I

THE RANGE OF JEWISH HISTORY


Le peuple juif n'est pas seulement considerable par son
antiquite, mais il est encore singulier en sa duree, qui a
toujours continue depuis son origine jusqu'a maintenant ...
S'etendant depuis les premiers temps jusqu'aux derniers,
l'histoire des juifs enferme dans sa duree celle de toutes nos
histoires.--PASCAL, _Pensees_, II, 7.

To make clear the range of Jewish history, it is necessary to set down
a few general, elementary definitions by way of introduction.

It has long been recognized that a fundamental difference exists
between historical and unhistorical peoples, a difference growing out
of the fact of the natural inequality between the various elements
composing the human race. Unhistorical is the attribute applied to
peoples that have not yet broken away, or have not departed very far,
from the state of primitive savagery, as, for instance, the barbarous
races of Asia and Africa who were the prehistoric ancestors of the
Europeans, or the obscure, untutored tribes of the present, like the
Tartars and the Kirghiz. Unhistorical peoples, then, are ethnic groups
of all sorts that are bereft of a distinctive, spiritual
individuality, and have failed to display normal, independent capacity
for culture. The term historical, on the other hand, is applied to the
nations that have had a conscious, purposeful history of appreciable
duration; that have progressed, stage by stage, in their growth and in
the improvement of their mode and their views of life; that have