WorldPerfect

The Jewish Impact on Civilization

Ken Spiro

• Publisher: Simcha Press EB
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780757324062
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In pursuit of an answer to the question of what would constitute a perfect world, author Ken Spiro questioned more than 1, 500 people of various backgrounds and religions. His findings revealed six core elements: Respect for human life; peace and harmony; justice and equality; education; family; and social responsibility. He then set off on a journey to find out why these were such common goals across cultural, economic, social and racial lines, and in the process, traced the history of the development of world religions, values and ethics. As a rabbi, he paid particular attention to how Judaism impacted, and was influenced by, the course of these developments. The result is a highly readable and well-documented book about the origins of values and virtues in Western civilization as influenced by the Greeks, Romans, Christians, Muslims and, most significantly, the Jews. The history of religion, presented in Spiro's highly readable style, is a fascinating and timely subject, especially in today's volatile religious climate. Spiro divides his book into five engaging parts:

• Where the Quality of Mercy Was Not Strained: The World of Greece and Rome
• Against the Grain: The Jewish View
• A Father to Many Nations: Abraham and the Implications of Monotheism
• With Sword and Fire: The Rise of Christianity and Islam
• The New Promised Land: Impact of Judaism on Liberal Democracies

Readers of all faiths will find that the elements of a perfect world can only be achieved by a common understanding of our mutual backgrounds and that our diverse religions are all merely branches growing from one single tree.

Part I

Where the Quality of Mercy Was Not Strained: The World of Greece and Rome

CHAPTER 1 Horror Show

Of all the principles we might list, the basic right to life seems certainly the most fundamental. We all want to live without fear of being arbitrarily deprived of life. We all want to live with a certain minimal amount of human dignity. We all want certain protection in the law against oppression by tyrants who might consider certain segments of society expendable simply because they are too weak or too poor to protect themselves.

As obvious and important as this concept seems to us today, it was not so obvious or important in the world of antiquity.

To begin with, Greeks and Romans—as well as virtually every ancient culture we know of—practiced infanticide.

By infanticide, I mean the killing of newborn children as a way of population control, sex selection (generally, boys were desirable and girls undesirable) and as a way of ridding society of potentially burdensome or deformed members.

A baby that appeared weak or sickly at birth, or had even a minor birth defect, such as a cleft palate, harelip or clubfoot, or was in some other way imperfect was killed. This was not done by some Nazi-like baby removal squad. This was done by an immediate member of the family, usually the mother or father, and usually within three days after birth.

The method of “disposal” varied, but generally we know that, in antiquity, babies were taken out to the forest and left to die of exposure, dropped down wells to drown, or thrown into sewers or onto manure piles.

The horror of a parent killing his or her child is shocking enough. But that this parent should have so little regard for the child as to unmercifully dump it where it might die slowly and painfully, or be picked up by someone to be reared into slavery or prostitution (as sometimes happened), suggests a level of cruelty beyond our modern imagination. In his essay “The Evolution of Childhood,” Lloyd DeMause reports:

Infanticide during antiquity has usually been played down despite literally hundreds of clear references by ancient writers that it was an accepted, everyday occurrence. Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, “potted” in jars to starve to death, and exposed in every hill and roadside, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend.” (Euripides, Ion, 504)¹

Gruesome evidence of this practice has been found in various archeological excavations. Most notably, in the Athenian Agora, a well was uncovered containing the remains of 175 babies thrown there to drown.²

Lest we assume that was the practice of the poor and ignorant, one of the most influential thinkers in Western intellectual history—none other than Aristotle—argued in his Politics that killing children was essential to the functioning of society. He wrote:

There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up. And to avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state.³

Note the tone of his statement. Aristotle isn’t saying “I like killing babies,” but he is making a cold, rational calculation: Overpopulation is dangerous, and this is the most expedient way to keep it in check.

Four hundred years after Aristotle, the practice of killing babies was firmly entrenched in the Roman Empire. This is an excerpt from a famous and much-quoted letter from a Roman citizen named Hilarion to his pregnant wife, Alis, dated June 17, circa 1 C.E.:

Know that I am still in Alexandria. And do not worry if they all come back and I remain in Alexandria. I ask and beg of you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment I will send it up to you. If you deliver a child [before I get home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it.⁴

Hilarion, as we see, is very much concerned about his baby son, his heir. Indeed, a typical Roman family might be made up of two or three sons—to ensure succession should one son die—but seldom more than one daughter, who was considered a burdensome responsibility and was expendable. DeMause, one of many scholars quoting the Hilarion letter, adds:

Girls were, of course, valued little, and the instructions of Hilarion to his wife Alis are typical of the open way these things were discussed.… The result was a large imbalance of males over females.… Available statistics for antiquity show large surpluses of boys over girls; for instance, out of 79 families who gained Milesian citizenship about 228–220 B.C., there were 118 sons and 28 daughters.⁵

Of course, it could be argued that on other fronts the Greeks and the Romans were capable of refined thinking and an elevated approach to behavior. Seneca, the famed Roman philosopher and writer, developed a lengthy treatise on the control and consequences of anger. In it, he draws the distinction between anger and wisdom, using the following example:

