In 1898, Mark Twain, the Missouri writer and humorist who requires no introduction, wrote a piece entitled "Concerning the Jews." Such a title in such a time-- or any time, really-- would carry a presupposition of anti-Semitic stereotyping, but Twain was no anti-Semite. Indeed, while he did unfortunately buy into a number of the stereotypes, his great sin was in being overly flattering. He exaggerated the social and especially commercial successes of the Jewish people. The Jewish Chronicle commented the next year, “Of all such advocates, we can but say, ‘May Heaven save us from our friends.’”
Yet I posit that Twain’s article is more deserving of our charity. Not for its whole content. No, it is quite full of faulty predictions and speculations that, though perhaps reasonable in their time, are soundly discredited in hindsight. For instance, he suggested that while Jews would always have a racial bias against them, it was of no unbearable consequence in such places as France, Germany, Austria, and Britain because the Enlightenment had emancipated them. If only that had been so. Twain was skeptical, too, of Herzl’s plan for a Jewish home under the suzerainty of the Ottomans. True enough, the Sultan flatly rejected Zionism, and ultimately both Arabs and Jews revolted and aided the British conquest of the region, but that was all years after Twain’s death in 1910, and in that day not more than 95,000 Jews lived in Eretz Israel.
I do not credit Twain for those claims, Heaven forbid, but for his immortal conclusion, which is often cited in absence of the rest of his essay. Here, concluded in the form of a question:
If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent. of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.
He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.
The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?
Twain’s precise data and speculations were misinformed, but his overall point here stands, and for all time. Thus I take it upon myself to answer that question: What is the secret of the immortality of the Jewish nation? Why did that endangered tribe live on when nearly all other antiquities faded, for over 3,000 years under near constant persecution? What quality preserved them?
Was it the land? Do not all successful nations have land to tend? Indeed, yearning for Eretz Israel is a consistent theme of Tanakh, and religious Jews pray facing Jerusalem three times a day. At the end of such festivals as Pesach and Rosh Hashanah, they say “Next year in Jerusalem,” in the hopes that the Messiah will soon bring them home. A Jew without the land of Israel is akin to a spouse who has not seen their beloved in many years. But it was not the land that preserved the Jewish people. How could it be? For the vast majority of Jewish history, most Jews have been in exile. Until independence in 1949, Jews had not held their own land since the Roman conquest of the 1st century, and more Jews have lived outside the land than inside since the Babylonian Exile.
Perhaps, then, it was language. Don’t Jews speak Hebrew, a language holy to them? Unfortunately, Jews have not spoken Hebrew as a common vernacular for roughly 2,500 years, again at the time of the Babylonian Exile. Even during their brief period of independence under the Hasmoneans between the Alexandrian and Roman conquests, Aramaic and Greek were more common than Hebrew. Today, my educated guess would be that roughly half of Jews speak Hebrew with any fluency, and that is only after the language underwent an immense revival as the vernacular of Israel. Various Jews have spoken-- and continue to speak to varying extent-- Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, Russian, English, and so on. No, Hebrew is indeed very special to Jews, but it did not in of itself preserve the nation; Rather, it is a byproduct of the nation being preserved.
How about a central authority? The Jewish people must have been well organized with a stringent hierarchy, yes? Well, no. There were natural leaders, of course. Jews would flock around great rabbis, and in some countries a chief rabbi was an official position over a town or kingdom. In Persia, Jews followed the Exilarch, an alleged descendent of King David. But there was no central authority, not since the dissolution of the Sanhedrin following the Roman conquest. Jewish communities for the most part acted independently of each other.
What about an army? Surely all successful nations have been defended from persecution by diligent soldiers. Well, since the twice aforementioned Roman conquest and until the forming of militias in the 1910’s and ‘20’s, Jews had no army. Indeed, many of them were pacifists. For nearly 2,000 years, their nation survived in a state of desolation. Yet, it survived-- thrived, even, when its hosts allowed it to.
Then it must be culture. Culture separated the Jew from the gentile and kept the tribe united despite being scattered across the world, surely. Except, there is no universal Jewish culture. There is the Ashkenazi, the Sephardi, and the Mizrachi, and those are only broad distinctions for many smaller subcultures and yet still do not include the Jews of, say, Ethiopia or India. Jewish culture therefore cannot be responsible for the survival of the Jewish nation because there is no single Jewish culture. However, if you look at the similarities of all Jewish cultures, you may come to the same conclusion I have.
Given that Jews have not historically had what most other nations had, the answer to their immortality must be the one thing they do have, which coincidentally, no other nations have themselves, and which several deceased nations of antiquity vehemently attempted to impede. The answer is Torah, Jewish Law. It is because of Torah that Jews never forgot where they came from, never forgot their land, language, and ancestors even when they were cut off from all three for vast quantities of time. It is from Torah that Jewish authority is derived, and any commonality in the various Jewish subcultures can also be traced to the traditions and heritage of Torah.
As Rabbi Lord Sacks Z’tl once said in a shiur on Sukkot, “Every time a nation forgets its youth, its childhood, the hard times they had… they become decadent, and they eventually decline and fall. But Jews never are allowed to do that.” Jews are not allowed to forget where they came from. They cannot forget how they were led out of Egypt, how their law was revealed to Moshe Rabeinu. They cannot forget how Mama Rochel broke the silence of death to weep for their desolation. They cannot forget the Golden City, from which the divine presence is never exiled. As the psalmist of Psalm 137 wrote, “How can we sing the songs of the L-rd while in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.” That is how a nation survives for all time and against all odds, by passing on their most cherished values from generation to generation. No land, army, or authority is a substitute, and no culture or language can live without it.
Thus I conclude with the famous quotation from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers), “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it (2:21).” The Jew is immortal because the Jew must be immortal; the eternal people have an eternal mission.
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