#393 — Is History Repeating Itself？
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Summary
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a Russian-American historian who writes about the history of the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and the rise of anti-Semitism in post-World War II Ukraine. In this episode of The Making Sense Podcast, we talk to Simon about his journey to becoming a historian, how he got into the field, and why he thinks we should be worried about the present and the near future. We also talk about the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the lessons that we can learn from them, and how to deal with the chaos on both sides of the world. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, our support is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. Please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here, and consider becoming one. You'll get access to our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford a full-time college education, and we'll give you access to all sorts of free courses, books, and podcasts. We're making sense of the past, present, and future, so you can help make sense of it all by becoming a member of the Making Sense. Thank you, and remember: you're not alone, we're all in this together. Sam Harris and I am here to make sense, not just of history, but of all things. . This is a podcast about history, not only of history and culture and politics, but also of the present, the past and the future, and all things we need to know about history and history, and of who we can do, and what we should do in order to live up to our best in the most important things in the coming to understand what we can expect in the next 50 years, in the making sense we can hope for in the future. - Sam Harris and Simon Sebag-Montefiore, the author of Stalin, The Call of the Red Tsar, The Court of The Red tsar, Stalin, and Jerusalem, and The Call Of The Red Czar, The Great Tsar and the Call of The White Tsar The Great Czar Stalin, Stalin: The Great tsar: Stalin: Stalin's Last Days, The Last Days of the White House of the Revolution, The Last Emperor, and The Last Tsar: The Last Testament? And much more.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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I am here with Simon Sebagg-Montefiore. Simon, thanks so much for joining me.
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Yeah, yeah. We've been on a WhatsApp thread together for quite some time. We won't divulge
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the other attendees, but it's great to finally meet you, however remotely. You have written these
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just marvelous magisterial histories. I'm reading two simultaneously, but you've written many others.
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But the two I'm reading, Stalin, the Court of the Red Czar, and Jerusalem, the biography,
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really combined, they offer just an amazing lens through which to look at the present. My interest
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in talking to you as a historian is to help me worry about the present and the near future. And I think
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you're uniquely well-placed to do that, given your expertise in both Russian history and the history
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of the Middle East. Before we jump in, can you just give me kind of a potted intellectual biography?
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What do you consider your areas of focus as a historian?
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You know, my background was I did history at Cambridge University. Then, bizarrely, I went into
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banking for a short, disastrous career. And then I went out to the Soviet Union as it disintegrated
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in the early 90s. And so that was really my training ground. That was a brilliant place,
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a fascinating place to see an empire falling apart. And I think for a young historian, to see
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with their own eyes an empire falling apart is the best training you can have, better than books.
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And so that was a very interesting time. And then from that, I started to write about Russia,
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which I'd started really when I was at university. And I started writing about Catherine the Great
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and Potemkin. And that was a very, that's a subject that's become very relevant, of course,
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because they, apart from their very colorful sex life and amazing letters and their place in the
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Enlightenment, the Russian Enlightenment, they were also empire builders. And of course,
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they conquered South Ukraine and Crimea and built all the cities that are now being fought over,
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Odessa, Sebastopol, Dnipro, and so on. And that led through a weird, through a weird favor to me,
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in a way, from Vladimir Putin himself, to having access to Stalin's archives, and being one of the
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first people to be able to work in those archives. And of course, that was the sort of,
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that was the big thrill, really, being, starting to work on Stalin. And that's the book you're
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Yeah, not a, not a cheerful subject. It's quite unbelievable how horrific history gets.
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One hopes one is not living in a period of history like some of the periods you've written about,
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but increasingly, our present starts to begin to feel like we've entered the stream of history.
