David N. Myers > Quotes

“too is the precise path of Jews to this region of Europe. In all likelihood, the forebears of medieval Ashkenazim began their path in the ancient Middle East, most likely Palestine (but perhaps also Babylonia),”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“late 630s ce, building in that city two of Islam’s holiest sites: the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. From this point forward, Jews became—as they would remain throughout the Middle Ages—a small minority subject to the rule”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“The Hasmonean practice of conversion expanded the Jewish population of the kingdom significantly during an eighty-year reign that ended with the Roman conquest of Palestine in 63 bce. The capital, Jerusalem, grew rapidly as the city gained new stature as a bustling urban environment.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“In the wake of the Black Death, Ashkenazic Jews pushed eastward into Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It is this large region that would become the heartland of a pious, Yiddish-speaking population, growing from thousands of Jews in the fourteenth century to more than 6 million in 1900 and making it by that point the largest Jewish community in the world several times”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Judaism to a diasporic, rabbinic Judaism. And yet, demographic change did not occur overnight. Jerusalem invariably declined as a religious and political center. But this did not portend the end of a Jewish presence in Palestine or a massive dispersion of the Jewish population. The coastal city of Yavneh became the new center of power, where the new rabbinic leaders of post-Temple Jewish life took center stage. Scholars debate whether an exalted high court and legislative body known as the Sanhedrin also arose in Yavneh or was more of an aspirational dream”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“especially demographic growth. The world Jewish population more than doubled from 1700 to 1800, reaching 2.7 million. The next one hundred years witnessed a more than threefold increase, as the world Jewish population reached 8.7 million in 1900—and then doubled again by 1939. What can explain this staggering growth?”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“One noteworthy source of distinction is that the Jewish population declined precipitously from around 1 ce to 1500 ce; the decline, which may have reduced the Jewish population from 4.5 million to 1 million people, was due to a mix of factors; disease, war, mass persecution, and forced conversion.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“amounting to .2 percent of the world’s population. Although Jews have been around for thousands of years, they have the same number of members as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), which was founded in the nineteenth century. Their survival may well be impressive, but the fact that they have so few members”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Christianity and declare it a tolerated religion in 312–313 ce. At that point, the growing theological animosity with Judaism became official imperial policy. What followed were centuries of tense relationships among Jews, Christian rulers, priests, and the general populace, with real consequences”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Judaism, the most ritually liberal of the three main denominations (along with Orthodox and Conservative), accepted patrilineal descent as a criterion of Jewishness. This opened up new fissures with the state-sponsored Chief Rabbinate in Israel, which held fiercely to the standard of matrilineality. It also opened up broader divisions between American Jews and the State of Israel over whether those converted to Judaism by Reform—or, for that matter, Conservative—rabbis should be considered Jews under Israel’s “Law of Return,” which grants an expedited path to citizenship to Jews. Within Israel itself, debates have been vigorous about the status of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants over the past three decades or so—Ethiopians and Russians who moved to Israel but were not considered”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“twin factors that help explain the Jews’ survival—antisemitism and assimilation—have also served as constraints on their growth. Over the course of millennia, Jews married into, converted to, and joined other groups, sometimes through coercion and sometimes not, to the point of disappearance.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“What we do possess is an important piece of external evidence from the thirteenth century bce that makes explicit reference to “Israel.” It is the Merneptah stele, a stone inscription that describes, in verse, the triumph of an Egyptian king, Merneptah, over a number of groups in the land of Canaan. The final line relates: “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” It is not clear what battle the stele is describing, but it seems to be referring not to a place name but to an ethnic group. Indeed”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“The second key event was the rise, in the first third of the seventh century ce, of Islam. Similar to the case of Constantine, the fledgling Islamic movement both married religious and political interests”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“They might even speak colloquially and unscientifically of a Jewish “gene,” for example, when expressing a measure of pride at the high percentage of Jewish Nobel laureates.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Spain was known in Hebrew as Sepharad, a place name drawn from the biblical Book of Obadiah (1:20); Jews of Spanish origin came to be known as Sephardim, a group that served as a cultural foil to Ashkenazim in the medieval period. In”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, had been united under King Solomon in the tenth century bce, but split apart under his son Rehoboam. This division rendered them vulnerable to attack, as when the Assyrians laid siege to Israel in the late eighth century and the Babylonians to Judah in the early sixth century bce.