The Jewish mind

From Moses to Jesus to St. Paul to Einstein to Freud to Bob Dylan, Jewish minds have impacted the world far beyond their meagre numbers. For better and for worse. Such men of science as Jonas Salk put an end to the epidemic of polio, while others like Karl Marx laid the rails that carried nations to a hellish reality. Another, Robert Openheimer, gave us the atomic bomb ending World War Two, but striking fear into all since. At the same time another Marx- Groucho- made us laugh, and another, Irving Berlin, gave us the iconic "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" and "God Bless America" in song. It was a Jew who gave us "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and even the Jewish lion, Bert Lahr, made us smile in "The Wizard of Oz." 

 The Jews represent a mere 0.2 percent of humanity, yet they have achieved 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories. Considering all the empires that tried to exterminate them, from the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Greeks to the Romans to the Nazis, and now the Islamic world, they almost disprove the "survival of the fittest" theory- but for the Jewish mind, and the Jewish God.

 What is "the Jewish mind'? The Jewish mind is one that has been forged and formed under extreme pressure for some three thousand years. Due to the Torah command "You shall teach these things diligently to your children," education has held a high priority in Jewish life, and produced a literate people in a mostly illiterate world. Then being driven out forcefully from their homeland of Israel, they lived in close-knit communities and ghettos and were outcasts in the nations of the world. They were accused of deicide from Christian pulpits, and of every uncouth practice, even blamed for the Black Plague in Europe. They were forbidden from owning property or working in Christian enterprises, or attending universities. In 1290 they were expelled from Catholic England, and those who made it to Spain suffered at the hands of the Catholic Inquisition, and were expelled in 1492. In Russia, they suffered the Pogroms, driving them from their homes to other nations. And yet they remained Jews, and kept their religious traditions for the God of their fathers. This all culminated in the Nazi Holocaust.

In those fires of persecution, they were forced to seek measures of survival. With little available to them, they were obliged to use their minds to weather the impossible. Like diamonds, the hardest stone known, are formed under pressure, so the Jewish mind was shaped and sharpened to a razor's edge.

It was the unthinkable horrors of the Nazi Holocaust that finally drove the survivors back to their ancestral homeland of Israel. There they were met with unending opposition and hostility and wars from the start, and so were obliged to become a formidable fighting force. In a series of unprovoked wars of annihilation by their Arab neighbors, the Jews, though vastly outnumbered, succeeded in defeating every onslaught, even regaining Jerusalem as their capital in a Six Day War. And so those Jews went on to develop a modern democratic nation of great invention and ingenuity, blessing the world with modern technology and water conservation, agricultural invention, medical advancements, and both defensive and offensive weaponry.  

The Jewish mind is quick and penetrating, inquisitive and apt to overthink. It is said that where three Jews gather there are five opinions. One may witness that in the Israeli parliament today. And in our days, hatred of the Jew has again arisen to extreme heights, blaming the Jew for every and any problem on the face of the Earth. The strange and toxic phenomenon of anti-Semitism seems to lie just beneath the surface, awaiting any excuse to break forth like a plague. And so the Jew must use the mind given him to negotiate the storms, and trust in his ineffable and one eternal God.