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THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

March 20, 2024
By Bassam Michael Madany

Most Arab and Muslim writers, even those who claim to be moderate, hardly ever admit that Islam was responsible for the rise of a unique imperialistic venture in the history of mankind. No other major world religion combined religion with politics, church with state, as Islam has done during the last 1400 years. And no other religion spread primarily through the sword, as Islam has done. Muslims glorify their early Conquests, claiming that they were accomplished with the approval of Allah, who gave them the right to bring mankind under their rule.

The West has been imperialistic; I lived under the French presence in the Levant during my formative years. At the school I attended, most subjects were taught in French. We studied the history of the Near East, but the emphasis was on “Histoire de France.” The title of our geography book was “La France et ses Colonies.”

However, when the French departed, they left no lasting impact on the area. The same applies to the other European Empires: they began in the 19th century and spread for 150 years, only to disappear soon after WWII. An important feature of Western Empires is that they were outre mer, “Overseas.” Not so with Islam, it spread contiguously as a land empire, with a lasting impact on the native populations.

An excellent analysis of the Nature and Extent of Islamic Imperialism was done by the British author, V. S. Naipaul.

In 1979, he visited four non-Arab Islamic countries, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He met with various people and discussed the impact of Islam on their daily lives. His first book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, was published by Random House, New York, in 1982. Here are excerpts from his book:

“Islam in Iran was even more complicated. It was a divergence from the main belief; and this divergence had its roots in the political-racial dispute about the succession to the Prophet, who died in 632 A.D. Islam, almost from the start, had been an imperialism as well as a religion, with an early history remarkably like a speeded-up version of the history of Rome, developing from city-state to peninsular overlord, to empire, with stresses at every stage.” P. 7

Almost two decades later, Naipaul revisited these four Islamic countries and met with the persons he had talked to in the 1970s. He produced a follow-up book, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted People. It was published by Random House in 1998.

The author returned to the theme of his previous book, and pointed to the unique nature of Islamic imperialism, namely, to make “the Converted People” forget their entire past, as if history began with the Islamic Conquests of their countries. In the Prologue of this work, he wrote:

“Islam is in its origins, an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert must turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away must be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of the converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.” P. xi

The historian Efraim Karsh dealt with the same subject in his book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, published by Yale University Press, New Haven, and London, in 2006. In his Introduction, Professor Karsh contrasted Christianity with Islam:

“The worlds of Christianity and Islam, however, have developed differently in one fundamental respect. The Christian faith won over an existing empire in an extremely slow and painful process, and its universalism was originally conceived in spiritual terms that made a clear distinction between God and Caesar. By the time it was embraced by the Byzantine emperors as a tool for buttressing their imperial claims, three centuries after its foundation, Christianity had in place a countervailing ecclesiastical institution with an abiding authority over the wills and actions of all believers.

“The birth of Islam, by contrast, was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his authority directly from Allah and acted at one and the same time as head of the state and head of the church. This allowed the prophet to cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura and to channel Islam’s energies into ‘its instruments of aggressive expansion, there [being] no internal organism of equal force to counterbalance it.’”P. 5

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A CHALLENGE TO THE HISTORIC ROLE OF THE SERMON IN MISSIONS

March 20, 2024
By Bassam Michael Madany

Recently, I became aware of organizations that claim that the mere distribution of the Scriptures constituted Christian Missions.

I am not referring to the American Bible Society (1816) or, to the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804.) These organizations work as auxiliaries to the Church’s Mission, by supporting the translation and publication of the Scriptures in many languages.

The availability of the Bible, both in print and in digitized form, is a great blessing for Missions. But it’s important to remember that historically, it is a modern phenomenon and dates to Gutenberg’s invention of the press in 1455. Centuries before, Bibles existed as “manuscripts,” a Latin term that means “handwritten.”

Great as the achievements of the press have been, the sermon remains the basic means for spreading the Christian faith. Christianity was born on Pentecost Sunday when the apostle Peter preached his inaugural message. These are excerpts recorded in Acts 2:

“Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said, ‘Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. … This is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:

“‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy…. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— this Jesús, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it…This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

“Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.’ And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.”

Similar, but shorter sermons, are found in Acts 3: 11-26; Acts 4: 5-12; 27-32. The Epistles of Paul, Peter, James, Jude, and John are replete with sermonic materials that played a basic role in the Mission of the Church.

