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Palestine
in Proportion
A noted
historian rereads the Bible and
reaches new convictions on the Holy
land
By H. G. Wells The other day I was talking to an assembly of
teachers and scientific workers on the problems of getting the
elements of a modern world outlook into the ordinary human mind
during its all too brief years of schooling and initiation. I
was not persuading nor exhorting; I was exposing my thoughts
about one of the primary difficulties in the way of a World Pax
which which will save mankind from the destruction probable in
putting the new wine of mechanical and biological power into the
worn bottles of social and moral tradition. I dealt with the
swiftness of life, the shortness of time available for learning
and the lag and limitations of teaching.
In my survey of the minimum of knowledge needed to make an
efficient citizen of the world, I laid great stress upon
history. It is the core initiation. History explains the
community to the individual, and when the community of interests
and vital interaction has expanded to planetary dimensions, then
nothing less than a clear and simplified world history is
required as the framework of social ideas. The history of man
becomes the common adventure of Everyman.
I depreciated the exaggerated importance attached to the
national history and to Bible history in western countries. I
maintained that the Biblical account of the Creation and the
Fall gave a false conception of man's place in his universe. I
expressed the opinion that the historical foundation for world
citizenship would be better laid if these partial histories were
dealt with only in their proper relation to the general
development of mankind. In particular I pointed out that
Palestine and its peoples were a very insignificant part of the
general picture. It was a sideshow in the greater conflicts of
Mesopotamia and Egypt. Nothing important, I said, ever began
there or worked out there. . . .
In saying that I felt that I was stating plain matter-of-fact
to well-informed hearers. But it is not what I should have
thought and said, forty years ago. And since the publication of
my remarks, there have been a number of retorts and replies to
my statement that have made me realize how widely and profoundly
and by what imperceptible degrees, my estimate of this Jewish
history has been changed since my early years and how many
people still remain under my earlier persuasions. Long after I
ceased to be a Christian, I was still obsessed by Palestine as a
region of primary importance in the history of human
development. Most people still seem to do so. It may be
interesting to state compactly why I have grown out of that
conviction.
Evolution of a Concept
Very largely it was through rereading the Bible after an
interlude of some years and with a fresh unprejudiced mind, that
this change came about in my ideas. My maturer impression of
that remarkable and various bale of literature which we call the
Old Testament was that it had been patched a lot but very little
falsified. Where falsification appeared, as in the number of
hosts slain in the Philistine bickerings, it was very naive,
transparent and understandable falsification.
I was not impressed by the general magnificence of the prose,
about which one still hears so much. There are some splendidly
plain and vivid passages and interludes of great dignity and
beauty but the bulk of the English Bible sounds to me pedestrian
translator's English, quite unworthy of the indiscriminate
enthusiasm that has been poured out upon it. From their very
diverse angles the books of the Bible have an entirely genuine
flavor. It is a collection; it is not a single book written ad
hoc like the Koran. And the historical parts have the
quality of honest history as well as the writers could tell it.
Jewish history before the return from Babylon, as the Bible
gives it, is the unpretending story of a small barbaric people
whose only gleam of prosperity was when Solomon served the
purpose of Hiram by providing an alternative route to the Red
Sea, and built his poor little temple out of the profits of porterage. Then indeed there comes a note of pride. It is very
like the innocent pride of a Gold Coast negro whose chief has
bought a motor car. The prophetic books, it seems to me, reek of
the political propaganda of the adjacent paymaster states and
discuss issues dead two centuries ago.
One has only to read the books of Ezra and Nehemiah to
realize the real quality of the return of the miscellany of
settlers from Babylon, a miscellany so dubious in its origins,
so difficult to comb out. But a legend grew among these people
of a Tremendous Past and of a Tremendous Promise. Solomon became
a legend of wealth and wisdom, a proverb of superhuman splendour.
In the New Testament we hear of "Solomon in all his
Glory." It was a glory like that of the Kings of Tara.
When I remarked upon this essential littleness of Palestine I
did not expect any modern churchmen to be shocked. But I brought
upon myself the retort from the bishops of Exeter and Gloucester
that I was obsessed by "mere size" and that I had no
sense of spiritual values. My friend Mr. Alfred Noyes reminded
me that many pumpkins were larger than men's heads, and what had
I to say to that? But I had not talked merely of physical size.
I had said that quite apart from size nothing of primary
importance in human history was begun and nothing worked out in
Palestine. That is, I had already said quite definitely that
Palestine was not a head but a pumpkin and a small one at that.
A number of people protest. But, they say, surely the great
network of modern Jewry began in Palestine and Christianity also
began in Palestine! To which I answer, "I too thought
that." We float in these ideas from our youth up. But have
we not all taken the atmosphere of belief about us too
uncritically? Are either of these ideas sound? I myself have
traveled from a habit of unquestioning acquiescence to
entire unbelief. May not others presently do the same? I
do not believe that Palestine was the cradle of either Jewry or
Christendom.
