Max I. Dimont > Quotes

“All civilizations we know about have left a record of their history in material things. We know them through tablets or ruins dug up by archaeologists. But we know of the Jews in ancient times mostly from the ideas they taught and the impact which these ideas had upon other people and other civilizations. There are few Jewish tablets to tell of battles and few Jewish ruins to tell of former splendor. The paradox is that those people who left only monuments behind as a record of their existence have vanished with time, whereas the Jews, who left ideas, have survived.”
― Max I. Dimont

“It was the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), discoverer of Troy, who invented the legend of the blond, Aryan Greek. According to Schliemann, the first Greeks appeared from some mystic Nordic spawning ground, invaded Greece, and out of their own genius, effortlessly created a culture containing the seeds that gave birth to Western civilization. This hypothesis was so flattering that the West immediately accepted it as revealed truth, and endless repetition has hardened it into a dogma that is difficult to dissolve, even with contrary evidence. Greek history did not begin with Aryans but with Semites, and Greek civilization did not begin in Greece but in Crete. The first Greeks, referred to as “Achaeans” by Homer”
― Max I. Dimont, A History of the Jews: The Indestructible Jews, The Jews in America, and Appointment in Jerusalem

“These laws permitted them to identify themselves with the cultures of peoples in every land in which they resided without having to lose their identity The Jews had learned the art of separation of church and state.”
― Max I. Dimont, Jews, God, and History

“When the star of Islam rises, the Jews rise with it to a golden age of intellectual creativity. When feudalism settles over Europe, they open shop as its bankers and scholars. And when the Modern Age struts in, we find them sitting on the architectural staff shaping it. If we now shift our sights from a general view of the history of civilizations to focus on that of the Jews only, we see an equally incredible succession of events. We see Jewish history begin with one man, Abraham, who introduces a new concept to the world—monotheism—which he hands to his descendants. Now Jewish history hits the roads of the world. After a nomadic existence in Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, and settlement of Palestine; after defeat by the Assyrians, captivity by the Babylonians, and freedom under the Persians; after an intellectual clash with the Greeks, strife under the Maccabeans, and dispersion by the Romans; after flourishing as mathematicians, poets, and scientists under Moslem rule; after surviving as scholars, businessmen, and ghetto tenants under feudal lords; after surviving as statesmen, avant-garde intellectuals, and concentration camp victims in the Modern Age, a small segment of these descendants of Abraham return—after a 2,000-year absence—to reestablish Israel, while the rest choose to remain in the world at large in a self-imposed exile. Such a succession of events would be improbable were it not historic fact. What can we make of these events? Are they mere accidents of history? Are they but blind, stumbling, meaningless facts, a series of causes and effects without a definite design? Or is this improbable succession of events part of what philosophers call “teleologic history”—that is, a succession of events having a predetermined purpose. If so, who drafted such a blueprint? God? Or the Jews themselves? Why would God choose the Jews as His messengers for a divine mission? Or, to use William Norman Ewer’s trenchant phrase, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” The equally trenchant rejoinder by Leon Roth is, “It’s not so odd. The Jews chose God.” If God had a need for messengers to carry out a mission, He would have”
― Max I. Dimont, The Indestructible Jews

“because Christian artists substituted spiritual strength for Greek surface beauty.”
― Max I. Dimont, The Indestructible Jews

“In the year 458 B.C., with the permission of the Persian king, Ezra headed the second mass exodus of eighteen hundred Jews from Babylonia to Jerusalem.”
― Max I. Dimont, Jews, God, and History

“The Jews devised, four centuries before Christ, a legal system based on the dignity of man and individual equality before the law, while Europe still had trial by ordeal as late as the fifteenth century. The rabbis viewed law as a vehicle for justice; laws without justice were regarded as immoral. Even though the Jews in those days had no jury system,16 the procedures for the indictment and trial of an accused person were similar to the procedures in American courts today.”
― Max I. Dimont, Jews, God, and History