21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

Author:Yuval Noah Harari
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Freud’s mother

My book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was originally written in Hebrew, for an Israeli public. After the Hebrew edition was published in 2011, the most common question I received from Israeli readers was why I hardly mentioned Judaism in my history of the human race. Why did I write extensively about Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, but devoted just a few words to the Jewish religion and the Jewish people? Was I deliberately ignoring their immense contribution to human history? Was I motivated by some sinister political agenda?

Such questions come naturally to Israeli Jews, who are educated from kindergarten to think that Judaism is the superstar of human history. Israeli children usually finish twelve years of school without receiving any clear picture of global historical processes. They are taught almost nothing about China, India or Africa, and though they learn about the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and the Second World War, these isolated jigsaw pieces do not add up to any overarching narrative. Instead, the only coherent history offered by the Israeli educational system begins with the Hebrew Old Testament, continues to the Second Temple era, skips between various Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and culminates with the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the state of Israel. Most students leave school convinced that this must be the main plotline of the entire human story. For even when pupils hear about the Roman Empire or the French Revolution, the discussion in class focuses on the way the Roman Empire treated the Jews or on the legal and political status of Jews in the French Republic. People fed on such a historical diet have a very hard time digesting the idea that Judaism had relatively little impact on the world as a whole.

Yet the truth is that Judaism played only a modest role in the annals of our species. Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, Judaism has always been a tribal creed. It focuses on the fate of one small nation and one tiny land, and has little interest in the fate of all other people and all other countries. For example, it cares little about events in Japan or about the people of the Indian subcontinent. It is no wonder, therefore, that its historical role was limited.

It is certainly true that Judaism begot Christianity, and influenced the birth of Islam – two of the most important religions in history. However, the credit for the global achievements of Christianity and Islam – as well as the guilt for their many crimes – belongs to the Christians and Muslims themselves rather than to the Jews. Just as it would be unfair to blame Judaism for the mass killings of the Crusades (Christianity is 100 per cent culpable), so also there is no reason to credit Judaism with the important Christian idea that all human beings are equal before God (an idea that stands in direct contradiction to Jewish orthodoxy, which even today holds that Jews are intrinsically superior to all other humans).

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