From Persecution to Nationhood: The Jewish Journey That Defied All Odds

There is no parallel in human history to the survival of the Jewish people. Every other nation of the ancient world that lost its land and was scattered ceased, within a few generations, to exist. The Babylonians, the Philistines, the Hittites, the Edomites — all melted into the peoples around them and vanished from history. The Jewish people, scattered for nearly two thousand years across every continent, hunted and expelled and slaughtered again and again, did not vanish. They endured. And at the end of that long ordeal, against every law of history and every reasonable expectation, they returned to their ancient land and became a nation once more. The journey from persecution to nationhood is, quite simply, a story that should not have been possible.

To grasp the magnitude of that journey, one must hold its two ends together in the mind at once. At the one end stands a people without a country, scattered as a defenseless minority among the nations, subject in every age to the whims of rulers who could tax them, confine them, expel them, or kill them at will, and who frequently did. At the other end stands a sovereign state with its own government, its own army, its own seat among the nations of the world. Between those two ends lie two thousand years of exile and a mountain of suffering almost beyond reckoning. That a people should travel that road at all is remarkable; that they should travel it and arrive, within living memory of their worst catastrophe, at full nationhood in their own ancient homeland, is without precedent in the annals of mankind.

A People Marked for Destruction in Every Age

The history of the Jewish people in exile reads as an almost unbroken catalogue of persecution. They were expelled from one kingdom after another — from England, from France, from Spain in the very year Columbus sailed. They were herded into ghettos, forbidden to own land, blamed for plagues, and massacred in the pogroms of eastern Europe. The medieval Inquisition tortured those who would not abandon their faith. And in the twentieth century the hatred reached its monstrous climax in the Holocaust, in which a third of the entire Jewish people — six million souls — were murdered in a systematic campaign of extermination. As the ancient Passover liturgy declares, in every generation enemies have risen up to destroy them.

Any one of these catastrophes might have ended a smaller or less rooted people. Taken together, across so many centuries and so many lands, they represented a pressure toward extinction that no other nation has ever survived. And yet the same liturgy that names the enemies of every generation completes the sentence: in every generation they rose up to destroy us, and the Holy One delivered us out of their hands. The survival was not merely endurance. It was, the Jewish people have always insisted, deliverance.

The catalogue is worth laying out, for its sheer length is part of the argument. The Romans destroyed the Temple and drove the people from their land. The Crusaders, marching to the Holy Land, slaughtered Jewish communities along the Rhine. When the Black Death swept Europe in the fourteenth century, the Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells and were burned alive by the thousands. In 1290 they were expelled from England, in 1306 and again later from France, and in 1492 — the year Columbus sailed — from Spain, where those who would not convert were driven out or handed to the Inquisition. In the seventeenth century the Chmielnicki massacres in the Ukraine destroyed hundreds of Jewish communities. In the Russian Empire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, waves of pogroms — organized, often officially tolerated mob violence — killed, raped, and ruined Jews by the thousands and sent millions fleeing westward. And then, in the heart of civilized Europe in the twentieth century, came the Holocaust, the most systematic and technologically efficient campaign of extermination ever mounted against any people.

Out of Persecution, a Movement

It was out of this long ordeal of persecution that the modern movement for Jewish nationhood was born. For centuries the longing to return to Zion had lived in the prayers and the hearts of the scattered people, but it was the renewed persecutions of the modern age that turned that ancient longing into an organized political cause. A Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl, covering the trial of a Jewish French army officer falsely convicted of treason amid an eruption of public anti-Jewish hatred, concluded that the Jews would never be safe as a permanent minority among the nations, however assimilated they tried to become. In 1896 he set out his case in a short book arguing for the establishment of a Jewish state, and the following year he convened the First Zionist Congress, declaring afterward that he had there founded the Jewish state — a thing that would, he predicted, become plain to all the world within fifty years.

He was very nearly exact. Within just over fifty years of that congress, the State of Israel was declared. The movement Herzl helped to launch drew waves of Jewish immigrants back to the land of their ancestors, fleeing the pogroms of the east and, later, the gathering storm in Germany. They came and drained the swamps, founded the farms and towns, and built the institutions of a state-in-waiting, so that when the moment of independence came, the framework of a nation was already in place. The point worth marking is the bitter irony at the root of it: the very persecution meant to destroy the Jewish people instead drove them, at last, to reclaim their nationhood. What the enemies of Israel intended for evil became the occasion of Israel’s restoration.

