The story is told that on one occasion, Karl Barth was asked why he believed in God, and he responded, “Because of Jews.” When his questioner, surprised, asked, “Why because of Jews?” Barth is said to have responded, “Find me a Hittite in New York City.”Now, I don’t know for a fact that Barth said that—though it sounds quite plausible to me—but whether original to Barth or not, it’s a good point. The Jews are to anthropology and human history what the crocodile is to paleontology and zoology: a remarkable survival from a vanished time. And no, I’m not comparing Jews to crocodiles—quite the opposite, in fact, which only intensifies the point; where the crocodile has survived because it’s an indomitable predator that’s too mean and too efficient at killing things to die off, the Jewish people have not survived through power politics, but rather despite them. They have survived and kept their national and religious identity through conquest and exile, enduring centuries in which everyone’s hand was against them. This is a survival which is unmatched in human history.To understand this, consider Barth’s case of the Hittites—or for that matter, the Philistines, the Carthaginians, the Etruscans, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Medes, or the Babylonians. None of these peoples exist anymore. They were conquered, assimilated, lost their national and cultural identity, and disappeared into memory. This was, throughout the pagan era, the normal pattern. Religion was the tentpole of the culture—the people took their identity in large part from the gods they worshiped, and the gods were worthy of worship as long as they sustained the independence of their people and brought them victory in battle. When defeat came in battle and the nation was conquered, that marked the defeat of their gods by another, more powerful, set of gods; that brought an end to their religion (sometimes more gradually than others), which left the culture largely unsupported and caused it, over time, to collapse.Along with that, the language would go, because there was no longer anything to keep it alive, and no longer any utility in speaking it. In the modern era, with the rise of nationalism, we’ve seen a force develop in resistance to that process, and efforts to revitalize languages from Navajo to Welsh and rebuild the base of native speakers; but in the pagan era, whatever efforts there might have been to keep languages like Hittite alive, they didn’t succeed. There simply wasn’t the cultural capital for such an effort to succeed, or even to make sense, and so languages died with their cultures.The great exception from that time period is the Jews. Granted, Hebrew largely died as a spoken language and had to be reconstituted, even reinvented; but it was possible to do so, and the people still existed to do it. They survived conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and endured as a distinct people in exile to be returned to their homeland under the Persians; they endured the rule of the Persians and the Greeks, won their independence for a while, were reconquered by the Romans, who ultimately dispersed them across the empire—and they endured that, too. They existed as a people and a religion without a homeland, through many different cultures and under many different regimes, for the better part of two millennia; and after all that time, the idea of a Jewish state still made sense, because there was still an identifiable Jewish people to live in it. We’re accustomed to this as we’re accustomed to so many things simply because they’re facts—and yet, what an extraordinary fact it is! If we don’t stop and think about it, we miss that.To my way of thinking, then, Barth (or whoever actually said it first) was right to hold up the simple existence of the Jews as a reason to believe in the God of Israel. This is one of the reasons why, contrary to what folks like FVThinker seem to believe, the God of Israel cannot be disproven on the same grounds as the old pagan gods: his people still exist as his people, and theirs don’t.