Children also, if weak and deformed, we drown, not through anger, but through the wisdom of preferring the sound to the useless.⁶

Incidentally, Seneca, exemplifying the noblest ideals of Roman philosophy, condemned killing of human beings and even animals for sport. But he saw nothing wrong with killing babies for expediency. Indeed, infanticide was so common, so “natural” that playwrights made fun of it in the comedies of the time.⁷ For example, the comedy The Girl from Samos, by the fourth-century B.C.E. Greek poet and playwright Menander, centers on two illegitimate babies, one of whom is exposed and whose mother ends up caring for the other child while fooling her lover that the baby is his.⁸

But then, the whole attitude toward the weak and helpless was totally skewed in ancient societies. Apart from thinking nothing of killing infants when they saw fit, the Romans engaged in the practice of mutilating unwanted children to make them at least “useful” for begging. (Incidentally, this horrifying practice is still seen today in India.)

Our morally minded friend Seneca, who was so concerned with the issue of useful versus useless, also came up with a tortured justification for this abomination:

Look on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks, and those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulder pulled down out of shape in order that his grotesqueries may excite laughter.… Let us go to the origin of those ills—a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks—a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children.… What wrong has been done to the Republic? On the contrary, have not these children been done a service inasmuch as their parents had cast them out?⁹

Today, we would view the killing of newborn babies because they were unwanted or the mutilation of tiny infants for profit as probably the most heinous act a person could commit. What is the weakest, most defenseless, most innocent member of society? A little child. Therefore, we believe that a child, a baby, deserves the protection of society even more than an adult. But in Greek and Roman thinking, rather than being accorded the most protection, children were given the least; this happened simply because, as totally powerless, they were the easiest people to trample on or get rid of.

William L. Langer, Harvard professor and former president of the American Historical Association, points out in his foreword to The History of Childhood:

Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways.¹⁰

So we see how very different the attitude of antiquity was to ours. The most basic right—to life (never mind life with dignity)—was by no means guaranteed.¹¹

Another example, which clearly indicates this difference, is the practice of human sacrifice—killing people as a form of religious observance.

As with infanticide, virtually every culture we know of engaged in this practice: killing people in order to appease or pay homage to the gods. From the earliest recorded history to as late as the sixteenth century in the Americas and seventeenth century in Asia, human sacrifice was an accepted way of worship.

The Greeks and the Romans seemed generally more advanced on this one issue—with some exceptions—preferring to sacrifice animals to their phalanx of gods.

The Greeks practiced a custom where a human scapegoat was offered to the gods. Writes Sir James George Frazer in The Illustrated Golden Bough, his study of magic and religion:

The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as a plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.… They were led about the city and then sacrificed, apparently by being stoned to death outside the city.… But such sacrifices were not confined to extraordinary occasions of public calamity; it appears that every year, at the festival of the Thargelia in May, two victims, one for the men and one for the women, were led out of Athens and stoned to death.¹²

Romans were more fond of sacrificing flocks of sheep; then, after the entrails and livers were extracted and reserved for godly consumption, they’d have a banquet and enjoy the rest themselves. Still, human sacrifice—of children, slaves and prisoners of war—was an accepted practice until the time of Hannibal,¹³ and though it was officially outlawed in 97 B.C.E., it continued on a smaller scale, nevertheless, well into the first century C.E.

DeMause cites the following confirming sources:

Dio said Julianus “killed many boys as a magic rite”; Suetonius said because of a portent the Senate “decreed that no male born that year should be reared”; and Pliny the Elder spoke of men who seek “to secure the leg marrow and the brain of infants.”¹⁴

Probably, the practice was brought into the empire and nurtured by the various peoples the Romans conquered.

The Carthaginians, who represented a superpower in the region before being vanquished by Rome in the Punic Wars, were fond of human sacrifice to honor their most important god, Baal-Haman. Italian historian Indro Montanelli describes a Carthaginian religious ceremony in his book Romans Without Laurels:

When it was a matter of placating or ingratiating themselves with Baal-Haman, they used babies, putting them in the arms of his great bronze statue and letting them fall into the fire blazing below. They were known to burn as many as three hundred a day while the blast of trumpets and the thunder of drums drowned out their screams.¹⁵

Similarly, Druidism, a Celtic religion that favored human sacrifice, entered the empire after the conquest of Gaul (which is now modern France and western Germany). The Romans went to the trouble of suppressing this cult, which, strangely, they considered “immoral.” I say strangely, because while the Romans frowned on the slaughter of people for the purposes of worship, they thought it was perfectly fine to slaughter people for the sheer fun of it.

Surely, there can’t be a better example of a total disregard for the value of human life than killing people for entertainment. And here the Romans take first prize. No civilization before or since was so bloodthirsty in this regard. Throughout the empire, more than two hundred stadiums were specifically erected for the exhibition of this particular “sport,” which required that people and animals be housed and displayed in such a way that they couldn’t escape before being murdered in front of a cheering and jeering audience.

The practice was extremely popular, and Emperor Augustus in his Acts brags that during his reign (29 B.C.E. to 14 C.E.) he staged games where ten thousand men fought and three thousand five hundred wild beasts were slain. While savage fights to the death between gladiators—who were usually slaves trained for the purpose—w...