The Evil of Judaism and the Goodness of Jews

For the past two thousand years, Jews have been accused of practically every crime imaginable—almost always irrationally and prejudicially. They have been accused of denying mankind’s Savior, of demanding his execution, of kidnapping Christian children and using their blood for baking, of profiteering from war, of duplicitously causing Germany’s defeat in World War I, and much more.

Jews have not merely been accused of such things; they have been bitterly persecuted as well. They have been forcibly dispersed from their ancient homeland, slaughtered by Crusaders, locked up in squalid ghettoes, subjected to brutal pogroms, and murdered by the millions in the Holocaust.¹

Their enemies span the philosophic and political maps. Martin Luther, a founder of Protestantism, wrote of the Jews:

Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy, and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God’s wrath inflicts on the Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly giving God the lie.²

Karl Marx, father of Communism, and himself born into a Jewish family, stated:

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.³

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Party and architect of the “Final Solution,” wrote:

In the Jewish people the will to self-sacrifice does not go beyond the individual’s naked interest of self-preservation. . . . [The Jew’s] sense of sacrifice is only apparent. . . . If the Jews were alone in this world, they would stifle in filth and offal; they would try to get ahead of one another in hate-filled struggle and exterminate one another. . . . Here again the Jew is led by nothing but the naked egoism of the individual.⁴

Such contempt for Jews is not a relic of the past. It continues today. For example, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, stated in 2018, “Satanic Jews have infected the whole world with poison and deceit.”⁵ And, fueled by such rhetoric, anti-Semitic attacks have increased markedly in America and Europe in recent months.⁶

Christians, Communists, Nazis, and Muslims may disagree on many things; but, as these examples illustrate, they often agree on one thing: Jews are evil.

What does it mean to be a Jew? Judaism is first and foremost a religion. The exact meaning of “Jew” is one who subscribes to this religion. Despite misconceptions and misrepresentations, Judaism is not a race but a set of ideas, which any individual can accept or reject. Indeed, many people, especially in the modern world, are born into Jewish families and grow up to become thorough secularists, even atheists (including me). Although it is customary to refer to such people as Jews, it is more accurate to refer to them as having been reared in a Jewish family.

Historically, Jewish culture stressed the importance of scholarship, primarily study of the Talmud, the collection of Jewish law and tradition. But in the modern world, the focus has shifted toward secular education. Because of this, despite millennia of hatred and persecution against Jews and those of Jewish descent, and despite their tiny numbers (today, perhaps fifteen million out of a world population of eight billion), their outpouring of genius and creative talent in the modern world is staggering.

Albert Einstein was the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Richard Feynman made monumental contributions to physics, won a Nobel Prize in the field, and, in 1999, in a poll conducted by 130 of the world’s leading scientists, was named the seventh greatest physicist in history. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project, America’s World War II effort to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis.⁷ Sigmund Freud, whatever his errors, pioneered the field of clinical psychology. Jonas Salk created the first vaccine for the dreaded childhood disease of polio; Albert Sabin, shortly after, developed an even more effective oral vaccine against the disease. Alyssa Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand) emigrated to America and revolutionized the fields of both literature and philosophy. Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others contributed immensely to our understanding of economics. Jews and those of Jewish descent virtually created the American entertainment industry: Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein created and sustained the Broadway musical. George and Ira Gershwin were prolific composers/songwriters. David Sarnoff and William Paley built up NBC and CBS, respectively, and introduced commercial television and its dramatic content. Jewish immigrants Louis Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn (MGM), William Fox (20th Century Fox), Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner (Warner Bros.), and numerous others pioneered the film industry.⁸ Later, Steven Spielberg became one of its greatest directors. These are a handful of the many Jewish individuals whose ingenuity has improved our world.

Jews are innocent of virtually every accusation that, for two millennia, anti-Semites have hurled against them. But more, in the modern world, especially in America, they have exerted an enormously positive influence on the development of advanced culture.

Nonetheless, there is a horror for which Judaism is legitimately responsible. It consists of a constellation of irrationalities. These are: (1) Jews created the first influential faith-based, supernatural religion; (2) they were the first influential group in Western history to overtly reject the reason-based culture of the Greeks in favor of faith-based orthodoxy; (3) Judaism directly spawned Christianity, an even more destructive religion; (4) Judaism indirectly spawned Islam, perhaps the most destructive religion of all.

