suffering that follows from the crisis and that is translated into “understanding of the heart.” It is now that Judaism develops from its stage of an “embryonic higher religion” into its maturity. In the tribulations of this Time of Troubles, Judaism “found its soul by exchanging a parochial for an ecumenical outlook.” Jewry, enlightened by suffering, resigns itself “consciously to be the instrument of God’s will,” and is ready now to go out and meet the world with the ethos of gentleness, to captivate souls rather than to subdue empires.9This meaning of “the retort” is taken from various passages in the Study, in particular from V/433, VII/228 and 424, I/293, VIII/472, V/120. Mr. Toynbee, developing this theme, is unstinting in his appreciation. So he says, for example:
… the classical case is the spiritual experience of the Prophets of Israel and Judah in the Syriac “Time of Troubles,” when these prophets discovering their truths and delivering their message, the society out of whose bosom they had arisen, and to whose members they were addressing themselves, was lying in helpless agony in the grip of the Assyrian tiger.… For souls whose body social was in this fearful plight, it was an heroic spiritual feat to reject the obvious and specious explanation of their misery as the work of an irresistible external force of a material kind, and to divine that, in spite of all outward appearances, it was their own sin that was the true cause of their tribulations and that it therefore lay in their own hands to win their true release.
This “saving truth” was inherited by Christianity from the prophets of Israel and “propagated in Christian guise” for the salvation of “the Hellenic World.”10According to Mr. Toynbee’s terminology, meaning the Roman Empire, which is to be considered the Universal State of the disintegrating Hellenic Civilization. “Without this intrusion from an alien source in [of?] a principle which had already been apprehended by Syriac souls with an altogether non-Hellenic outlook, the Hellenic Society might never—even in its own ‘Time of Troubles’—have succeeded in learning a lesson which was so much at variance with the dominant mood in the Hellenic Ethos.” The significance of this Jewish response of the “still small voice” was then so far-reaching that without it the conversion of the Roman Empire and its peoples to Christianity might never have occurred.
Bearing this in mind one is almost tempted to the perhaps frivolous remark that, alas, the finest Time of Troubles does not last forever; and so the Syriac tribulations too came to an end with the establishment by Cyrus of an Empire that gave the Syriac world a Pax Achaemenia.11VI/302. From the sixth century to the second century B.C.E. Judaism and Jewry pass through a phase of “relative stagnation.”12III/141. No suffering, no creativity!—this is the rule. The stimulus for further growth is not again provided until the Achaemenian Empire, as the result of the conquest of Alexander the Great, is overwhelmed by the Hellenic world. And now we have a second bout of the Time of Troubles, but this time between the Syriac and the Hellenic civilizations. The conflict is narrowed down in the second century B.C.E. to one between Judaism and Hellenism—at first between Jewry and the Hellenized Syria of the Seleucids, later between Jewry and the Roman Empire, the universal state of Hellenic society. It is in this period that Judaism and the Jewish people fail miserably; it is the time of their decline and irretrievable fall.
2.
What happened to the Jewish soul after the glorious achievements of the first period of Syriac misfortune? In the opinion of Mr. Toynbee, Judaism in this second Time of Troubles lapsed into militancy.13V/68, footnote 2. However, trying to analyze what that means, we come up against one of the idiosyncrasies of the profuse Study. The rich style is, unfortunately, not seasoned by clarity of expression; nor is the breadth of erudition controlled by consistent reasoning. The “lapse into militancy” has not remained unaffected by the author’s predilection for literary luxuriance. The phrase seems to have a host of different meanings. The rebellion of the Maccabees is first described as such a lapse into militancy for the purpose of propagating a religion by methods of violence.14IV/225. However, the record is corrected later, so as to conform more to the truth, by the admission that the Maccabees drew the sword “in self-defense, in order to save the Jewish religion from extinction.”15V/657-58. This, of course, does not seem to be such a dishonorable deed, and Mr. Toynbee, in another place,16IV/246. gives even the Pharisees a pat on the back for having supported the Maccabees in “the heroic Jewish revolt against Hellenism.” But the admission is made not in order to exculpate the Maccabees but in order to pin-point their guilt. The very same sword that had been so nobly drawn was soon turned “to the new sinister use of imposing Judaism upon the neighboring non-Jewish populations … whom the Maccabees now succeded in bringing under their rule.”15V/657-58. The reference is of course to Johanan Hyrcanus17See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII/9., who is reported by Josephus to have compelled the Idumeans to accept Judaism. The isolated action of a Hasmonean prince is construed as “the Maccabean policy of religious conversion by political force” that cost Judaism “the whole of its spiritual future.”18V/657-58.
