The story of the Jews

Author: Xu Xin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: When most people think of Jews, they associate them with Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the Auschwitz concentration camp, and today's Middle East conflict. But why have Jews shone so brightly in the economic arena? Why were they subjected to the Nazi Holocaust? Why are Jews determined to establish a state in Israel? Many people may not know the answers to these questions. Through the story of the Jewish people, this book attempts to provide answers. It is a popularization of the author's many years of academic research, featuring interactive text and images, making it easy to understand yet academically insightful. It is highly readable and an excellent work for understanding Jewish cultural history.
Walking into History
Around 1800 BCE, in one of the cradles of human civilization—the "Fertile Crescent" of the Middle East—a group of people appeared. Led by an elder, they drove their cattle and sheep, carrying their clothes and belongings, moving southwest toward the "Canaan Land," known as the "crossroads of the Middle East." Without a doubt, it was a migrating group. Despite the long journey and difficult conditions, the travelers were clear in their purpose, resolute in their determination, and moved forward step by step. Although such migrations were common in the Middle East at the time, this particular group was extraordinary. In fact, their migration was a declaration to the world that a new nation was entering history. In the years that followed, they would write a glorious chapter in the early history of humanity.
This group of people is the Jewish nation, the main subject of this book. In the general sense of ethnic origins, the Jewish nation was clearly one of the ancient peoples of the Tigris-Euphrates region. Abraham, known as the "father of the Jewish nation," was born in Ur, a Sumerian city in the center of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. "They came out of the Chaldean Ur," the Book of Genesis, which records the early history of the Jewish people, says of their origins. From the perspective of racial origins, the Jewish nation was part of the Semites who established the ancient Babylonian kingdom, belonging to a branch of the Semitic language family. Compared to many other nations that once lived in this region, the emergence of the Jewish nation was relatively late (about 1,500 years after the rise of Mesopotamian civilization). Before entering history, civilizations created by peoples such as the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Amorites (also known as the ancient Babylonians) had already flourished. Based on historical records, the Jewish nation entered history during the reign of Hammurabi, the "golden age" of the Babylonian kingdom. Emerging in such a highly developed civilization and atmosphere, the Jewish nation clearly benefited greatly, and the highly cultural nature of Jewish civilization from the beginning may be directly linked to this. However, due to the lack of historical records, like many other ancient peoples, the early history of the Jewish nation remains obscure.
Legends became the main source of constructing this period of history. However, unlike other nations, the Jewish people had a unique understanding of their own historical emergence. Although the history of all ancient peoples began with legends, no other nation traced its origins to a single individual, especially an ordinary person. For example, the Chinese nation traces its origins to the legendary emperors Yan and Huang, who held imperial titles. According to Jewish legend, the Jewish nation traces its origins to a man named Abraham (originally named Abram, later renamed Abraham, meaning "father of many nations" in Hebrew) and regards him as the "founder" of the Jewish nation. While people also know about Abraham's family and his group, in the eyes of the Jewish people, those individuals do not belong to the Jewish nation. Strictly speaking, Abraham only acquired the identity of a "Jew" after he left his original homeland and separated from those family members. This is .
Secondly, although Abraham was not poor and owned property and concubines, he was not a king or a noble. He was still an ordinary person, at least before leaving his birthplace. He became, or was considered to be, the ancestor of a nation entirely due to his ideological transformation and his rather unusual migration. In this way of narrating history, especially linking the beginning of a nation to an ordinary person, is not only in the history of early humanity that we know but may also be the only case. In a sense, this beginning may indicate, at the same time that it foreshadows the unique role of Jewish culture in recognizing the individual and the value of human beings, that the Jewish nation was "different" from the very beginning.
According to the legends preserved by the Jewish people, Abraham, around 1800 BCE, left Mesopotamia, where his ancestors lived, with his family and belongings, heading to the ancient Canaan Land, known as the "Promised Land" (17hePromisedLand) by the Jewish people, or the "Land of Israel," now commonly referred to as the Palestinian region. The Jewish people who migrated to Canaan were given a new name—"Hebrews." This was the earliest term specifically used to refer to the Jewish people. The term "Hebrew" (spelled in English as hebrew, is generally believed to derive from the word Itabiru) means "people who came from across the river" (referring to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), vividly describing their origin.
Whatever the case, on this new land, with this new name, a new and unique nation appeared on the stage of human history.