WHAT IS A JEW?

Israel is a country in the Middle East, a piece of real estate so small that one needs a magnifying glass when searching for it on a map. Its main inhabitants, the Jews, together with their brothers and sisters throughout the world , amount to a pathetic less than 0.02 percent  of the world population. As Sir Isaiah Berlin once famously quipped, “The Jews have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography.”

The anti-Semite has a hard time with Jews. They boycott us in academia, journalism, European governments, the marketplace, etc. The trouble with us is that we are constantly breaking the rules. For thousands of years, we have survived powerful empires that did everything to destroy us – the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Germans - and there were plenty to give them a willing hand. In the 20^th century, it looked as if they had finally succeeded. Six million were murdered in the Holocaust.

But, instead of disappearing, we decided that after 2,000 years of exile, it would be better to go home and rebuild our own country.  

We are one of the oldest nations in the world! For most of our existence we have been among the poorest of the poor, scattered among foreign countries without an army to protect us. In spite of this, we contribute, per capita, more to this world than any other nation.

Israel is always constantly coming up with  new inventions. I just read the newest which is truly amazing. Israeli doctors have succeeded in implanting bone cells - grown in the laboratory - into human bodies, enabling them to produce new bones. This is a revolutionary break-through for people who need bone implants, because of cancer, accidents, other body ailments.  

But it’s not only in the field of medicine that Jews have contributed significantly. Intel Israel’s computer chips for personal computers; anti-virus computer software; cellular phones; voicemail; micro-irrigation; cherry tomatoes; steel security doors; Iron Dome; Waze; ReWalk, to name just a few – all developed by Jews in that most hated country, called Israel.   

                             

Then there’s a Jew called Jesus. He is the most revered man in the entire western world, worshipped by hundreds of millions, as nothing less that the son of God. What non-Jewish kid could have ever pulled that off? And if that’s not enough, everyone knows that if Jesus were alive today, he would eat in kosher restaurants.

According to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch Jews are a distinctive people defined by shared memories and collective responsibilities, “not reckoned among the nations” [Numbers 23:9] since they are capable of surviving even without nationhood, even in exile and dispersion. Israel’s strength lies not in nationalism but in building a society based on justice and human dignity.

To quote Sir Winston Churchill: “Some people like Jews and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world” [Sunday Herald, Feb. 8, 1920].