Whether the thesis makes sense or not, it means that the lapse into militancy was due to religious zeal; it had a religious motivation. This version of the “lapse” is lost sight of elsewhere in order to make room for a different one. According to another version, Jewry’s struggle against Hellenism was a purely secular affair, a political enterprise with the purpose of driving an alien aggressor out of the domain of the Syriac world, a task that was later brilliantly accomplished by Islam. This then was the “disastrous aberration”—the exchanging of the religious function, proper to Judaism, for a political role. In the end Jewry had to pay heavily “for having lent itself to a political enterprise.”19E.g., V/125-6, VIII/479, 446. But even this version of the “lapse” is not maintained consistently. At times Mr. Toynbee says that Judaism was perversely distracted from its “ecumenical mission of bringing human souls into a closer communion with God” and became a combatant “in the trivial mundane military enterprise of liberating a subjugated Syriac Society’s domain from the incubus of an interloping Hellenic ascendancy.” At times, on the other hand, Mr. Toynbee implies that the struggle between the two societies was really a Kulturkampf and that Judaism was deflected from its original mission and “transformed” into a weapon “of cultural warfare in the Syriac Society’s retort to the Hellenic Society’s aggression.”20VII/73.
And now the reader may take his choice between militancy as a policy of religious conversion, as an auxiliary in a cultural warfare, or as a struggle for political freedom. But, Mr. Toynbee himself does not make a choice; he asserts these propositions indiscriminately and simultaneously, with all their contradictory consequences.
The use of force for the conversion of souls is indeed the most monstrous perversion of religion that one can imagine. And if that was the guilt of Jewry during the period under discussion, one might even agree with the author’s equation of the exploits of the “Jewish Sicarii—the ‘gangsters’ of the zealot persuasion”—with those of the Spanish Inquisition.21IV/228-29. It is of course true that these “gangster” Zealots were fighting as soldiers, defending their homeland against the brutal military monster, whereas the Grand Inquisitors were living in the palaces of the mighty, robed in purple and satiated with power and riches, secure and safe and risking nothing of their own, wielding all the power of this world against the few and the weak who were no aggressors. Nevertheless from the point of view of the Kingdom of God, it makes little difference whether you take the sword in self-defense or as an aggressor; you will perish by the sword.22VI/260-61. On the other hand, if the struggle of Jewry against Hellenism was only “a trivial mundane military enterprise” for the sake of political liberation, then it might be called foolish but not really devilish; then it does make a world of difference whether you fight in self-defense, spurning life without liberty, or as an aggressor, trampling under foot the freedom and happiness of others. Surely, not even the “etherealized”23IV/225. Mr. Toynbee would have the courage to consider all the “unsuccessful” fighters for freedom in history to be “gangsters.” If Jewry’s failure consisted in exchanging a religious function for a political one, then the mere mentioning of the Zealots and the Spanish Inquisition in the same breath is an unwarranted insult to the Zealots. Mr. Toynbee is perfectly right in maintaining “that the propagation of one religion at the expense of other religions through the employment of methods of barbarism, on the ground that the religion in whose name the persecution is carried on is a religion of a higher order, is a moral contradiction in terms, since oppression and injustice and cruelty are negations of the very essence of spiritual sublimity.”23IV/225. Now, this is extremely relevant in any discussion of the Inquisition; it was indeed “a moral contradiction in terms” to insist on building the Kingdom of God with “oppression and injustice and cruelty.” However, the stricture does not apply to the Jewish Zealots, if theirs was a secular struggle against a secular enemy. It is certainly not a “moral contradiction” to fight on the mundane plane a mundane war of self-defense with mundane means; but it is undoubtedly the most devilish form of barbarism to “save” souls, against their own will, with iron and fire.