The tragic irony is that if Judaism gets much credit, it is for creating this religious hydra—something for which it should, in justice, be criticized.

The Birth of Judaism

According to oral legend, Abraham, patriarch of Judaism, lived roughly 1900 to 2000 years before Christ was born, hailing from the city of Ur in ancient Chaldea (Babylon).⁹ Abraham was supposedly a descendant of Noah. When he and his family crossed the Euphrates, he became the first of the “Hebrews,” the people who “crossed over” or those “from the other side of the river.”¹⁰ In the southern part of current-day Turkey, Abraham supposedly had an experience with Yahweh—alleged in Judaism to be the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator of the universe and of man—who proposed a covenant to the seventy-five-year-old patriarch: If Abraham and his descendants worshipped Yahweh as the one true god, then Yahweh would appoint them “God’s Chosen people,” place them under his protection, and deliver to them the Promised Land of Canaan. (One wonders what would have happened to the Jews if they were not under God’s protection.)

According to the Old Testament, over a period of many centuries, the Jews slaughtered previous pagan occupants of Canaan; suffered through slavery in Egypt; gained liberty; were conquered and exiled by the Babylonians; were granted passage home by the Persians; flourished under such powerful kings as David and Solomon; built in Jerusalem two iterations of a sacred temple—both eventually destroyed by their enemies; and, in the 4th century BC, were conquered by Alexander, student of Aristotle. What followed was a momentous event in the history of both Judaism and Western Civilization more broadly.

Orthodox versus Hellenizing Jews¹¹

In the 4th century BC, the Greeks began colonizing the Middle East. They brought with them the most advanced culture in history up to that time: reason-based philosophy, brilliant literary works, man-glorifying sculpture, science, mathematics, medicine, democratic government, and (relative to the standards of the day) freedom of intellectual expression. Judea, by contrast, was (and remained) governed by strict Orthodox Judaism. Nonetheless, many educated Jews were attracted to both the high culture and the sexual liberalism of the Greeks. Historian Max Dimont writes:

Just as Jewish businessmen yielded to Greek manners and Jewish youth to Greek pleasures, so Jewish intellectuals succumbed to the spell of Greek philosophy, [which] the Orthodox Jews regarded with more alarm than they did the courtesans. The latter could corrupt only the body, whereas the former corrupted the mind.¹²

Aristotle’s this-worldly philosophy, the Orthodox understood, threatened religion vastly more than did sexual promiscuity.

In the 3rd century BC, Orthodox Jews rose up against Hellenizing Jews (those committed to Greek culture). The essence of the conflict was not a Jewish rebellion against Greek rule—but a civil war between Orthodox and Hellenizing Jews. Antiochus Epiphanes, a Hellenistic king of the Seleucid Empire who persecuted the highly orthodox Maccabeean Jews, “has been so entrenched in Jewish history as a villain,” writes Dimont, “that few Jews can see the war that ensued for what it really was—not an uprising against tyrannical Seleucids, but a revolt by Jewish anti-Hellenizers against Jewish Hellenizers.”¹³

According to the eminent historian Will Durant, a Greek official in the town of Modin demanded the Jews sacrifice to Zeus. An old man named Mattathias, father of five sons, declaimed that even if all others accepted Greek paganism, he and his sons would adhere to the strict monotheism of their forefathers. When another Jew stepped forward to sacrifice to Zeus, Mattathias slew him and the Greek official, as well.¹⁴ Mattathias, his sons and followers, went to war against Greek influence. Mattathias was old and soon died. But his son, Judas, called the Maccabee or Hammer, continued the struggle. In the years 166–164 BC, the Maccabees drove the Greeks from the area around Jerusalem, and, in time, from Judea. The pro-Greek Jews were slaughtered or exiled.¹⁵

Jews not only created an influential faith-based, supernatural religion, but many clung to it fanatically even after the Greeks offered them a rational alternative. By Aristotle’s day (the 4th century BC), leading Greek thinkers had rejected the myths of their ancient forebears—for example, that Pallas Athena had sprung fully developed from Zeus’s head without benefit of a mother. Leading Jewish thinkers, on the other hand, accepted the ancient myths of their culture—for example, that a burning bush spoke, a man lived inside a whale, and a woman was turned into a pillar of salt. Critically, Jews clung to the central myth of all faith-based religion: There exists a supreme consciousness without sense organs, brain, or other bodily means of consciousness—a super ghost of the universe—who created the entire cosmos from nothing, rules it without limitation, and must be obeyed unquestioningly.