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I remember the first period of my life where I felt all of a sudden, okay, this is history with all of
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its dangers. It was immediately after 9-11. I just felt like, okay, my life, what I consider to be
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a normal life, sort of post-history, however naively that lands for you. After 9-11, I thought,
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oh, really, anything can happen at any time. And this is the kind of thing that very unlucky people
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experience in history. And more and more, I don't think I've ever shaken that epiphany,
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but one does try to go to sleep. But more and more, it seems like we can't quite escape the tide
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of history here. How do you, we're certainly going to jump into a discussion about the Middle East and
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the rise of anti-Semitism. I think we'll touch on the war in Ukraine. And as you know, Russia has its
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finger in the chaos on both of these sides of the world.
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I guess my first question is, as a historian, is your historian hat more or less always on as you
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read the newspaper? Or do you too go to sleep at times thinking you're living in some post-historical
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My historian hat is always on. And at the moment, it's just impossible. It's very hard to sleep at
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all. And there's just, there's such turbulence. But also, it's fascinating to watch in the worst,
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in the worst way. I think one has to, one goes back to some of those, you know, one of the great
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analysts of power and history, Lenin, you know, with that famous quote, you know, nothing happens for
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years. And then everything, years happen in weeks or days. And of course, one remembers the
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one always remembers how, you know, right before the Russian Revolution, he said it, he said to his
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wife, Kripskaya, I don't think the revolution's going to happen in my lifetime, you know. And then
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when it, when they've had the first report to the fall of the Tsar, he said, he said, can it be true?
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Is this a, is this a hoax? So, you know, no one, no one knows what's going to happen, even the most
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shrewd analysts. And of course, historians are terrible prophets as, you know, the end of history and
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many other, you know, pieces by brilliant historians have, have shown. But I think the
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thing to understand at the moment is how exceptional the period that we were living through, that we
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grew up in was, how extraordinary. And of course, we didn't realize it when we were in it so much,
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but the period from, from 45, 48, 50 to, to, okay, 9-11 or the election of, of Donald Trump or
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whatever, you know, the, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even October 7th, you know, how exceptional
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was that period where, you know, the leaders of, of actually, you know, every president of the United
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States had kind of similar views of the world, you know, give or take small differences. Um,
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they had a view of an internationalist view of a, of a mission to the world and where Soviet leaders,
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despite believing in world revolution and their mission to change the world were also extremely
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conservative really. And where, you know, people did respect the United Nations that was a
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supranational sanctuary of something called international law, which, which, which existed
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because people believed it existed. And, and where various views became taboo in most liberal
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democracies, antisemitism, where a great liberal reformation happened with gay rights. And that
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another advances, the pill, the right to abortion, all these things were kind of one in this kind of
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period, which, which I call in my world history, the great liberal reformation because it was so
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radical, but of course we took it for granted. And all, of course, all of these things will have to
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be fought for again and are now under threat. And that exceptional period, it's hard to think of a
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period where anything like that really existed, you know, maybe the Roman empire with, when,
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when the Roman empire faced the Persians and the Sasanians, there were these kind of, you know,
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two polar powers that really kind of kept a sort of peace, but of course it was a much more brutal,
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brutal world. And of course the rest of the world was, was, was not included in those two powers.
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It was really just Mediterranean and, and the near East. Yeah.