From the New Testament’s sermonic materials, the following are historical/theological works that elucidate this subject.

Professor R. V. G. Tasker’s The Gospel Behind the Gospels, (Chapter 1 of “The Nature and Purpose of the Gospels.” SCM PRESS LTD 1957.

“The four Gospels though they are found at the beginning of the New Testament, were not the first literary products of the Christian religion. They were written almost certainly between the years AD 65 to 100; though they embody sources written sometimes earlier. In any chronological arrangement of the New Testament books, the Gospels would have to be placed after the letters of Saint Paul, this is a fact of great significance and is of vital importance to a true understanding of the Gospels themselves.

“There were at least thirty-five years of Christian teaching and Christian missionary activity, before the believers were in possession of the written records of Christ’s life and teaching, which we know as the Four Gospels, and which ever since they received general recognition, that is, before the middle of the second century, have played an indispensable part in all subsequent Christianity. Our faith today is bound to be conditioned by the four Gospels. The faith of the earliest Christians was independent of them.

“Early Christendom began by the preaching or proclamation of a series of statements, which together made-up what was called the Good-News or Gospel; and a person was a Christian in so far as he accepted by faith those statements as true. The statements were concerned with Jesus of Nazareth, but they were not primarily statements about anything He had said, merely because he had said it, or almost about his manner of life while on earth, merely because it was His manner of life, or about his personality or indeed about any of the kind of things that are of interest to our modern biographer. The uniqueness of Christianity lay in the unique character of the statements which were proclaimed as the Gospel. As to the content of these statements there is remarkable agreement in the summaries of them given in the Epistles of Saint Paul, and in the early chapters of Acts.

“Here we see that what was proclaimed as the Gospel was, to quote from the Epistle to the Romans, ‘the Good News that's what God had promised by his prophets in the Holy Scriptures, that is in the Old Testament, concerning a blessed age to be inaugurated by God's anointed messenger, or Christ, had been fulfilled in Jesus. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead was the divine guarantee that such a fulfillment had taken place. It was indeed the Resurrection of Jesus which set a divine seal upon his life and death and gave it a unique significance. Jesus was ‘declared to be the son of God as Paul asserts by his resurrection from the dead.’” Pp. 9-11

Another Biblical scholar, F. F. Bruce, referred to the necessity of reading the Scriptures in the light of the historic Christian Tradition. In his book, Tradition Old & New, he wrote:

“Hold fast to the traditions,” wrote Paul to the Christians in Corinth. Yet some would regard freedom from any kind of tradition as the sign of spiritual maturity and emancipation. That is because of the mistaken idea that tradition is always bad.

“Yet the living tradition, the continuity of Christian life, is indispensable. Without it, Scripture would have had no context. If we could suppose that the church had been wiped out in the Diocletian persecution and the church’s scripture lost, to be rediscovered in our own day like the Dead Sea Scrolls, would the rediscovered scriptures once more have the effect which we know them to have in experience, or would they, like the Scrolls, be an archeological curiosity and a subject of historical debate? On the other hand, the living tradition without the constant corrective of Scripture, (or, in more modern language, without the possibility of ‘reformation according to the Word of God’), might have developed out of all recognition if it did not have indeed slowly faded and died.” P. 128 Tradition, Old & New, The Paternoster Press, Exeter, Devon EX2 4JW

I trust that the Biblical and theological materials I presented are sufficient to show the inadequacy of the claim that the mere distribution of the Scriptures constituted Christian Missions.

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MEMORIZING THE SCRIPTURES - A NECESSITY IN PREACHING

March 16, 2024
By Bassam Michael Madany

When the Apostle Paul dictated his Letter to the Romans, he quoted from his memorized passages of the Old Testament. Likewise, the other writers of the New Testament. They followed a time-honored tradition. They set an example for Christians throughout the succeeding centuries.

Thus, a minister of the Word of God must memorize the Biblical text he intends to use in his sermon.

Here is an example from Saint Augustine’s work, who memorized the Biblical texts of his sermons.

“St. Augustine as the draughtsman of the doctrine of God's Word in which the Word served not only as a lesson or, as a guide to the newly converted, but inspired faith and worked salvation as vocation, as a call by God. Saint Augustine preached in the conviction that God Himself was present in the faithful words of His preacher.” Dr. A. D. R. Polman’s The Word of God according to St. Augustine.