After the Maccabees triumphed, Orthodox Jews controlled Judean culture.¹⁶ The Greeks supported a substantial amount of intellectual freedom that stimulated philosophic and scientific debate. But the religious fundamentalists stifled such freedom of intellectual expression. The rational culture of the Greeks—the study of philosophy, literature and the arts, science and mathematics—was banished from the Orthodox schools. Everything taught in those schools was in strict accordance with fundamentalist religion.¹⁷

Both sides claimed to support freedom. For the Greeks, it meant the open debate of competing philosophies, the birthing of brilliant literary and artistic works, and free inquiry via science and mathematics into nature’s secrets. For Jews, on the other hand, freedom meant an absence of secular restrictions—foreign or indigenous—on the power of the clergy to impose full theocratic governance on the Jewish people.

Several centuries later, Jewish fanatics waged two bitterly destructive and futile wars against the more secular Roman Empire and the Greek philosophy on which it was based. “Culturally, the Roman Empire was Greek,” writes historian Paul Johnson, “especially in the East.”¹⁸ These religious zealots were driven by the same orthodox fervor against reason and secularism that had impelled the Maccabees. In this case, the Romans crushed the uprisings, destroying the sacred Jewish Temple during the first war, and exiling the Jews from their ancient homeland as a result of the second. But Orthodox Judaism lived on.

Judaism’s rejection of Greek culture was a turning point—not just for Jews, but in history more broadly. For if, in the 2nd century BC, the Hellenizing Jews had won the culture wars, Orthodox Judaism might have gradually and quietly expired—and humanity may have been spared the horrors of Christianity and Islam.

The Birth of Christianity

In the conventional view, Christianity is based on the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus was a Jew who preached peace toward the pagan Roman Empire, in contrast to Old Testament teachings that God’s “Chosen People” should wage unremitting war on heathens occupying the Promised Land. Although Jesus revised the Judaic moral code, more fundamentally, he adopted a metaphysics and epistemology (a view of the nature of the universe and of how human beings gain knowledge) identical to that of Judaism. On Jesus’s view, God was the same supernatural being, a super ghost, a disembodied cosmic mind, a creator who magically wrought the entirety of the universe from nothing, and who, of course, was utterly inaccessible either to sensory observation or to noncontradictory logical thought grounded in such observation. The Christian God, like the Jewish God, can be accepted only on faith.

Faith is a claim to knowledge in support of which there is no evidence (or in defiance of evidence). Saint Paul, for example, claimed that human beings did not come to understand God via reason—but that God revealed Himself to those of faith. Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, went further, claiming that faith is “not merely incompatible with but offensive to natural reason.” Similarly, in the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard held that faith involves a submission of the intellect; faith is both hostile to and completely beyond the grasp of reason.¹⁹ In monotheistic practice, faith is often based on a revealed text—whether the Old Testament, the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, or another—that is held to be the infallibly accurate word of God, which must be accepted without criticism. Faith-based teachings have no basis in reality; consequently, they inevitably clash with conclusions that do. As Mark Twain reportedly remarked, “Faith is when you believe things you know ain’t true.”

The Greeks, on the other hand, bequeathed to mankind a rational method. Although at times inconsistent and mixed with mythology, Greek ideas advanced secular culture and rational epistemology, enabling Greeks to make immense progress in science, math, medicine, man-affirming art, and philosophy. This rational development culminated in the work of Aristotle, who, whatever his errors, formulated the field of logic, and, critically, recognized and explained that sound reasoning is grounded neither in myth nor in faith but, rather, in observable fact. Aristotle, more than any other single human being, taught humanity how to think.

