Quotes from Robert Eisen

The more important value for Jewish success was a high regard for the cultivation of the intellect…

Also instructive for anyone – Jew or non-Jews – looking to succeed in the modern world is the entire saga of Jewish history that has been discussed throughout this book. It shows how perseverance in the face of adversity can pay off in the long term.

Most important for our purposes here is that the [Jewish] obsession with learning and cultivating the intellect had no precise parallel in Christian Europe in the early medieval period.

Their [the Rabbi's] answer to the catastrophe that befell the Jewish community in the Roman period was to embrace life even more intensely than before.

That is why Jews succeeded as they did in Europe: Christian Europeans had created an environment in which Jews could thrive. Jews, who had recently been invited to become part of non-Jewish society, found themselves entering a world that was built on ideas that were already deeply entrenched in their own collective mindset.

To put it succinctly, in fashioning a Judaism that allowed Jews to survive centuries of subjugation, the rabbis also fashioned a Judaism that allowed Jews to thrive in the modern period.

The Protestants were not much better than the Catholics in their treatment of dissenters.

If Judaism was going to survive, the rabbis would have to take their religion into their own hands and shape it so that it could deal with the reality of exile. The same sense of independence helps explain why the rabbis adopted a high degree of tolerance for each other's opinions on the meaning of God's laws. If the rabbis could argue with God, as they sometimes did, they could certainly argue with other rabbis.