What about monotheism, then? Doesn’t Judaism at least deserve special praise for pioneering the belief in a single God, which was unparalleled anywhere else in the world (even if this belief was then spread to the four corners of the earth by Christians and Muslims more than by Jews)? We can quibble even about that, since the first clear evidence for monotheism comes from the religious revolution of Pharaoh Akhenaten around 1350 bc, and documents such as the Mesha Stele (erected by the Moabite King Mesha) indicate that the religion of biblical Israel was not all that different from the religion of neighbouring kingdoms such as Moab. Mesha describes his great god Chemosh in almost the same way that the Old Testament describes Yahweh. But the real problem with the idea that Judaism contributed monotheism to the world is that this is hardly something to be proud of. From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.
Monotheism did little to improve the moral standards of humans – do you really think Muslims are inherently more ethical than Hindus, just because Muslims believe in a single god while Hindus believe in many gods? Were Christian conquistadores more ethical than pagan Native American tribes? What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars. Polytheists found it perfectly acceptable that different people will worship different gods and perform diverse rites and rituals. They rarely if ever fought, persecuted, or killed people just because of their religious beliefs. Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions and religious discrimination.11
Compare, for example, the attitude of Emperor Ashoka of India in the third century bc to that of the Christian emperors of the late Roman Empire. Emperor Ashoka ruled an empire teeming with myriad religions, sects and gurus. He gave himself the official titles of ‘Beloved of the Gods’ and ‘He who regards everyone with affection’. Sometime around 250 bc, he issued an imperial edict of tolerance which proclaimed that:
Beloved-of-the-Gods, the king who regards everyone with affection, honours both ascetics and the householders of all religions … and values that there should be growth in the essentials of all religions. Growth in essentials can be done in different ways, but all of them have as their root restraint in speech, that is, not praising one’s own religion, or condemning the religion of others without good cause … Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion’, only harms his own religion. Therefore contact between religions is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, the king who regards everyone with affection, desires that all should be well learned in the good doctrines of other religions.12
Five hundred years later, the late Roman Empire was as diverse as Ashoka’s India, but when Christianity took over, the emperors adopted a very different approach to religion. Beginning with Constantine the Great and his son Constantius II, the emperors closed all non-Christian temples and forbade so-called ‘pagan’ rituals on pain of death. The persecution culminated under the reign of Emperor Theodosius – whose name means ‘Given by God’ – who in 391 issued the Theodosian Decrees that effectively made all religions except Christianity and Judaism illegal (Judaism too was persecuted in numerous ways, but it remained legal to practise it).13 According to the new laws, one could be executed even for worshipping Jupiter or Mithras in the privacy of one’s own home.14 As part of their campaign to cleanse the empire of all infidel heritage, the Christian emperors also suppressed the Olympic Games. Having been celebrated for more than a thousand years, the last ancient Olympiad was held sometime in the late fourth or early fifth century.15
Of course, not all monotheist rulers were as intolerant as Theodosius, whereas numerous rulers rejected monotheism without adopting the broad-minded policies of Ashoka. Nevertheless, by insisting that ‘there is no god but our God’ the monotheist idea tended to encourage bigotry. Jews would do well to downplay their part in disseminating this dangerous meme, and let the Christians and Muslims carry the blame for it.
Jewish physics, Christian biology
Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do we see Jews make an extraordinary contribution to humankind as a whole, through their outsized role in modern science. In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20 per cent of all Nobel Prize laureates in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.16 But it should be stressed that this has been a contribution of individual Jews rather than of Judaism as a religion or a culture. Most of the important Jewish scientists of the past 200 years acted outside the Jewish religious sphere. Indeed, Jews began to make their remarkable contribution to science only once they had abandoned the yeshivas in favour of the laboratories.