Judaism and Christianity differ regarding many significant religious beliefs, most fundamentally regarding the divinity of Jesus. But they employ an identical faith-based method—one that Judaism passed on to Christianity. Because of this, many Christians warred as vociferously as did Jews against the reason-based Greek approach. For example, Saint Paul wrote, “The more [the Greeks] called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew . . . they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.”²⁰ Tertullian famously claimed, “Wretched Aristotle, who taught [the heretics and philosophers logic] . . . what is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem?”²¹ Tertullian’s claim that reason and faith have nothing in common is accurate—and he chose faith. Similarly, centuries later, Martin Luther, one of the most influential Christian theologians, referred to Aristotle as “this damned, conceited, rascally heathen,” as well as by other choice epithets, and sought to severely curtail the teaching of his works because of their pro-reason, anti-faith nature.²²

Once in power, Christians put their faith-based philosophy into political action. In 529 CE, Christian emperor Justinian I closed the pagan schools of philosophy, including Plato’s Academy, which had flourished in Athens for roughly nine hundred years. He held that Greek philosophy was inherently antithetical to Christian faith and, therefore, forbade pagans to teach. Durant, points out sadly, “Greek philosophy, after eleven centuries of history, had come to an end.”²³

In 415 CE, in Alexandria, a Christian mob that included monks and a member of the local bishop’s staff savagely murdered Hypatia, the brilliant Greek mathematician. Morris Kline, a leading historian of mathematics, wrote, “The fate of Hypatia symbolizes the end of the era of Greek math.”²⁴

The impassioned love poetry of the brilliant Greek poetess Sappho was largely destroyed by Christian censors; a mere six hundred of the twelve thousand lines she composed have survived. “In the year 1073 of our era,” Durant relayed, “the poetry of Sappho . . . was publicly burned by ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople and Rome.”²⁵

John Scotus Erigena (810–877 CE) was Europe’s sole original philosopher for six hundred years. The Church so effectively hunted one of his books that not a single copy survived.²⁶ Church watchdogs burned writings of the brilliant logician Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and condemned him to perpetual silence. The Inquisition murdered Giordano Bruno, threatened Galileo, and eradicated writings that challenged Catholic orthodoxy. Post-Reformation, their Protestant counterparts executed innovative scientist/theologian Michael Servetus, burned books and heretics, opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution, and rejected various forms of scientific research and life-saving medicine.

The Jews spawned a faith-based, antirational methodology and bequeathed it to Christianity, which, as Judaism’s monster child, terrorized Western independent thinkers from the 5th century until the 18th. How much more advanced would mankind be were it not for two millennia of intellectual repression at the hands of Judaism and Christianity? The philosophic truths not identified, the man-glorifying artworks not created, the scientific theories not developed, the great minds not writing or speaking out—countless potential advances were suppressed and irretrievably lost. Consider the case of William of Conches (1080–1154). He repudiated the notions that faith-based beliefs were enough and that philosophy and science were expendable. Predictably, he came under suspicion by Church censors and prudently decided to comply rather than resist. William “retracted his heresies . . . abandoned philosophy as an enterprise in which profit was not commensurate with the risk, became tutor to Henry Plantagenet of England, and retired from history.”²⁷ In the terms of Ayn Rand’s brilliant novel Atlas Shrugged, William of Conches went on strike. How many other outstanding minds were likewise intimidated into silence? We have no way to know.

The Birth of Islam

But Judaism’s worst monster child is Islam.

The parental relationship between Judaism and Islam is not as direct as between Judaism and Christianity—but it is undeniably real.

Paul Johnson points out that a substantial number of Jews were in Arabia in ancient times. According to Muslim teachings, Muhammad (570–632 CE) was the founder of Islam. By his lifetime, roughly “twenty tribes in and around Medina were Jewish.”²⁸ The most rigid Jewish monotheists tended to gravitate to the desert, a relatively “featureless place conducive to strict monotheism,” perhaps because more richly diverse lands birthed belief in a god of the river, a god of the forests, a god of the mountains, and so forth—a pluralistic pantheon of gods. “It was from such a [desert] background that the greatest of all Jewish sectarian heresies was to spring—Islam.”²⁹

The two faiths have much in common—above all, a strict monotheism. “But the desert was important, because the Jews living on its fringes,” Johnson writes, “had always practiced a more rigorous form of Judaism, and in particular, had been uncompromising in their monotheism. This was what attracted Muhammad.”³⁰

Christianity, although also a presence in Arabia, was not strictly monotheistic in Muhammad’s eyes (nor in the eyes of the Jews). The Trinitarian belief that Jesus was God, but distinct from God the Father, would have struck him as a form of polytheism, anathema both to him and to the Jews.

