I spent much of the weekend working my way through the very excellent "Atlas of Jewish Civilization." I actually got it for my Mom for Mother's Day, but she's in San Francisco visiting my sister for a week, so our Mother's Day celebration is delayed, and the book was sitting there yelling, "read me!" and I could not resist. I'm glad I didn't. I learned more about the history of the Jewish people in one weekend than I learned in the rest of my life. What scared me about the book was not the scale of the Holocaust, which the Jewish community makes darn sure that Jewish kids learn, but the fact that the Holocaust was not the first mass killing of Jews, not by a long shot. Throughout history there have been purges. Sometimes they are killed simply because some other nation wants their land. Sometimes Jews were killed because of religion (the Crusades, the Inquisition). Did you know that Christians were highly persecuted in the first few centuries after Jesus until a Roman Emperor was baptized, and almost immediately the newly approved Christians turned around and started killing Jews, the only group that had not discriminated against Christians before? The Russians, with the Pale of Settlement and the pogroms, did their share of killing Jews as well. When you have such a survey of Jewish history in front of you, it's hard not to wonder what the world would be like if people had just let Jews live in peace. I can say one thing, there would be a heck of a lot more of us around.

Another fact that surprised me was that until the mid-20th century, Jews and Muslim Arabs had had a great relationship, having never warred against one another. In fact Jewish communities in Iran and Iraq were the longest continuous Jewish communities in existence, having been around for about 3000 years. Now there are less than 100 Jews living in those countries.

Anyway, back to what scared me. I had always been led to believe that nothing like the Holocaust could ever happen again, and that it was only a strange mix of nationalism and Germanic history that allowed it to happen in the first place. Books like "Hitler's Willing Executioners" furthered my belief in such. Now I know that is so much BS, as events like the Holocaust have been happening to Jews throughout their history. The Holocaust was worse in total numbers than any other massacres, but in terms of percentage of Jews killed versus total Jews on Earth, it was nothing special. So next time someone tells me not to be paranoid about events I see as blatantly anti-Semetic, I will tell them to read something like "The Atlas of Jewish Civilization" and then come talk to me about being paranoid.

Don't let me make you think that book is all downers. The authors do a great job of illustrating all the great things that have comes from Judaism. In fact, when people say stuff like America was founded on Christian principles and laws, you remind them that those Christians principles and laws are really Jewish principles and laws that the Christian world adopted. Why? Because they make sense and are a far better way of running society than anything anyone else has come up with.