By Ed Lamond
In my last monthly column, I considered myself blest to live in Jersey, an island of free speech. I concluded that the deaths that Israel had inflicted on Gaza, fell far short of genocide, when related to Gaza’s population density. Many if not most commentators, and notably the BBC, have sided with Hamas – easily done, given Gaza’s continuing civilian casualties. In contrast, I had sought to distance myself, then apply logic. The truce, it seems, has now become warfare by other means: a contest between Hamas, reasonably described as a death-cult akin to the most extremist Knights Crusader, and the Israelis, whom they wish to exterminate.
The hope is that the Saudis and President Trump will manage to stop the bloodshed permanently, instilling peaceful coexistence, to the detriment of Hamas.
This month, I seek to put the Jews and Israelis into context.
ACCORDING to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, worldwide Jewry peaked at 16.6 million in 1939.
The Nazis then killed six million, including one million children – those who cast doubt on this Holocaust range between evil and imbecilic.
In major part, what saved the Jews was their dispersal or diaspora following Rome’s abolition of their country more than two thousand years ago. They were driven out, and Judaea was renamed Philistia, the Latin name for Palestine, itself derived from Greek.
A proud and unruly people, they had rebelled once too often against Rome’s Imperium.
How could they? The followers of the One God, whose very name most of them dared not speak, worship anyone as ludicrously human as a Roman Emperor?
Spread progressively over the globe, they remained cohesive by keeping their religion and its languages, Hebrew and later Yiddish, portable and exclusive. They carried their intelligence and business acumen with them.
In 2023, their diaspora was as follows:
| Jews (in millions) | % of Jewry | |
| Israel | 7.200 | 45.8 |
| USA | 5.700 | 36.3 |
| France | 0.440 | 2.8 |
| Canada | 0.398 | 2.5 |
| UK | 0.312 | 2.0 |
| Argentina | 0.171 | 1.1 |
| Russia | 0.132 | 0.8 |
| Germany | 0.125 | 0.8 |
| Australia | 0.117 | 0.7 |
| Other | 1.105 | 15.7 |
| World-wide | 15.700 | 100.0 |
First, an admission. These and subsequent statistics are cobbled together from Googling (or should that now be lower case, as is hoovering?) They may therefore be outdated or lacking in scope or detail, but their hearts are in the right place, at least in my opinion.
In 2024, worldwide Jewry rose marginally from 15.7 to 15.8 million, still beneath the peak in 1939, thanks to marriage or conversion out of Judaism – normally into Christianity or Islam – but also into atheism or agnosticism. I can’t think of any other country whose expatriates outnumber its patriates, nor have I identified any immigrants who have been more productively assimilated into their adoptive countries.
Thanks to Roman arms, the ghost of Goliath of Gath had triumphed over the People of David, his Israelite victor.
Goliath’s city was one of the five constituent city states of Philistia: alphabetically, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath itself, and Gaza; of these, only Gaza survives, although archaeologists have located the others. They were all on the ancient sea and land trade routes connecting the wealth of Egypt to the Middle East and Europe.
The Philistines, their original inhabitants, were probably seaborne invaders from the Aegean. Their past then interlocks with Israel’s in a ferment of myths and legends, population movements, invasions and mayhem – coalescing fitfully into history. That the current population of Gaza is Arab brings the ferment up to date.
Arabs claim descent from Abraham, as do Israelis. The former from his eldest son, Ishmael, sired on Hagar, his Egyptian concubine, the latter from Isaac, the son born of his wife, Sarah.
Convinced she was barren, Sarah had originally encouraged Abraham’s liaisons with Hagar, to perpetuate his line. But she shocked herself and most people by conceiving at 90, then giving birth to a perfectly formed baby, without dying in childbirth.
Mind you, Abraham was a decade older, and people lived much longer in those days. For example, Methuselah, the oldest human ever, died at 969. But I’ve digressed. Sarah’s relationship with Hagar and Ishmael then turned increasingly unpleasant, until Abraham humoured her by driving them into the desert, igniting the enmity between Arabs and Jews. Isaac, renamed Israel, then fathered the sons who fathered the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
These became the Sephardi Jews and, in 861CE, or soon after, their numbers were swollen by the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. A war-like, Turkic, pony-borne, Steppe-people, they had settled in the land bounded by the Caucasus Mountains to the south, the Black Sea to the west and Caspian Sea to the east. Each tribe communed with its gods through its Shamans, and Bulan, their overlord, wanted to unify them under a single religion.
He summoned representatives of the Christian, Muslim and Judaic faiths to answer two compulsory questions: First, which is the best faith? And, second, Which is the second best? The answers to the first question were predictable. Christians and Muslims were in conflict, as usual, so they grudgingly conceded that Judaism came next.
The Jewish response was “there is no God but ours”. Exultant, Bulan chose Judaism, aware that Christianity would have absorbed his people into the Byzantine Empire, and Islam into the Caliphate – powerless Judaism freed and unified them.
Space constricts me, but the Khazars eventually became the Ashkenazi Jews, who spoke Yiddish, and their diaspora tended northwards into western Russia and eastern Europe. There, pogroms and their persecution climaxed in the Holocaust.
Should you wish to delve further into this, I recommend The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler. First published in 1976, it’s still in print. You might also try Darkness at Noon, his evisceration of Communism, first published in 1940. It’s also in print.