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Yeah. So, so the end of this world is a sort of return to the way things have always been with
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massive number of powers. I guess you'd say, you know, the sort of the 70 year peace is what was
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coming to an end, what you were witnessing coming to an end, beginning to end with 9-11,
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which included a sort of chess game between two great powers. Then 25 years of American
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paramountcy, a sort of game of solitaire, and now suddenly, fascinatingly, a, a sort of multiplayer
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game where smaller powers followed their own interests in ways that we can't even, we, we,
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we don't understand. And then of course the success, the key thing about this was the success of liberal
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democracy, which again was extraordinary. And one forgets that, you know, the European half of Europe
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was inducted under dictatorship until 91, even Western Europe, you know, was under dictatorships
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until 1974, 75. So again, one for just forgets a lot of it is perception. We've just forgets how
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recent all this is. Yeah. So, I mean, do you think we've reached a point where the unraveling of liberal
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world order as we've come to know it has reached a point of no return where you're, you're, you're
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expecting America to pull back, that multilateralism will be less and less effectual, and we're going
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to see a, a period of greater chaos globally, or, or you, do you think we can pull back from the brink
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here and return to what we in our, in our lifetime have considered more normal? The, the, where, if we
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can't get quite to, uh, all the way to Fukuyama, we can get to something like the, you know, the
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expectation going forward is that liberal democracy and it's, uh, however many discontents it has
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will prevail or at least be the, the expected norm globally. And, and that there'll be enough
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power on that side of the equation so that, you know, despotism will still seem both pathological and,
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and anomalous. I think that first of all, I don't think history ever kind of repeats itself
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exactly. It never goes back, but that doesn't mean that democracy, liberal democracies can't
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resurge and, and triumph. And, but that needs, that needs changes within liberal democracies. I mean,
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America is still the greatest power that's ever existed in terms of military power economy and all
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sorts of other tests at measures. And, and American power is still the most dynamic force in, in, in,
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you know, in the world game, if you like, but the democracies are having a huge crisis within
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themselves. And, you know, as Ibn Khaldun, that the, the great, um, Arab North African historian in
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the, in the 14th century said, he said like great kingdoms don't fall because of, of military defeats
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or economic defeats. They fall because of psychological defeats, which is a very interesting concept.
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And he said, you know, the, the loss of asabia, forgive my appalling Arab pronunciation, but the,
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the loss of cohesion, of solidarity, of, of values that hold together, um, a society in a common goal.
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And this of course brings us to stuff that Fukuyama has written very well about, about,
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you know, overqualified, over-entitled population, et cetera, et cetera, which, which of course,
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these are things that are stopping democracies behaving with confidence. And if America regained its
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confidence, you know, America has the, has a huge power to change things, but we should be under no
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illusion. The success of liberal democracy was not because there was, you know, liberal democracy was,
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was not just because liberal democracy is very nice to live under. It was also because liberal
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democracies were successful. And the, the biggest influence, I mean, people, when I wrote my world
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history, people said, why is there so much war in your, in your world history? This is full of violence.
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And I said, well, of course, you know, wars are when everything is speeded up and intensified,
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you know, inventions, um, ingenuity, all of it happens during warfare. And we were seeing that
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now with drone warfare and what, you know, all this, all that's happening in, in, um, the Middle East
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and Ukraine, that's another thing we can talk about. But the point is the reason why there was such
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liberal democracy was so successful. Everyone wanted to have a system that looked like a liberal
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democracy, even if it wasn't a liberal democracy was because of the victory of, of World War II
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of 45. I mean, started with 1918, but then again in 1945, which was really a sort of Soviet victory,
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but it was, it was widely regarded as a victory of America, of American power. And that made,
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if you look at all the new states created after 1945 in the sixties, they all looked like America.
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I mean, even China today, even Russia have presidencies, legislatures. I mean,
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it's all based on America because America set this, this standard, even though they were never
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democracies and certainly never liberal democracies. But the point was everyone wanted to look like
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America. And of course, a lot of these countries that we presumed were democracies, maybe weren't as
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democratic as we thought all along anyway. And one only has to look at all the states created
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in Africa, for example, which are now disintegrating. That's another subject to discuss perhaps later,
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but it was a great compliment to America that many states became liberal democracies. It was a great
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compliment to the success of America in wars that were incredibly consequential and mattered.