I continue with excerpts from “The Many Benefits of Scripture Memorization.” For an entire book on this topic, see How to Memorize Scripture for Life by Andrew M. Davis.

“First of all, our salvation begins…by hearing and believing the words of the gospel, we are born again (John 3:3) and justified by faith in Christ (Gal. 2:16). Saving faith comes…by hearing the word of Christ (Rom. 10:17). …Scripture also reveals that the way we make progress in our Christian faith is…by hearing God’s word with faith (Col. 2:6-7).

“Once we have come to life spiritually through faith in Christ…God has set before every Christian two infinite journeys: the internal journey of growth in holiness and the external journey of evangelism and missions.”

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THE LEGACY OF BAT YE’OR A FORGOTTEN HISTORIAN OF DHIMMITUDE

February 24, 2024
By Bassam Michael Madany

Islam spread mostly at the expense of Christian lands since its rise in the seventh century. Muslim conquerors referred to Christians and Jews as “Dhimmis,” a term that means “protected.” This classification included severe rules for the conduct of their lives, including the payment of the annual Jizya tax.

The condition of being a Dhimmi is known as Dhimmitude. I’m astonished that historian Philip K. Hitti (1886-1978), who authored several books on the History of the Arabs, remained silent about the plight of Christians and Jews living under Islam. When researching the reason for his omission, I came across this explanation generated by Microsoft Copilot in response to “Had professor Philip Hitti dealt with the plight of Christians under Islamic rule”:

Philip Khuri Hitti did not explicitly deplore the treatment of Christians and Jews under Islamic rule. While Hitti’s research provided valuable insights into the dynamics between different religious communities, he maintained a scholarly and objective perspective. His work aimed to illuminate historical contexts rather than express personal opinions or judgments. It’s essential to recognize that scholars like Hitti contributed to our understanding of complex historical relationships, but their role was primarily academic rather than advocacy oriented. The treatment of religious minorities under Islamic rule remains a multifaceted topic, and various scholars have explored it from different angles.”

While “a scholarly and objective perspective” should avoid “advocacy”, it should not avoid discussing systemic discrimination, even if it was inconvenient to narratives fashionable in academia. Avoiding the discussion of such topics is tantamount to self-imposed censorship. In Hitti’s case, it’s hard to understand it, since he was of Lebanese background and his parents must have mentioned “Dhimmitude” and told him about the 1860 massacre of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, Syria. I should add that several Western historians have assiduously avoided any reference to this aspect of Islamic history.

So, we are indebted to Bat Ye’or (Daughter of the Nile) who took the initiative by writing a book on the treatment of Christians and Jews in Islam. I learned about her work from an article in First Things, by Richard John Neuhaus, who commented on her book “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude.”

Bat Ye’or was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Cairo, Egypt in 1933. During the Nasser regime that began in 1952, life for Egyptian Jews became intolerable. That led the family to leave Egypt in 1957 and go to the United Kingdom as refugees. Bat Ye'or married the British historian and activist David Litman in September 1959. A year later, they moved to Switzerland and lived there until his death in May 2012. They were blessed with three children.

The French author Jacques Ellul contributed the Foreword for the book. Here are some timely excerpts:

“In Islam, Jihad is an institution and not an event, it is part of the normal functioning of the Muslim world. The conquered populations change status (they became Dhimmis), and the Shari'a tends to be put into effect, overthrowing the former law of the country. The world, as Bat Ye'or brilliantly shows, is divided into two regions: the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb; the "Domain of Islam" and "the Domain of war." The author has the courage to examine whether a certain number of events that we know in the West, do not already derive from a sort of "Dhimmitude" of the West, vis-a-vis an Islamic world that has resumed its wars, hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity, the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy Israel.)” Bordeaux, France 1991

Bat Ye’or described the plight of Eastern Christians under Islam [pages 73,74]:

"This is not a book about Islam; it neither examines its expansion nor its civilization. Its objective is the study of that multitude of peoples subjected by Islam, and to determine as far as possible the complex processes—both endogenous and exogenous—that brought about their gradual extinction.

“I am indebted to the Lebanese Bashir Gemayel for the term ‘dhimmitude’ which he used on two occasions. This word could not better express the actual subject of my research, begun in 1971, on the manifold and contradictory aspects of a human experience which millions of individuals have endured over the centuries, sometimes for more than a millennium.