Similarly, the purported forcible conversion of the Idumeans ought to be re-evaluated. If Judaism was forced into a political role and the Maccabean kingdom was a purely mundane enterprise,24V/387. then Johanan Hyrcanus was attempting to imitate the methods of Antiochus Epiphanes, who by the brutally enforced elimination of religious diversity among his subject peoples was hoping to safeguard the political unity of his empire.25See Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XIII/9. On this showing, Johanan Hyrcanus was doing on a small scale and in a tiny corner of the world what the conquerors of this earth did almost as a matter of political routine on a far vaster scale and with much more devastating consequences for the human race. In this case one may of course speak no longer of the “Maccabean policy of religious conversion by political force,” but rather of the Machiavellian policy of all rulers—that of safeguarding the political unity of their realm at all cost, even by means of enforced religious uniformity.26There are historians who maintain that Constantine the Great, when making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, was moved mainly by considerations of political expediency. While Mr. Toynbee, for reasons of his “psychological” penetration of the mentality of Constantine, rejects such a view (see V/708-10), he cannot help conceding (see IV/349-50) that the triumph of Christianity over the Empire was due to “promptings of Superstition … supported by the counsels of raison d’état.” In order to preserve “the ancient unity of religious and political life in the Hellenic universal state … the bold diplomatic counterstroke was executed of taking the Christian Church bodily to the Empire’s bosom”. After the entente between Constantine and the Church, the latter—according to Mr. Toynbee—“nestled down promptly and cheerfully into the political shell in which the Imperial authorities now invited it to take up its abode …” Since “the bold diplomatic counterstroke” included the forcible suppression of all other religions besides Christianity (Judaism being the only one that was granted a very narrowly circumscribed measure of toleration), it would be interesting to know whether the establishment of Christianity by Constantine should be called “a policy of religious conversion by political force” or, perhaps, a policy of political unification by means of enforced religious uniformity? See also what Toynbee has to say (VII/401) about Theodosius I’s new policy of repression against all non-Christian religion in 382 C.E., as a means for saving the Empire from dissolution. Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that the same deed that cost Judaism “the whole of its spiritual future,” when performed on a world-wide scale, should have established the good fortune of Christianity. At the same time one cannot help recalling that another Christian scholar contemporary of Mr. Toynbee, John MacMurray, in his The Key to History, subjects the entente between Constantine and the Church to a criticism which is very similar to the one meted out to the Hasmonean Prince by Mr. Toynbee. MacMurray recognizes in this entente between Church and State the main cause for Christianity’s failure in Western history. The two concepts are incompatible.
However, inconsistency does not perturb Mr. Toynbee. Having belabored the Maccabees and the Zealots on account of their perverse policy of propagating Judaism by methods of barbarism, he proceeds lustily to reap the full harvest of his other theory that the Maccabees deserted religion for politics. But here we have to introduce another one of Mr. Toynbee’s cherished concepts. What is at first called “lapse into militancy” imperceptibly merges into the ethos of violence, and we get the “antithesis between the gentle ethos of Christianity … and the violent ethos of Maccabean Judaism.”27V/175. One cannot help being genuinely surprised. What happened to the “lapse” that it should deserve to be elevated to the dignity of an “ethos”? Furthermore, the lapse into militancy must have been a lapse from something else; speaking of the Maccabees, this could only have been a lapse from Judaism, which—in Mr. Toynbee’s own words—in “a tremendous spiritual travail” of the first Syriac Time of Troubles had chosen the ethos of gentleness.28See above, sect. 1 of this chapter. It would therefore be much more truthful, when discussing the lapse of the Maccabees from the religion of their fathers, to speak of the antithesis between the gentle ethos of Judaism and the violent ethos of the Maccabees.
