Flogging a rapidly expiring horse is often ill-advised, yet occasionally necessary.
Should you, fine readers, cast your minds back a mere fortnight, you may recall that my previous missive concerned the sumptuous two-volume The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, that learned and lavish rebuttal to the fashionable contempt for our civilisational inheritance. In flagrant contravention of the old rabbinic adage that one “begins with denigration and ends with praise,” I opened with unstinting admiration for the book's manifold strengths before rounding on its single great deficiency: a curious and glaring lacuna where my own tribe ought to have stood. Why, I asked, should so splendid a history appear almost wholly innocent of the achievements, indeed the very existence, of the Jews during the eighteen centuries that separate Paul of Tarsus from Karl Marx?
The replies flooding my inbox proved illuminating. Many wrote to say that they too had noticed the omission and were glad to see it elucidated. Others were less charitable, intimating (or flatly declaring) that the Jews had no serious claim upon a history of Western civilisation in the first place. The most frequent response I received, however, took the shape of a perfectly reasonable question: Very well, how would you have written it? Which Jews merit a place in such an accounting? Which members of the tribe pressed their personal seal most indelibly into the wax of Western Christendom?
Excommunicated Spinoza, Samuel Hirszenberg (1907)