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.

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 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 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.