Toynbee’s Purpose with the Jews

As someone whose familiarity with ancient Jewish history and Old Testament
scholarship is at best superficial, I do not feel able to judge on the accuracy of the account of
post-exilic Jewish intellectual developments and changes in Judaic religious concepts that
Professor Toynbee presents in chapter fifteen of his “Reconsiderations”, somewhat
pretentiously entitled “The History and Prospects of the Jews”.1 It seems persuasive to my lay
understanding and consistent with my scant background knowledge on the topic. Toynbee
was certainly not an authority in Judaic studies, and apparently based his narrative on but a
handful of English-language works by his contemporaries R. Travers Herford, George Foot
Moore, W. O. E. Oesterley, Charles Francis Whitley and the Rabbi Claude Montefiore. This,
however, far from discrediting his interpretation, helps him to detach himself from the
technicalities and gives him a perspective from which to delineate a comprehensive picture.
What I think is problematic is that after discerning two threads in Jewish thought that, for
him, constitute a basic underlying paradox of Judaism – and let us assume that that is a
genuine paradox – he goes on to expound his views on how Jews can escape from their
alleged predicament. Further, these views seem to be at odds with some comments he makes
at other points in the text.
Although the word fossil that Toynbee applied to the Jews and other contemporary
ethno-religious groups in an earlier volume of his magnum opus, has derogatory and social
Darwinist connotations, and his Jewish readers rightly perceived it as a stumbling block,
throughout the chapter he makes evident that his usage of the term was intended to be purely
analytical, in accordance with his theory of civilizations. Toynbee’s view of post-Biblical
Jewry is markedly different from the Christian tradition from which he pretends he cannot
liberate himself.2 Not only one finds no trace of animosity against the Jews in his text, but he
also holds that Judaism did not lose any of its validity with the advent of Christianity.
Moreover, if he validates pre-Vatican II Christian terminology when he equates post-biblical
Judaism with Pharisaism, he also exculpates the Pharisees from the charge of hypocrisy that is

1. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 12, Reconsiderations (London: Oxford University Press, 1961),
477–517.
2. Ibid., 478.
most often associated with them in the Christian mind. His sympathetic and unbiased manner
of treating Jewish history, however, only make his exhortations in the last pages of the chapter
all the more unexpected.

legyenek a zsidók térítők – de maga Toynbee láthatóan hitetlen, teljesen

instrumentálisan kezeli a vallást
a zsidók ne csak térítők legyenek, de előbb integrálják Jézust és Szent Pál
törvényértelmezését és szakadjanak el a száműzetés élőtti, nemzeti istentől (a törvény
értelmetlen részétől) – tehát tegyenek magukévá valami újat, aztán tanítsanak meg rá
mindenkit – ráadásul a zsidóság vallásilag erősen megosztott
integrálják Jézust, de ne a keresztény értelmezésben – mennyire valószínű, hogy a
keresztényeket ez érdekelheti
mennyire valószínű, hogy a szekularizált zsidóság, amelyet főként a hagyomány tart
össze, vallási térítőként lesz sikeres?
mennyire valószínű, hogy a szekularizált korban egy újraértelmezett régi vallás
tömegeket hódíthat meg – az elmúlt kétezer évben nagyon kicsiny volt az érdeklődés a zsidó
hitre való áttérés iránt, ráadásul pont Toynbee túlozza el a zsidókkal szembeni ellenérzéseket
amit Toynbee szeretne, az egy vallás nélküli “szeretetvallás”, amely megfelel egy
szekularizált világnak