For an unbiased mind, however, the most puzzling point here is the phrase “Maccabean Judaism.” In fact, there is no such things and there never was. The Maccabees were neither teachers nor interpreters of Judaism. In matters of religion they were followers and not leaders. Yet the term is a cornerstone in the structure of Mr. Toynbee. From the point of view of a Higher Religion the lapse into militancy is a grave aberration; but a sin that affects the soul of the sinner still leaves untainted the purity of his religion. An undespoiled Judaism, however, will never satisfy Mr. Toynbee. Accordingly, the Maccabees are said to have deserted the religious plane of life for a political one, thus transforming Judaism itself; they created a Judaism of their own, a kind of mundane religion. For the political task of liberating a society under physical assault, militancy is the only possible way of action; indeed, it is a virtue, the ethos of a mundane civilization. What we have is no longer a “lapse,” but “a change of ethos”;29V/126, footnote 5. and since this changes the very essence of a religion, we get “the violent ethos of Maccabean Judaism.”
It should not be difficult to guess how the other Judaism, the good one, the higher religion of the prophets of Israel, has been whisked away from the scene of history. This is how Mr. Toynbee puts it:
After the transformation of Judaism and Zoroastrianism into instruments of Syriac political opposition to a Hellenic dominant minority, the Syriac religious genius took refuge among those elements in the Syriac population under Hellenic ascendancy which were reacting to the challenge in the gentle and not in the violent way; and, in giving birth to Christianity and Mithraism as its contributions to the spiritual travail of a Hellenic internal proletariat, Syriac religion found new expressions for a spirit and an outlook which Judaism and Zoroastrianism had repudiated.30V/126-27.
This statement neatly condenses most of the terminology of the Study, and no doubt has a certain dignity of its own. Attempting to translate it into plain English, by leaving out all references to Zoroastrianism and Mithraism31One of the charms of the Study is that it prevents Jews as well as Judaism from falling into the sin of vain conceit by imagining that there could be anything unique about either of them. In good and bad fortune, in their greatness as well as in their fall, they have for their yoke-fellows of destiny the Parsees and Zoroastrianism. (and therefore reading for “Syriac religious” and “Syriac religion,” “Jewish religious” and “Jewish religion”), and by equating “the gentle and not violent way” with the way of the original Judaism that was “transformed,” we can perhaps maintain that what Mr. Toynbee says is this: After the transformation of Judaism into an instrument of Syriac political opposition to Hellenic domination, the Jewish religious genius took refuge among those people who reacted to the challenge in the Jewish way; and, in giving birth to Christianity, Jewish religion found a new expression (meaning Christianity) for a spirit and an outlook (meaning Judaism) which Judaism had repudiated. Now, even though he says so, Mr. Toynbee does not really mean that Judaism repudiated Judaism; that would be silly. The unfortunate impression arises from the fact that “Judaism” and “Jewish” are used in two different ways in the same sentence. Almost throughout the entire sentence the words stand for their original “pre-transformation” meaning; only once, in the final clause, is “Judaism” used in the sense which it received after its “transformation.” It was this “transformed” Judaism that repudiated the classical Judaism of Israel. Classical Judaism “found new expressions” in Christianity, when—as the result of the rather illegitimate birth of Maccabean Judaism—the Jewish spiritual genius (the classical one!) took refuge outside a faithless Jewry. The Judaism of the prophets having been taken over by Christianity, the “antithesis” is now between the gentle ethos of Christianity and the violent ethos of Maccabean Judaism. The Judaism which Jewry itself is permitted to retain for its own use is the “transformed” Judaism of the Maccabees; and, since no other remains, Mr. Toynbee proceeds to drop the adjective “Maccabean” and speak boldly of the violent ethos of Judaism.