But, back to the Jews – and my theme. No other people, or religion come to that, has punched so far above its weight in developing the West’s version of civilisation, based on freedom of thought, speech, religion, assembly and travel.
They have excelled, inter alia, in physics, chemistry and biology, mathematics, psychiatry, economics, music, dance, comedy, acting and literature.
The following names attest to this, generally in the order they occurred to me: Peter Sellers, Bob Dylan (Zimmerman, actually), Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Goldie Hawn, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Feynman, Maimonides, Jesus, of course, also St Paul and St Peter, Gustav Mahler, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Anne Frank, Groucho Marx, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Woody Allen, Sammy Davis Jr, Marc Bolan, George Ballanchine, Winona Ryder, Scarlett Johansson and Elon Musk (aspirationally, he says, not by birth).
That’s more than enough – you’ve no doubt got the drift.
Perhaps even more telling is the number of Nobel Prizes won by Jews. Of the 965 awarded between their inception in 1901 and 2023, Jews won at least 216, or 22%, including those contenders with a minimum of one Jewish parent.
This makes sense, since Judaism is inherited through the female line, sundered when Jewish males marry out of it. Might this, I wonder, hark back to their Biblical sojourn in Egypt, where Pharaonic succession was also matrilinear. But I’ve digressed again. Jews have won in all six Nobel categories, as follows:
| Nobel category | Awarded to Jews | % of each category |
| Chemistry | 37 | 19 |
| Physics | 56 | 25 |
| Economics | 38 | 41 |
| Literature | 16 | 13 |
| Physiology or Medicine | 60 | 26 |
| Peace | 9 | 8 |
Total awarded: 965, of which Jewish: 216, 22%.
Not a bad effort for less than 0.2% of the world’s population. Had mathematics been a category, they would have won more prizes.
Anti-semitism also suppressed their achievements, especially during the early decades of the prize. My initial Googling indicated, for example, that Jewish prize-winners rose from 22% since 1901 to 32% since 1945, despite the Holocaust. I have searched again, but cannot corroborate this, bowdlerised possibly by an algorithm. In comparison, Christians, members of the world’s largest religion, were 31.6% of the world’s population in 2022 and Muslims the second largest, with 25.8%. Their respective Nobel tallies were 65.4% and 0.5%.
The Christian majority is hardly surprising, since Christian countries triggered the industrial revolution and still bask in its afterglow.
The Muslims’ performance is tragic. During Europe’s Dark Age, Islam was the citadel of knowledge and civilisation. Its Caliphs encouraged the rescue of Ancient Greek mythology, philosophy and science, preserved then in Arabic. They also encouraged the adoption and development of Indian mathematics: zero and decimalisation, for example, as well as algebra, an Arabic word, and the Indian numerical system, now described as Arabic.
Try, for example, dividing or multiplying, adding or subtracting the Latin number MXCXLVII (1,947) and CCXIV (214). Difficult? Yes, but not impossible: various awkward strategems were necessary, supplemented when necessary with an abacus.
Arabic numerals could also decimalise the Ancient Greeks’ discovery of Pi, from its evolution into 22/7ths, an unwieldy fraction, into 3.14 and a journey to infinity beyond the decimal point.
Such accuracy was fundamental to western science and micro-engineering, a confluence which has reached the depths of the Earth’s oceans, trodden the Moon and probed through the Solar System into outer space and the origins of the universe. That India has now joined the space race confirms that its mathematical brilliance is returning home, for further development and discoveries.
Sadly, Middle Eastern Islam still tends to skirt the outskirts of the modern world. Its tragedy intensified as its secular leaders, who had evolved from Abbasid Caliphs into Ottoman Sultans, lost power, culminating in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
Muslim religious extremists, whom they had suppressed, filled the void. Their philosophy was succinctly defined by Osama bin Laden: You love life, we love death – or words to those effects. He was actually addressing the Jews, but this also applies to the West, into whose freedoms the Jews have integrated, then excelled.
In contrast, bin Laden and his ilk have spawned death-cults intent on murdering infidels and, when expedient, killing Muslims and themselves in their earthly pilgrimage to their God and Paradise. Secular pursuits – like science, literature, painting, music and delighting in life – they dismiss as irreligious.
Hamas would agree, so it follows that a two-state solution is more likely to perpetuate warfare with Israel than instil peace.
In summary, I believe that the Jews’ quest for intelligence and love of life are now innate. I am no geneticist but how long did it take to breed spaniels, say, or poodles?
In comparison, Jews have been living on their wits for 4,000 years. Their literacy and numeracy verge on 100%, their contributions to science, mathematics and the arts speak not so much volumes as encyclopaedias.
In conclusion, if you want to breed intelligence, marry into Jewry. If you want football skills, marry a Uruguayan. They have won the World Cup twice, two Olympic golds and 15 Copa America Championships, their skills concentrated in a population of only 3.38 million.
Was never a truer word spoken than in jest?
Edward Lamond was born in Calcutta, three and a half months after the Raj ended. He has set foot in more than 60 countries and been resident in eight: India, Tanganyika, Kenya, Jersey, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong and the USA. He has now chosen to rest in peace in Jersey. Why? Go for a stroll. See for yourself.
