Approximately 1,770 years before Christ, God called Abraham, of Ur of the Chaldees, to father a new nation chosen by Him as His peculiar people in whom all nations would be blessed. This people, God promised, would dwell in the land of Canaan, which stretched from Lebanon in the north to the lower desert in Egypt in the south.
In return God demanded from Abraham and his descendants that they should walk before Him and be perfect, and that all males should be circumcised.
God revealed Himself as one, alone and unique, in days when no religion had less than many gods. His people were to be circumcised as a sign of the Covenant. Their origin through Abraham was probably Semitic, but henceforward this was to be of no significance. They were a people apart—difficult clay whom God would slowly mould.
Why God chose these people we cannot say. We can point to the fact that throughout their history down to the present day they are superb intermediaries; we can point out that wherever they have had a brief respite from pogrom their talent and genius has flowered in an exciting way whether with the Chinese in the Middle Ages or in Spain under the Moors. But they are like no other race. Their culture has grown from religious soil. They alone can say—or it can be said of them—here are the blood brothers of God.
Under Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the Israelites were no more than a tribe. It was Moses who made them into a nation. Their nationhood was the fruit of pogrom.
The tribe migrated to Egypt round about 1590 B.C. consequent upon Semitic invasions of Canaan. Here they were hospitably received and allowed by the Egyptians to graze their flocks and pursue their nomadic existence in that district in Lower Egypt called Goshen. There they lived in peace for three hundred years (how slow are the mills of God—it was five hundred years since God had spoken to Abraham) until Ramasses II became Pharaoh of Egypt.
During this period of three hundred years the original seventy people who had come with Jacob “grew into a teeming multitude”, as the Book of Exodus has it. The words of Ramasses in council are recorded: “We must go prudently about it and keep them down, or their numbers will grow: what if war threatens and they make common cause with our enemies?”
The enemies of Ramasses were the Asiatic peoples on his eastern frontiers. These peoples—Syrians and Ethiopians—had been subjugated nearly two centuries previously when the frontiers of the Egyptian empire had reached the Persian Gulf.
With that imperialist economy which is pitiless towards the human rights of minorities, the Pharaoh built two store cities on the main communication lines with Asia and employed the Israelites of the Delta as slave labour to build them. “The more they were ill-treated,” Exodus narrates, “the more they bred and multiplied. The Egyptians, in their abhorrence for the Israelites, oppressed and insulted them, making their lives a burden with drudgery in the claypit and the brick-kiln, drudgery, too, of all kinds in the cultivation of the land.”
So far we have persecution rather than pogrom, a hard bitter persecution against the rights of man—but they would not be clearly defined until Christianity made flower the seeds of them given in the Mosaic Law. The Old Testament tolerated slaves, as indeed do modern governments such as that of South Africa, so firmly based on distorted Old Testament Calvinistic residues, which treats the negroes in its diamond mines as Pharaoh treated the Jews in his brick-kilns. But persecution was to pass into pogrom.
The reason for this is instructive and worth considering, because this is the first of the pogroms—the first organised attempt to exterminate a potential nation, and the pattern that it follows is not dissimilar to the last of the pogroms under the Nazis.
The key to this pogrom lies in the words: “the more they were ill-treated, the more they bred and multiplied”. The sign of the agreement or covenant with Abraham had been God’s command that all males should be circumcised. At different times various peoples have followed this practice, mainly with an emphasis during puberty of initiation into manhood. But with the Jews the outward sign of circumcision derived its meaning from the promise that they were God’s chosen people.
It is hard to underestimate the psychological significance of this custom, ritually and carefully carried out in each family in each generation. It built into the minds of the Israelites the conviction of a special destiny which awaited their tribe, and as a sign expressed, as no other sign could have done, their exclusiveness and their mysterious purpose. It was also, so to speak, a Divine guarantee of the fertility of their families, and they must have felt that the prophecy, which had promised to Jacob that the “race shall be as countless as the dust of the earth” would be quite literally fulfilled. Every individual under stress and danger shows his well-developed instinct for self-preservation. But here is a tribe, a future nation which has an almost unparalleled sense of racial preservation, in the sense that the nearest parallel we can find to them is among those nations who for a brief and unsuccessful time have believed that they, too, were the chosen of Destiny and must, like the Fascists and the Nazis and the Communists in Russia, multiply and people the earth.
Thus it was that the first persecution of Ramasses boomeranged, and instead of reducing their numbers and breaking their morale it only multiplied them. Tyranny, like population, grows in geometric progression, and Ramasses passed into that phantom world where the problem of a minority is simply solved by exterminating it. He was the first to find out his mistake. Subsequently wave after wave of pogrom would thunder upon the Jews, but some always would cling to the rock of survival and the nation would rise from the ashes of its dead, a phoenix, bloody but unbowed.
Everyone knows how this pogrom finally failed. Moses was called to save the chosen people, the story beginning with the little Jewish baby floating in its wicker basket down the Nile to the feet of Pharaoh’s daughter, surely one of the loveliest stories in the world. It is a strange story, too, that Moses should have survived the vicious dictate of Pharaoh’s pogrom slaying the newly born males of each family, for that parallels the escape of the Christ child from the sword of Herod. His foster-father brought him down to Egypt, and there for a time the Christ child lived in the land where his great ancestor was his prototype.
Of such things might Moses and Christ have spoken on the Mount of the Transfiguration, the one talking of the Pasch and the night of liberation from the Egyptians, and the other of Himself as the Paschal Lamb and the fulfilment of prophecy.
This we do know, that without Moses there would have been no nation, without his deliverance no Israel. Instead a nation was born out of persecution and pogrom. And Pharaoh and the Egyptians were left despoiled. Not without reason did the ancient astronomers locate the birth of Israel under the sign of the Scorpion.