The idea is neither very original nor very exciting. We seem to have heard before that the real Jews, in the classical sense of the word, are the Gentiles, and the real Gentiles the Jews. New and original is only the way Mr. Toynbee develops this hoary theme of anti-Jewish conceit. However, let us not allow him to confuse us. When he speaks of the violent ethos of Judaism, he can only mean this new-fangled, “transformed,” political Judaism, which according to him was a Maccabean creation and which, in his view, is the religion of Jewry.
The idea of the “lapse into militancy,” on the other hand, must not be confused with the “violent ethos”; it does not refer to the “transformed” Judaism but, on the contrary, makes sense only from the viewpoint of the classical Judaism of the prophets. If the Maccabean policy was “religious conversion by political force,” then there was “lapse into militancy” but no “transformation” of Judaism—and therefore no “change of ethos” either. Unfortunately, Mr. Toynbee does not indicate any awareness that these two concepts are mutually exclusive. As we have already seen—and as we shall observe yet more closely—he treats them as if they were interchangeable. Finally, let us keep in mind the point, so eloquently made by Mr. Toynbee, that in Christianity “untransformed” Judaism “found new expressions.” Nor let us overlook the not altogether unimportant matter that when Mr. Toynbee speaks of the gentle ethos of Christianity, the term includes the gentle ethos of Judaism, “inherited from the Prophets of Israel.”32V/434. He rightly calls it Christian in contradistinction to “Jewish” only in accordance with the meaning that the word “Jewish” acquires within his own construction and as a result of but one of his interpretations of the Maccabean performance.
3.
The question that still must be answered is: How could a people, or a religion, that started out so promisingly fall so low? What was the reason for “the unfortunate change of ethos” or turn to violence? According to Mr. Toynbee, Jewry’s stumbling block was its immature Messianic idea. Jewish Messianism meant the restoration of “the fallen national kingdom at some hidden future date.”33V/387. Although such an expectation does mean a turning away from the external world, it is not the “transference of action from the Macrocosm to the Microcosm,” which we have recognized as the secret of the successful response to a challenge; it is not a genuine spiritual withdrawal from the world. Though the Jewish Messianic expectations were directed toward the future, they were awaiting a realm that was not essentially different from the existing one, but only more pleasant for Jewry. Such a concept of “the Kingdom” is an “external Utopia,” which “is intended to do duty, in place of the inward spiritual cosmos, as an ‘Other World’; but it is ‘Other World’ only in the shallow and unsatisfying sense of being a negation of the Macrocosm in the momentary present of the Macrocosm’s existence here and now.”34V/383. Jewish Messianism may, therefore, best be called Futurism; it is the attempt to solve the problem of a society in a state of disintegration by a mere external change in the time-dimension. It is true that for several centuries after the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, Jewish Messianism did work “in favour of gentleness,” and we see how the early martyrs in Judaism’s struggle with Hellenism gave their lives without offering any physical resistance. Yet, Futurism is bound to fail. The strain between “a confidently expected mundane future and an excruciatingly experienced mundane present” becomes unbearable and is resolved “in violence in the end.” And so we find that the “martyrdom of Eleazar and the Seven Brethren was followed, within two years, by the armed insurrection of Judas Maccabaeus.” This opened the era “of ever more fanatically militant Jewish Zealots … whose violence reached its appalling climax in the Satanic Jewish emeutes of … 66-70 and 115-17 and 132-5” of the C.E.35V/387.