So far as the origin of the Jews is concerned the greater
probability seems to me that the Jewish idea was shaped mainly
in Babylon and that the return to Judea was hardly more of a
complete return than the Zionist return today. From its
beginning the Jewish legend was a greater thing than Palestine,
and from the first it was diffused among all the defeated
communities of the Semitic-speaking world.
The synthesis of Jewry was not, I feel, very much anterior,
if at all, to the Christian synthesis. It was a synthesis of
Semitic-speaking peoples and not simply of Hebrews. It supplied
a rallying idea to the Babylonian, the Carthaginian, the
Phoenician, whose trading and financial methods were far in
advance of those of the Medes, Persians, Greeks and Romans who
had conquered them. It was a diffused trading community from the
start.
Jewry was concentrated and given a special character far more
by the Talmud literature that gathered about the Old Testament
collection, than by the Old Testament story itself. Does anyone
claim a Palestinian origin for the Talmud? I doubt if very much
of the Bible itself was written in Palestine. I believe that in
nine cases out of ten when the modern Jew goes back to Palestine
he goes back to a country from which most of his ancestors never
came.
When Paul started out on his earlier enterprise of purifying
and consolidating Jewry before his change of front on the road
to Damascus, he was on his way to a Semitic--a Jewish community
there, and Semitic communities existed and Semitic controversies
were discussed in nearly every centre of his extensive journeys.
There was indeed a school of teachers in Jerusalem itself, but
Gamaliel was of Babylonian origin and Hillel spent the better
part of his life and learning in Babylon before he began to
teach in Jerusalem. From the Bible itself and from the
disappearance of Carthaginian, Phoenician, Babylonian national
traditions simultaneously with the appearance of Jewish
communities throughout the western world, communities innocent
of Palestinian vines and fig trees and very experienced in
commerce, I infer this synthetic origin of Jewry.
Of course if the reader is a believing Christian, then I
suppose the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth at Jerusalem is the
cardinal event of history. But evidently that crucifixion had to
happen somewhere and just as my Christian critics can charge me
with being obsessed by mere size in my deprecation of Palestine,
so I can charge them with being obsessed by mere locality. If
the crucifixion has the importance attached to it by orthodox
theologians then, unless my reading of theology is all wrong, it
must be a universal and eternal and not a temporal and local
event.
Moreover nowadays there is a considerable body of quite
respectable atheists, theists and variously qualified Christians
who do not find in that practically unquestionably historical
event--I throw no doubt upon its actuality--the centre upon
which all other events revolve. There has been a steady
enlightenment upon the relations of Christian doctrine, ceremony
and practices to the preceding religious of Egypt, western Asia
and the Mediterranean, to the Egyptian trinity, to the Goddess
Isis, to the blood redemption of Mithraism. In this great
assembled fabric of symbols and ideas, the simple and subversive
teachings of the man Jesus who was crucified for sedition in
Jerusalem, play a not very essential part.
Christianity, I imagine or something very like it, would have
come into existence, with all its disputes, divisions, heresies,
protestantism and dissents, if there had been no Essenes, no
Nazarenes and no crucified victim at all. It was a natural
outcome of the stresses and confusions that rose from the impact
of more barbaric and usually Aryan-speaking conquerors, upon
Egypt and upon the mainly Semitic-speaking civilizations, very
much as Greek philosophy and art were the outcome of the
parallel impact of the Hellenic peoples upon the Aegean cultural
life. Old creeds lost their power and old usages their prestige.
The temporarily suppressed civilization sought new outlets. The
urgency towards new forms of social and moral statement and
adaptation was very great.
Legendary Distortions
It was, I suppose, the advantage of the nexus of Semitic
communities throughput the western world, that favored the
spread of Judaism and of the semi-Semitic Christianity that grew
side by side with it rather than the diffusion of Persian
religious inventions or Greek science and philosophy. It was an
unpremeditated advantage. The thing happened so. And on that
basis European mentality rests. We are all more or less
saturated with the legendary distortion of historical fact. It
makes us a little uncomfortable, we feel a slight shock when it
is called in question.
Such is the conception of Jewish and Christian origins that
has replaced the distortions of my early Low Church upbringing.
It has robbed Palestine of every scrap of special significance
for me and deprived those gigantic figures of my boyhood,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses of their cosmic importance
altogether. They were local celebrities of a part of the world
in which I have no particular interest. Once they towered to the
sky. I want to get them and Palestine out of the way so
that our children shall start with a better perspective of the
world
Source: Current History, January 1938 * * *
* *
updated 5 October 2007 |