The Indestructible Promise

The believer who reads the Hebrew Scriptures finds the survival of the Jewish people not as a mystery but as a promise kept. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God bound the continuance of Israel as a nation to the fixed order of the heavens themselves: as surely as the sun rises by day and the moon and stars by night, so surely would the seed of Israel never cease to be a nation before Him. Only if a man could measure the heavens and search out the foundations of the earth, Jeremiah added, would God cast off the offspring of Israel for all they had done. It is one of the most absolute guarantees in all of Scripture — and the unbroken survival of the Jewish people through two thousand years of attempted annihilation stands as its visible vindication.

This is the deepest answer to the riddle that has puzzled historians and philosophers for centuries: why the Jews alone, of all the scattered peoples of antiquity, did not disappear. The natural explanations — their faith, their law, their tight communities, their reverence for learning — are real and important. But behind them the Scriptures place a further cause: a covenant that God made and would not break. The survival of Israel is not finally a tribute to the toughness of a people. It is a testimony to the faithfulness of their God.

From the Ashes, a Nation

The final stage of the journey is the most astonishing of all. It was barely three years after the gates of the death camps were opened — while the ashes of European Jewry were, in a manner of speaking, still warm — that the State of Israel was declared. A people that the most powerful machinery of hatred in human history had set out to erase did not merely survive; within a single decade of its near-destruction it stood up as a sovereign nation in its own ancient land. There is no comparable reversal in the records of any people. The road ran from the ghetto and the camp to the parliament and the flag, in the span of a few short years.

The survivors themselves were woven into the founding. Among those who stepped off the refugee ships and into the fight for the new state were men and women who had walked out of the death camps with the numbers still tattooed on their arms. They had lost their families, their homes, and their whole world in Europe, and they came to the one place that would take them in, and there took up arms to defend it. There is a terrible and a glorious symmetry in it: the generation that had been marked for total destruction became the generation that secured the nation’s rebirth. The people whom the machinery of hatred had reduced to ash and number rose, within three years, to raise a flag over a state of their own. No storyteller would dare invent such a reversal; it would be dismissed as too improbable to believe. Yet it is sober history.

The prophet Ezekiel had seen it in a vision long before: a valley of dry, scattered, hopeless bones — the whole house of Israel, who said, our bones are dried, and our hope is lost, and we are cut off. And the Lord commanded the prophet to speak to the bones, and they came together, and stood up, an exceeding great army. No generation has had more reason than ours to read that vision as something more than poetry. The dry bones of a people the world had written off have stood up. The journey from persecution to nationhood is the dry-bones prophecy walking in the daylight of modern history.

A Witness That Will Not Be Erased

For the Christian, the survival and restoration of the Jewish people is not a matter of indifference. It is one of the clearest evidences in the world that the God of the Bible keeps His covenants. The Church received its Scriptures, its Savior, and its hope through this people; their endurance is, in a real sense, the guarantee of our own promises. A God who would abandon Israel after such pledges could not be trusted to keep faith with the Church either. But He has not abandoned them. Against the combined hatred of the centuries, the Jewish people have endured and returned and stood up as a nation — a living witness, written across the whole sweep of history, that the word of the Lord stands forever, and that He has not cast away the people whom He foreknew.

There is, finally, a word of sober warning and of hope woven into this history that the friends of Israel do well to remember. The warning is for the nations: across the long centuries, empire after empire and regime after regime set themselves against the Jewish people, and it is the Jewish people who remain while their persecutors have passed into the dust. The Scriptures had said as much — that those who blessed Abraham’s seed would be blessed, and those who cursed them cursed. The hope is for all who trust the God of the Bible: if He kept faith with Israel through such a night of suffering, and brought them at last from persecution to nationhood, then His promises to His people in every age may be relied upon without fear. The journey of the Jewish people is not only their own story. It is a standing proof, set in the plain light of history, that the God who makes covenants is a God who keeps them.