The answer to the problem of Jewry should have been Transfiguration, which differs from Futurism in that it represents “a genuine change in spiritual clime” and not “a mere transfer in the Time-dimension.”36V/394. It seems to imply a transformation of human nature, a kind of “awakening of the soul to the presence,” a rejection of this mundane world and the discovery of the Kingdom of God. It was the ultimately triumphant answer of Jesus “whose servants were forbidden to fight because his Kingdom was not of this World.” Jewry could not accept such a solution since the Kingdom of God brought salvation to all mankind, whereas the Jews awaited it only for themselves as God’s Chosen People. This is what Mr. Toynbee calls the “idolization of an ephemeral self,” the fateful error for which “the most notorious historical example” are the Jews. It is the Nemesis of Creativity in Jewry; indeed, the end of all further Jewish creativity. Having risen high above their contemporaries in the first phase of the Syriac Time of Troubles by the discovery of an omnipresent and omnipotent God, “they allowed themselves to be captivated by a temporary and relative half-truth. They persuaded themselves that Israel’s discovery of the One True God had revealed Israel itself to be God’s Chosen People; and this half-truth inveigled them into the fatal error of looking upon a momentary spiritual eminence, which they had attained by labour and travail, as a privilege conferred upon them by God in a covenant which was everlasting.”37IV/262-63. In such sinful self-delusion the Jews “rested on their oars” when the crisis of the impact of Hellenism upon the Syriac Society challenged them to a renewed creative response. “By persisting in this posture, they ‘put themselves out of the running’ for serving once more as pioneers in the next advance of the Syriac spirit.”37IV/262-63. They were unable to recognize “the true fulfillment of Jewry’s long cherished Messianic Hope”38IV/246. when it was granted to them in the person of Jesus. Thus Jewry went down to perdition.
It is somewhat amusing to find that with all the accouterments of modern historic research Mr. Toynbee could not uncover more than the homely old Christian commonplace that Jewry was punished forever for its rejection of Jesus. Of course, being an eminently enlightened post-Christian Christian,39See, e.g., IX/635. he will not say that Jewry was punished by a direct Act of God, as it were, to testify through its eternal wanderings to its own perfidy. Things do not happen that way in history. There are laws and there is a pattern, like the Nemesis of Creativity and the inevitable failure of Futurism. However, since Mr. Toynbee perceives “in History a vision of God’s creation on the move”40X/3. there is not really much difference between an Act of God and the Laws of History, which are also of God—except that a Law is always more inexorable than an Act of Will. Whereas according to the old dispensation Jews “have wandered about, regarded as an accursed race, as an object of contempt to other peoples,”41Quoted in The Foot of Pride by Malcolm Hay, Beacon Press, Boston, 1950. in the opinion of Mr. Toynbee they got entangled with the Laws of History and, as might be expected, were crushed completely and forever. The “accursed race” is still alive and there may be some hope for it; but of what is crushed by the mills of God, so ingeniously built into the workings of history, only “debris” or “pulverized social ash” remains.42II/286. Judaism and Jewry look as if they were alive; actually they are the fossilized remnants “of the extinct Syriac Society in the particular phase of disintegration in which that Society happened to find itself at the moment when it was smitten by the impact of Hellenism in the fourth century” of the C.E.43V/126.
For the sake of clarity, however, let us establish the fact that if the ultimate fall of Jewry consisted in the rejection of the “Jewish Messiah” who was offered to Jewry by the One True God, then what Mr. Toynbee says about Jewish Messianism being identical with Futurism is rather confusing. Since, in his own view, Jesus represented “the true fulfillment of Jewry’s long cherished Messianic Hope,” it is obvious that the true meaning of those hopes could not have meant merely the re-establishment of “the fallen national kingdom at some hidden future date.” Whatever Jewish Messianism be, on Mr. Toynbee’s own admission it is not what he says it is—a leap in the time-dimension toward a mundane Jewish national paradise. What he possibly has in mind when he discusses the nature of Jewish Messianism is not the proper philosophical or theological term, but the purely empirical idea. Mr. Toynbee assumes that the Jews of the Maccabean period understood by Messianism nothing but a mundane national restoration. This would then be the counterpart to Mr. Toynbee’s discovery of Maccabean Judaism; a “transformed” Jewish Messianism, eminently becoming to a “transformed” Judaism. What we shall have to ascertain is: Who did the transforming—Maccabean Jewry or Mr. Toynbee?