Overstating the Jewish role in the founding of the West

In his new book Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, David Klinghoffer writes:

The Jewish rejection of Jesus was the founding act of Western civilization. [Italics added.] Had the Jews welcomed the Christian message, at any stage prior to the crucial council of Jerusalem at which Peter and James accepted Paul’s belief that it was time to drop Jewish law from the requirements placed on Christians, the Jesus movement would have remained a Jewish sect with all the handicaps that implies. Unlike Christianity, and also unlike Islam, Judaism was never intended or suited to be a mass religion. Had the Jews embraced the Gospel of Jesus Christ in greater numbers, there would be no Christian Europe.

That phrase, “the founding act of Western civilization,” is so typical of the sloppiness and hype of conservative intellectual life today. It is one thing to say that the Jewish rejection of Jesus was a condition—though an inadvertent condition—of the founding of Western civilization. That is true. But it is wildly untrue to say that it was the founding act of Western civilization.

By Klinghoffers’s reasoning, we could say, for example, that the Persian Empire’s failure to beat the Greeks at the battle of Salamis was the founding act of Western civilization, since if the Persians had won the battle Greece would have been conquered and there would have been no Athenian Golden Age, no Greco-Roman civilization, and no West as we know it. But the Persians’ failure to beat the Greeks was not the founding act of Western civilization. It was an indispensable condition of the founding of Western civilization. And there were many such indispenable conditions of the founding of Western civilization.

Klinghoffer’s reasoning is not just wrong, but perverse. It makes the unsuccessful opponents of what eventually became the West the founders of the West. In other words, it is a piece of multicultural logic, by which the West’s Other, or in this case Christianity’s Other, is made its center.

Since the central role of the Jews in Western history and human history is already so well acknowledged and well understood by Americans, what ethno/religious egotism drives Klinghoffer to overstate the point so grossly? Enough of this inordinate Judeo-centrism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2005 01:49 PM | Send