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And also wars, let's be clear, that had clear victories. It's very hard to, it's very hard to achieve
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now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think we can focus many of our concerns through the, uh, the nexus of
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the city of Jerusalem. I mean, so much of what ails us in terms of the past shattering and possible
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future shattering of our world can be, uh, it doesn't capture everything, but it captures a lot
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when you look at the, the fixation, uh, of the, the three monotheisms on that single city. I remember
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reading, uh, Gershom Gorenberg's book, The End of Days, maybe 20 years ago or so. And, you know,
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this would be obvious to you as a historian, but this was the first time I realized that the destruction
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of a single building, the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount could produce World War III, right? I mean,
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the, the, the, the level of religious fanaticism aimed at that single piece of real estate is such
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that the, the world's Muslims and, and Christians and Jews view it as a, um, I mean, it's, it is a
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sacred symbol, but it is a non-negotiable one, right? I mean, it's not at all fungible. It seems
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there's nothing you could offer the world's two point billion Muslims in trade for that, that single
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building that would be satisfactory. And so it is with the, the millennial expectations of, uh,
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evangelical Christians, uh, perhaps even Christians more widely who expect that the Messiah will
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return. And this is, you know, they're, they're joined by Orthodox Jews in this expectation once
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the temple is rebuilt by the Jews there. And you go into this history in, in some detail in, in your
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book, uh, Jerusalem. But, um, let's talk about that because it is amazing when you step back,
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certainly from a secular perspective to realize that our world is essentially rigged to explode
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based on the millenarian superstitions of billions of people focused on a single building and certain,
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you know, patently absurd details like the production of a perfect red heifer to be sacrificed
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so as to sanctify the, the implements that would rebuild the, the temple. Uh, what are your thoughts
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on, on the temple Mount, Simon? Well, the temple Mount is, is the most intensely revered piece of,
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piece of land. It's, it's a compound, an esplanade. It's a platform actually built by Herod the Great,
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you know, created by Herod the Great during his reign, took most of his reign to build it.
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And Herod the Great actually sort of formed what we now think of as, as the Temple Mount on a,
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probably on a much rougher structure. And it hasn't, you know, the actual sort of space of the platform
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has not changed much since, since he built it. He was basically made King of Judea in 40 BC by
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Antony and Octavius, um, the future Augustus. And, um, they walked with him through Rome and they
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said, go back and conquer Jerusalem and, um, we'll give you some troops to do that. It had been taken
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by the Parthians. And so that's, that's the sort of origin of the actual space as we see it now on
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which, on which the two shrine, the two Islamic, beautiful Islamic shrines stand. And you're absolutely
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right. I mean, all of the expectations of fundamental believers of all the three Abrahamic
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religions are focused on that space. And many of them believe that outside the Golden Gate,
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which is the Eastern War, beautiful structure, probably built by Heraclius, the Byzantine April,
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on the, on the, on the Eastern side, believe that that is the place that, that the apocalypse
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will happen. And you're absolutely right. I mean, when I was writing about Jerusalem and I sort of,
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I sort of realized, you know, so many things could go right. This could be shared. This could,
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there could be a peace process that could lead to this being a sort of international, um, the,
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the Holy Basin as it's called by American peacemakers, that it could turn into a place,
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a sort of Vatican almost for all three religions, but it could also, anything that goes wrong there
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could, could, um, ignite a catastrophe, a Holocaust, a, a world and a world war three that would
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involve everybody because everybody is involved in, in the future of that place. And it's, that's why
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it's an extraordinary thing. And I guess one of the realizations today is that for years, we thought,
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again, going back to our sort of view of the world until 9-11, we knew there were religious people.
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There were many, there were many evangelicals in America, the, um, and in West Africa, there were,
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there were Islamic fundamentalists and so on. There were Jewish fanatics, but we felt that along with
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liberal democracy, a sort of secularity was kind of spreading across the world. And we were beyond
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that, that sort of religiosity. Yeah. Because that's turned out to be completely false. And
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actually, you know, religious people have a sort of force and a focus that secular people don't have,
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but which secular people are afraid of and are extremely impressed by. And so we're seeing that
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we're seeing that on the sides taken by different people in the Middle East right now. Of course,
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you know, it's, it's, it's not a coincidence that that space is revered by the three religions because
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one, each one led to another in a succession. And the holiness of each was borrowed, commandeered,
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stolen, reinvented, rechanneled by its successor and each successor, uh, retooled, relaunched and sort
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of slightly changed those, those stories in order to contribute to the heritage, to the, to the
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ancientness that is essential for legitimacy in religion. And then of course, that's why when you
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look at texts like the Bible, for example, the Quran, others, some of the texts sort of seem like
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seemed like very clear writing. Some of it is literally history that we can check. And some of
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it is unintelligible or weirdly detailed, like the famous red heifer in Jerusalem. But the point is,
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these texts are a mixture of ancient, uh, of a library of ancient texts that have been superimposed
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on each other. And the most holy thing is, is the revelation that builds on an ancient story that
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already exists and ancient holiness that already exists. And these, this, this concept of holiness
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is redoubled, multiplied many times by the destruction of those places. So the destructions
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of Jerusalem, two most famous destructions, Nebuchadnezzar in 586 and Titus in 70, but there
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were many, many catastrophic events there. But especially those are so mythic in scale and so total
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that the very ruins became holier than the buildings that they'd replaced. And of course,
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they became hallowed by the legitimacy, by the authority, by the, by the, the ancientness of,
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of what had gone before. So, you know, the revelation of the, it was a coincidence that Jerusalem became
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the holy city. Could have been any, many different places. The religious person wouldn't say that,
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of course, but, you know, historically talking about Gia strategy, there was no reason why Jerusalem
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should become such a significant place. It wasn't a, it wasn't a port. It wasn't on a trade route.
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It was a small hilltop, mountaintop in, in the blistered Judean mountains in Canaan,
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Judea, what became known as Judea. But once the Jews had made it their holy city, once they'd written,
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the decisive thing that happened was not the decision, I think, not just the decision to make it
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at the holy place and to build a temple there, but to write it down. And that was what was special
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about it because Jerusalem gained a biography, the Bible. And that biography meant that other people
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could, could read it, could find out about it, could be translated, it could be known by successors.
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And so the early Christians were, of course, Jews, despite what you might read on, on Twitter
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these days or on X these days. Yeah. Actually, that's, that's a point that I hadn't thought to
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raise with you, but I, I've always found it fascinating that the, um, certainly theological
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versions of antisemitism are a kind of reductio ad absurdum of themselves when you realize that
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Jesus and Mary and all of, all of Jesus's disciples were Jews, living as Jews, acting as Jews, thinking
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of them, of themselves as Jews. It's amazing that you can get a genocidal antisemitism out of that
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piece of legacy code somehow. In a Christian context, it's, it's probably less surprising in a Muslim
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context, but, um, but perhaps we, we can just talk about the roots of, of this intersection of
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religious belief on the Holy land, uh, you know, more broadly. I mean, one, one thing that was also
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surprising to learn in your book is that Jerusalem itself has been abandoned or effectively abandoned
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at various periods in history. I mean, it became essentially a little village of, of ruins, but let's
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talk about the roots here because I'm going to want to lead you in this conversation to a, an analysis
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of what's happened post October 7th. And we, with notions of, you know, settler colonialism and the
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illegitimacy of, of Jewish claims to that particular piece of real estate and the view worldwide that
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the Jews, uh, and the nation of Israel is, are, um, interlopers of a kind and a remnant of colonialism.
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So knowing that we're going to get there, let's talk a little bit about the history of, of the
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region of Jews in the region and of the emergence of Christianity and Islam out of, out of that region.
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The Judeans, which was in the word Jew comes from Judean. The Judeans were one of the Levantine
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people who emerged out of, who emerged in Canaan and controlled between about a thousand BC
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and about, you know, the beginning of the new, for, for about a thousand years or about 10 centuries
00:24:19.940
lived in kingdoms that they may, they mainly ruled in the small land that was around Jerusalem.
00:24:27.260
If you were a believing Jew, you'd say that they, they were, they were the chosen people who came out
00:24:32.680
of, out of Egypt and the Passover story. And you would believe that they were the chosen people.
00:24:38.320
If you're a secular person and look at history, you would say that they were one of the peoples that
00:24:44.340
emerged from, um, Levantine Canaanite peoples who lived, who lived in the region, um, that they created
00:24:51.500
kingdoms north, a kingdom called Israel in the south, a kingdom ruled by a house of David, which appears
00:24:59.840
on the Tel Dan steel. So we, we know that there was a house of David and that David and his
00:25:06.880
successors in the house of David, a dynasty ruled from Jerusalem that they built a temple there at
00:25:14.300
some point, maybe not as early as it's impossible to prove when it was exactly built, but it was
00:25:19.580
built. And that was the first temple. It was built on the, on the temple, what is now the temple
00:25:25.320
Mount, Mount Moriah, um, in Jerusalem. And there was a Northern kingdom, Israel. They, they were tiny
00:25:33.880
kingdoms that really prospered during a period when the great powers of the, of the region, Egypt, um,
00:25:41.160
Assyria, Babylon, and so on, were in times of crisis. When those, when those regions, when those big
00:25:48.280
empires woke up again and were restored to power, they swept down and conquered these, these kingdoms,
00:25:57.020
the peoples of Israel were, were removed to Babylonian exile. Jerusalem was destroyed in 586,
00:26:04.520
but the Judean people remained there in 63. Well, in, in, in the four, in, in, in the three twenties,
00:26:12.520
Alexander the Great arrived, his successors, two kingdoms, the Seleucids and the Assyrians,
00:26:18.280
um, ruled Syria and, and Egypt and, and fought for about a hundred years for control of Judea and
00:26:26.440
Jerusalem. 63, in a hundred, in about 164, they rebelled against the Assyrians, created a new
00:26:34.100
kingdom, the Maccabean kingdom, the Hasmonean kingdom. We're still in BC here, right? Yes. Which is
00:26:41.180
celebrated by, by Jews in the, in the, um, festival of Hanukkah. And they ruled for about a hundred years.
00:26:47.400
Mm-hmm. And then they broke up in civil war. Some people make parallels with Israel today,
00:26:53.220
um, with that process where, where that kingdom disintegrated. And then the Romans arrived in about
00:27:00.740
63 in the, in the person of Pompey the Great, a great Roman warlord. And, um, you know, then his
00:27:07.980
successors gave Judea to Herod the Great, who was a fascinating character, a key character, because
00:27:14.400
his mother was Arab. She was Nabatean, which was the Arab kingdom in what is now Jordan and northern
00:27:20.120
Saudi Arabia. And his father was an Edomian, an Edomite, a recent convert to Judaism. And so
00:27:28.740
he's an interesting person, half Arab, half Jew, half Judean, if you like. And he created a dynasty
00:27:36.000
that lasted for five generations, own ruling various bits of Roman dominated Near East. And
00:27:43.760
in 70, in 66, there was a huge rebellion against the Romans during the reign of Nero, partly caused
00:27:50.800
by Nero's managerial incompetence in his, in his rule of the empire.
00:27:55.460
And winning personality and winning personality, um, general, general, um, sinister character.
00:28:02.800
And, um, you know, he was one of Nero's interesting because he's one of those, one of those politicians
00:28:07.480
who merge entertainment and politics, which we should be familiar with today and, um, use
00:28:15.560
the power of entertainment and the power of politics to feed on each other in, in, in, to
00:28:20.740
promote himself. But moving aside from that, there was the Jewish revolt.
00:28:25.660
Run by, led by fundamentalist Jewish fanatics, I think we'd say now. And many of the Judean
00:28:31.940
people backed the Romans. And in fact, um, the Herod family were one of the, you know, one
00:28:37.360
and the historian Josephus actually, in the end, backed the Romans thinking Roman, Roman
00:28:43.100
Hellenic life was preferable to life under a Jewish religious state.
00:28:49.020
These weren't the Maccabees. These were, these were different sects and factions that fought
00:28:54.600
each other murderously. And in the end, uh, were stormed by Titus Caesar, the son of the
00:29:02.520
Empress, Emperor of Aspasian, who emerged out of the civil war of 68, the year of three
00:29:06.860
emperors and stormed Jerusalem and destroyed it for the second time completely. Many Jews then
00:29:13.840
went into exile, but many Jews remained there. And in the 130s, another emperor, Hadrian decided
00:29:22.440
to build a Roman temple on top of the ruins of the, of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem of
00:29:28.780
the second temple, which, which had been destroyed. And this caused the second huge Jewish revolt
00:29:34.160
led by Simon Bar Kokhba. And once again, this led to a, what everyone agrees is it was a
00:29:41.320
genocidal war against the Judeans. They were banned from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was renamed
00:29:46.780
Aelia Capitolina and remained under a new name for, for 300 years. But the Jews or Judeans
00:29:54.280
always revered it, prayed around its ruins, but were spread around the Mediterranean for the
00:29:59.760
first time. So there was a glut of Judean slaves, for example, in Rome. It's funny to think of Jews
00:30:06.500
as slaves, but there was most of the, many of the slaves in the Roman empire were Judean, of course,
00:30:13.120
because after these wars and out of this came a new Jewish religion that was always linked and
00:30:19.880
looked back to Jerusalem, but also looked to the Torah as a kind of portable Jerusalem almost,
00:30:26.920
which they carried with them always. And the religion changed fundamentally. Before then,
00:30:33.160
Jewish religion had been based on sacrifices on the temple mount, outside the temple to God.
00:30:39.880
And since they no longer had the temple and they no longer had access to the temple mount itself,
00:30:44.780
a new sort of religion developed, which where Jews prayed in synagogues and they lived,
00:30:49.400
you know, in Spain, in Italy, in Cyprus, in North Africa. So that was a new era. And at the same time,
00:30:58.740
the Christian religion had separated itself from Judaism. Jesus, Joseph, Mary, their family were Jews,
00:31:09.420
the Judeans were Judeans, but they lived in, they were known as Nazarenes because they came from
00:31:15.820
Galilee. And in the early part of the Christian story, they were really a Jewish sect. They prayed,
00:31:23.680
they followed one of, one of Jesus's brothers or cousins, James. They, they prayed in the temple like
00:31:30.060
other, like other Jews. And it was, it was only really after 70, after the destruction of, of the temple
00:31:40.140
had shown that, shown many that God had withdrawn his blessing from the Jews. Again, war, failure in
00:31:47.440
war is so decisive in history. And, and that many people, many, that many decided that actually they
00:31:55.220
needed to embrace a new revelation in the revolution, revelation of Christianity. And of course, it was the
00:32:00.980
preaching of Christianity to non-Jews. And the fact that Christianity would accept, open their arms
00:32:05.940
completely to non-Jews that made it, was partly made it so successful, but it was also, it's a
00:32:13.080
rebellion against the class structure in, in the Roman empire, enslavement. And also it had an, it had
00:32:21.100
a new concept, which was, if you behave well in this life, you'd go to heaven in your, in the next one.