Robert Spencer, an expert in Islam, explains that many of the new faith’s laws “were formulated in dialogue and debate with the Jews of Medina.”³¹ Muhammad saw himself as a prophet similar to those of Judaism: He forbade his followers to eat pork, he commanded them to pray several times daily, and he required them to face Jerusalem when praying. “From nearly the beginning of his prophetic career, Muhammad was strongly influenced by Judaism.”³²

Johnson highlights Judaism’s influence on the nascent faith. Muhammad “accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture—the Koran being an Arab substitute for the Bible—and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts.”³³ Indeed, Muhammad did not create a new and distinctive religion until he realized that Medina Jews “were not prepared to accept his arbitrarily contrived Arab version of Judaism.”³⁴

Like Christianity, Islam inherited Judaism’s faith-driven epistemology and its insistence that there is only one God. And like Christianity, Islam embraced Judaism’s explosive violence against unbelievers. Adding to all of that, Islam introduced a prophet who was himself murderously violent and whom Muslims were supposed to emulate. The result is that, for much of its history, Islam has warred against reason-based, secular culture with a maniacal intensity perhaps exceeding even that of ancient Orthodox Jews.

Early in Islam’s history, Muslim scholars studied Aristotle and the Greeks and made substantial advances in multiple fields during a justly named “Golden Age.” From roughly 800 CE until 1200, the Arab-Islamic world was the global leader in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Islamic writers composed beautiful poetry and epic tales, and great artists flourished in other fields, as well. Tragically, in time, orthodox religion killed off this magnificent culture. Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) is considered one of the most important figures in the history of Islam, second only to Muhammad. He was a theologian and a profound philosophic skeptic, arguing in his monumental book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, that reason inevitably led thinkers into insoluble contradictions that could be obviated only by accepting the teachings of the Koran on faith. He and other theologians built on the religious faith that lay at the foundations of Islamic society and, over decades, tore down the advanced intellectual culture that more scientific and secular thinkers had built.

Averroes (1126–1198), a towering Aristotle scholar and medical researcher, brilliantly answered Al-Ghazali in a blistering, line-by-line critique titled The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Unfortunately, although Averroes logically devastated Al-Ghazali’s arguments, the latter’s faith-based approach, being in accord with the religious fundamentals of Arab-Islamic society, became dominant. As Orthodox Jews had triumphed in culture wars over Hellenizing Jews some fourteen hundred years earlier, so Orthodox Muslims triumphed over Hellenizing Muslims in the Middle Ages. Averroes saw his books burned, indeed, lived to see, in 1194, the Islamic authorities demand the destruction of all philosophic texts, wherever found. By roughly 1200, the Islamic Golden Age was dead. Shunned in the Arab-Islamic world, Averroes’s ideas survived only in the West, where his brilliant Aristotle scholarship profoundly influenced Thomas Aquinas, helping to spur the medieval renaissance (12th and 13th centuries) that lifted Western Europe out of the last remnants of its Dark Age and pointed the way to its magnificent periods of the Italian Renaissance (roughly 1350–1550) and the Enlightenment (18th century).³⁵

The Judaic method of unquestioning faith was adopted by both Christians and Muslims. At different times, all three religions warred strenuously against Greek science, rational philosophy, and humanistic art. Unfortunately, for long periods of time, they warred successfully.

Modern Jews

However, in the West, among Jews as well as Christians, the Greek approach was not forever quelled. The 18th-century Enlightenment reestablished the Greek orientation: Reason again took cultural precedence over faith and led to political revolutions in America and parts of Europe that—to greater or lesser extent, over shorter or longer time periods, spilling lesser or greater amounts of blood—expunged the political power of organized religion (including the alleged divine right of kings), and established republican or parliamentary forms of government that protected freedom of the mind.

