The story of the Jewish people is both unique and intriguing. Born as a nation in slavery in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, the Israelites were emancipated and led by Moses into the land of Canaan in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Here they established the nation of Israel, but after a chequered history of some 1,800 years the people were carried off into exile; first the northern tribes of Israel into Assyria (BC 722) and later the southern tribes of Judah into Babylon (BC 586). In captivity they were cruelly oppressed and narrowly escaped extinction by genocide.

Ultimately, however, the people of Judah were allowed to return to their homeland and rebuild their cities as well as the temple in Jerusalem. But it was not long before they came to be dominated and oppressed by the empires of first Greece, and later Rome. In AD 70 the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords resulting in the siege and destruction of the city of Jerusalem in which the temple was destroyed and thousands of Jews perished. Further unrest culminated in the Bar Kochba Revolt of AD 135, which was ruthlessly crushed by the Romans. The Jews were banished from Jerusalem and Judaea and were deported in their thousands throughout the Roman Empire as slaves.

In the years which followed the Jewish people were progressively dispersed throughout the world, wandering from land to land where they met with intense persecution, cruelty and oppression often being confined to ghettos or made to wear the Star of David badge to ostracise them from society. They were hounded from country to country in their desperate efforts to survive. But many perished in anti-Semitic massacres and organised attempts at genocide, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Hitler’s “Final Solution”, when some 6 million Jews were put to death in gas-chambers, mass shootings and the like.

Yet miraculously the Jewish people survived, not only so, but in 1948, against all odds they managed to establish the new State of Israel in the land of Palestine. Despite several subsequent attempts by surrounding Arab nations to overthrow Israel, the nation has gone from strength to strength, and is now a formidable and powerful state in the Middle East.

But the enigma is, how do we explain, first the consistent persecution of the Jews, secondly their improbable survival in the face of such violent opposition from many different quarters over many centuries, and thirdly their remarkable return to their homeland and revival as a nation state? There is absolutely no parallel to this in world history. In part 2, God willing, we will reveal the answers to these questions.