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“openings for regional powers intent on gaining power over the land of Canaan. The Assyrians attacked and laid waste to the northern kingdom in the late eighth century, followed in the sixth century by the assault of the upstart Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar on Judah. In the midst of that later attack in 587–586 bce, Jerusalem and the Holy Temple were destroyed.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Josephus writes of a delegation of 8,000 Roman Jews—out of a likely total Jewish population of 40,000—who received an audience with the Emperor Augustus in 4 ce.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“northern France and Rhineland Germany that may or may not have reflected an actual encounter. In any event, it was in this part of Europe that, according to most scholars, Ashkenazic Jewry originated. It is somewhat mysterious”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“But Jewish history is far more than the static tale of antisemitism. It is also a story of constant motion that kept Jews lithe”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“in the year 1096, European Christians heeded the call of Pope Urban II to liberate Palestine from the hands of the Muslim infidels. On their way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders encountered Rhineland Jewish communities and, without Church warrant, set about to destroy those whom they held responsible for the crime of deicide (the murder of Jesus). A number of Jewish communities (Speyer, Worms, and Mainz) were destroyed, and perhaps as many as thousands of Jews”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“purity of blood” statutes introduced in the city of Toledo in 1449. The intent of these statutes was to separate “Old Christians” from “New Christians” (i.e., converted Jews), who were rendered ineligible for public office.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“had been the case with the previous Temple, Jews who were unable or even unwilling to come from distant parts to Jerusalem practiced sacrifice in their own locales. Several hundred years later, in the third century, the first evidence emerges of institutions in which a new form of devotion—prayer—appears. These sites where prayer was practiced were called “synagogues” (Greek for assembly).”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Second, in 1290, the first act of mass expulsion against the Jews of medieval Europe was executed by King Edward I of England, to be followed by expulsions from France in the fourteenth century and culminating in the sweeping expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. This attempt to rid European countries of their Jews took place against a backdrop of intensified anti-Jewish expression and imagery in popular Christianity, even though the wave of expulsions did not succeed in putting an end to Jewish life in Europe.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“their feet, moving from place to place when the need arose, like a good boxer (of which there were more than a few Jews) who is able to dodge and deflect the full brunt of blows directed against him. The ceaseless mobility of the Jews led to a second key factor in enabling their survival—what we may call in shorthand “assimilation” (otherwise known as “acculturation”). In contemporary parlance, this word induces panic in Jewish community officials, who point to high intermarriage rates and weakening organizational affiliation as signs of the impending disappearance of the Jews. In historical terms, assimilation refers to the process by which Jews, in making their way to new locales, absorbed the linguistic and cultural norms of their Gentile neighbors—and then shared their own. This peculiar understanding follows the usage of historian Gerson Cohen, who argued in 1966 that assimilation as a means of cultural interaction was not only unavoidable in Jewish history, but also necessary to the survival of the Jews. Without the constant cultural encounters, enacted every day over the course of millennia, Jews would have become fossilized, as the British historian Arnold Toynbee famously and mistakenly claimed they had. In fact, it was the interaction with non-Jews that allowed for the explosive diversity of Jewish culture and the ongoing vitality of its practitioners.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Indeed, as Jews came into being as a collective thousands of years ago, they, or their precursors, organized themselves according to tribal patterns. But when exactly did that occur?”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“shortly after reaching their greatest demographic heights, in 1939, their numbers were tragically reduced by the genocidal Nazi assault from approximately 17 million to 11 million. Today’s world Jewish population overwhelmingly”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“Already in antiquity, Jews had developed a romance with cities, whose size offered them a range of religious, economic, and social opportunities that smaller rural locales did not. In the Middle Ages, Jews played an important role as agents sent by host”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“One such Protestant setting was the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. It was there that Spanish exiles made their way in the sixteenth century, creating a rich cultural and commercial center. In fact, it was from Amsterdam that Jewish representatives of the Dutch West Indies”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction

“The sacred text became, as one modern observer noted, a “portable fatherland” for the Jews, especially when there was no Temple standing or when Jews lived far away from the Temple.”
― David N. Myers, Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction