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Spoiler alert.  I’m telling you the answer in the next paragraph.  You have experienced quite enough anxiety, what with the war and everything.  You don’t need the stress of wondering when the answer will come and whether it will be sufficient to explain this monumentally implausible phenomenon.

Here is the secret of Jewish survival: the people who hate us are idiots.  More importantly, we know that the people who hate us are idiots.  We can’t abandon our identities and join them, because they are idiots.  We can’t acquiesce and let them win, because . . . they are idiots.  They hate us for no justifiable reason and, therefore, we are better than they are, and they can not be allowed to prevail.  So we must survive.

Having gotten that out of the way, I can now present the argument in a more conventional manner.

What explains the survival of the tiny Jewish nation, people, culture, and religion, in the face of implacable hatred, overwhelming odds, and continuous oppression, persecution, and abuse?  Philosophers, historians and theologians from Augustine  to Toynbee to Mark Twain have puzzled over this question.

Twain most eloquently and memorably framed the question:

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it.

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it........

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