Some educated German Christians of the Enlightenment, to their everlasting credit, adopted the 18th-century doctrine of the Rights of Man and recognized that its principles applied even to the long-oppressed Jews. When such Jewish geniuses as philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn) ventured out of the ghetto and sought secular education, his right to do so was supported by enlightened German Christians.³⁶

Regarding modern Judaism, our story has a largely happy ending. In 19th-century Germany, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, his associates, and others, developed what came to be known as Reform Judaism, construing the religion as an evolving faith, susceptible to modern influences, eschewing strict observance of Mosaic Law, embracing a prominent role for reason, and upholding freethinking and the autonomy of the individual. Reform Judaism broke the millennia-long stranglehold of rigid orthodoxy over members of the faith.

Based on endless wrangling between and among Jews of every theological stripe, German Jewish immigrants in America founded Conservative Judaism and established the influential Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City in 1886. Conservative Judaism was supposed to be a middle ground between Orthodox Jews—committed to Mosaic Law and Jewish tradition—and Reform Jews, equally committed to adapting Jewish customs and observances to the principles of modern, secular society. But whatever their theoretical convictions, Conservative Jews overwhelmingly tended to adopt American culture rather than the faith-based teachings of their largely impoverished and uneducated eastern European forebears.

James Madison’s principle of religious freedom, articulated forcefully in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was a godsend to the Jews. Persecuted brutally in Europe, the Jews—despite noisy pockets of U.S. anti-Semitism—were liberated in America. Reform and Conservative Jews fervently adopted the best element of modern Western Civilization embodied in American culture: secular education. In every field of secular intellectual culture, 20th-century American Jews excelled in numbers vastly disproportionate to their tiny percentage of the U.S. population. In literature, law, philosophy, medicine and every branch of science, business, music and every aspect of entertainment, and in much else, American Jews and those of Jewish descent contributed a staggering amount of value to American culture.

Even Orthodox American Jews—despite their medieval sensibilities—were not immune to the lure of secular education and achievement. Chaim Potok is an excellent example. Although raised as an Orthodox Jew in the Bronx, New York, he went on to become a Conservative rabbi. More productively, he became an accomplished novelist. His superlative novel The Chosen tells the powerful story of a brilliant Jewish teenager struggling between secular culture and Orthodox Judaism, between independent values and conformity to religious tradition. Another example, Israel Kirzner, although an Orthodox rabbi, is also a former student of Ludwig von Mises and a doyen of Austrian economics in America. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, a physicist and Nobel Laureate (Medicine, 1977) was an Orthodox Jew who married the son of an Orthodox rabbi. Robert Aumann, an Israeli American mathematician and Nobel Laureate (Economics, 2005) was an Orthodox Jew. These are just a few of the many pathfinders who, though raised in Jewish families and cultures, nevertheless used their reasoning minds to understand reality and support human life.

Most modern American Jews and those of Jewish descent, in basic philosophy and commitment to secular education, are more Greek than Judaic in outlook and lifestyle. Their magnificent achievements in every branch of rational culture bear testimony to this. They have largely substituted rational, life-enhancing ideas for the worst elements of Judaism. Consequently, they provide an inexhaustible wellspring of rational genius that is profoundly inspiring. Indeed, by one account, in the modern world, Jews and those of Jewish descent compose 0.2 percent of the world’s population—but have won 23 percent of Nobel Prizes. In so doing, they provide a template for modern-day Christians, Muslims, and members of other zealous sects, to similarly throw off religious orthodoxy, to embrace rational epistemology, and to excel in every branch of secular culture.

Jews have been irrationally blamed for many crimes. In reality, their “sins” were to birth the first faith-based, supernatural religion to deeply influence Western history, to war against the rational culture of the Greeks, and to give rise to other faiths that warred even more fanatically against reason and life. In the modern world, especially in America, they have overwhelmingly triumphed over that failing—and pointed the way for members of other religious denominations to do the same.

Correction: The original posting and print edition of this article mistakenly cited “Black-Jewish Relations: Minister Louis Farrakhan—In His Own Words” in endnote 2. The endnote has here been corrected.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at Marist College. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020), and, most recently, Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math.

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