00:32:26.200
So salvation, so was a promise. And so it contained new things that have really affected us, um, right
00:32:33.960
until this day. And the conversion of Constantine to, uh, in, in the fourth century, Constantine,
00:32:42.320
the ruler of the whole Roman empire, the conversion to Christianity was a decisive moment in world
00:32:48.240
history and, and made, and really allied Christianity with power, with state, with empire. And, and Jesus
00:32:57.240
with, with, with war and, and, and victory. 300 years later in Arabia emerged the revelation of
00:33:06.300
the prophet Muhammad. He claimed to speak as the, as a messenger of God, but he was knowledgeable about
00:33:12.780
both Christian and Jewish religion. And whether he read it or he heard of it, he'd certainly traveled
00:33:20.520
with, uh, members of his family who were merchants to Syria, to Judea, to, to Palestine. And, and so he
00:33:30.360
encompassed, he embraced these stories as prophets. Um, he embraced, uh, Moses and David. He embraced
00:33:39.420
Mary. He embraced these people, Jesus as prophets in his new third and final revelation. And part of the
00:33:48.040
success of, of, of, of, of, of Muhammad was based on the, on what seemed like an eclipse of the Roman empire
00:33:54.360
in a time that must have seen, seemed like a sort of world disaster after, um, he died in 632. But in the
00:34:03.860
early part of that century, Persians, the Sasanian Persians invaded the, the Eastern Roman empire, defeated
00:34:11.500
it, took Egypt, Jerusalem, and fought their way all the way to close to Istanbul. And the world seemed
00:34:20.540
to be tilting in an extraordinary way. No one knew what would happen. And during that period, the two
00:34:28.500
great powers, the Sasanian Persian shahs and the emperors in Constantinople had formerly financed proxy
00:34:37.580
kingdoms of Arabs that fought as their kind of border, border proxies in the Middle East. And
00:34:43.340
they discontinued these, um, these pensions that they paid to these local Kings, these Arab Kings.
00:34:49.400
So there were a lot of, there's always been a great mystery, like how'd come these, these Arabs from
00:34:55.080
great obscurity managed to conquer so much of the world? And part of it was religious fervor.
00:35:01.300
Part of it was tough military toughness. Part of it was sort of military efficiency, a centrality of,
00:35:07.940
of belief. And part of it may have been that there were these kind of actually sort of experienced and
00:35:14.660
trained warriors around, trained by both superpowers, if you like, who were available. But anyway,
00:35:21.300
Muhammad was not only the founder of a religion like, like Jesus Christ, but he was also a head of state
00:35:27.600
and a commander who created a new community in a new state and his successors sent their troops out
00:35:34.580
into the world and a world that was completely destabilized. And the early, it seems like nothing
00:35:42.860
is certain of that period. It's such a misty period, but it seems like they very shrewdly offered all
00:35:49.280
mono atheists the chance to join this religion, which at the time had rules that were, that were
00:35:56.260
unclear, that were inchoate, that were developing. And there are, there are, for example, in Jerusalem,
00:36:02.280
there are very clear records that when they took Jerusalem, first of all, it was surrendered to them
00:36:06.440
by the, by Christian bishop without fighting and in return for tolerance. But secondly, that when they,
00:36:13.320
when they arrived there, they immediately went up to the Temple Mount, which had been left empty
00:36:17.920
as a sign of Christian disdain for the, for the Jews. And they built an early, an early mosque there
00:36:24.980
on the site of the Al-Aqsa. And they also, they also later built the Dome of the Rock in 691 on the
00:36:35.300
site, almost certainly on the site of the, of the Judean or Jewish temple. But in those early,
00:36:41.100
in those early mosques and the early Dome of the Rock, Christians and Jews were allowed,
00:36:46.560
it's believed, to pray there as well. And of course, the rules hardened later as the religion
00:36:52.240
became a formal, at the formal faith of a great Arab empire. But all that time, Jews had been there
00:36:59.320
in the, in that region, had prayed around the walls. And when the Muslims came, they allowed the Jews to
00:37:05.340
return to live there, providing, as Dimi, they recognized Islamic, the, the, the supremacy of
00:37:13.680
the Islamic religion and the Islamic state. And that was the basis in which Jews lived there for
00:37:18.820
many centuries to come. So how do you understand the roots of anti-Semitism? I guess they, the simplest
00:37:28.340
theological rationale for it is that the persistence of Jews as Jews is just logically...
00:37:36.680
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