“A remarkable chronicle written by a Monophysite monk, a native of Tel-Mahre a village in Mesopotamia, gives a precise description of the fiscal situation of non-Muslims. The chronicle completed in 774, provides almost photographic detail of one of the turning points in history. The description covers Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, in the 8th century at the time the Dhimmis formed most of the rural populations; small landowners, artisans, or sharecroppers farming the fiefs allotted to Arabs; a numerous Jewish peasantry lived alongside Christians villages: Copts, Syrians, and Nestorians. This chronicle reveals the mechanism which destroyed the social structure of a flourishing Dhimmi peasantry in the whole Islamized Orient.”

Excerpts from the Epilogue of the book [pages 261-265]:

“Here are peoples who having integrated the Hellenistic heritage and biblical spirituality, spread the Judeo-Christian civilization as far as Europe and Russia. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, conquered by nomadic bands, taught their oppressors, with the patience of centuries, the subtle skills of governing empires. the need for law and order, the management of finances, the administration of town and countryside, the rules of taxation rather than those of pillages of pillage, the sciences, philosophy, literature, and the arts, the organization the transmission of knowledge--- in short, the rudiments and foundations of civilization.

“They were the peasants who sowed, planted, and farmed, who plowed. Harvested, worked in the fields, cared for the orchards and the cattle, beekeepers and vine growers, farmers, and labourers. In the towns they were the artisans who worked, hammered, wove, and fashioned objects, the glaziers, sailors, and merchants. They were also the town planners who conceived the towns, the architects who designed the mosques and the Islamic palaces, the masons who built them and the people who maintained bridges and aqueducts.

“Decimated by razzias (Arabic term for Invasions) in the countryside, they sought refuge in the towns which they developed and embellished. Branded with opprobrium, the conquerors still chose to drag them from region to region to revive ravaged lands and restore ruined towns. Once again, they built, again they worked, once again they were driven out, pillaged and ransomed. And as they dwindled, drained of their blood and spirit, civilization itself disappeared, decadence stagnated, barbarism reigned over lands which, previously when they had been theirs, were lands of civilization, of crops and of plenty.

“The elites who fled to Europe took their cultural baggage with them, their scholarship, and their knowledge of the classics of antiquity. Thenceforth, in the Christian lands of refuge --- Spain, Provence, Sicily, Italy cultured centers developed where Christians and Jews from Islamized lands taught to the young Europe the knowledge of the old pre–Islamic Orient, formerly translated into Arabic by their ancestors. Straddling the two shores of the Mediterranean, intermediaries between two civilizations, they ensured trade, exchanges, the circulation of commodities and ideas, and the transfer of technology, enriching themselves and others by their ingenuity. Then in the 19th century when Europe lifted the screed of opprobrium which stifled them, again they met their challenge of modernity. Railways, telegraph, printing, journalism, transport, industry, banking: everywhere they were the promoters, the leaven of civilization and evolution. Once again, tireless artisans of progress, builders of civilization, they created the “infrastructure of modernity from Persia to the Maghreb [northwest Africa]. And once again driven out despoiled, decimated, they fled to the Americas, to Europe, to Israel, where Armenians, Maronites, Syrians, Chaldeans, Copts, and Jews, live from their own labor and not from international charity. Henceforth, from Turkey to Iran and the Arab countries, micro communities struggle along, the last remnants of multitudes of Christians and Jews who formerly populated those lands. Only cemeteries and ruins recall their past. Their historical, political, and cultural lights dissolve in the great oblivion of time, and, in their usurped history, the profound sense of dhimmitude is revealed: obliteration in nonexistence and nothingness.”

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ISRAEL AT 75 And Paul on Israel’s Future

November 28, 2023
By Bassam Michael Madany

Introduction

The current news from the Middle East is dominated by the Attack of the 7th of October and its aftermath. As a writer on the History of the region, I don’t comment on current issues, which are the domain of newspapers and other means of communication.

I share this article with my readers to help them understand the complicated nature of the issues that have dominated the lives of Mideastern people since the end of the Second World War.

On the 15th of May 2023, Israel celebrated its 75th as a nation. Time marches on. I remember that Saturday morning in 1948 when the BBC broadcast the news.

As the dawn of that day began, Arab armies greeted their neighbor by attacking from the north, the east, and from the south. The Haganah that had defended the Jewish people in Palestine during the British Mandate, became the IDF (Israeli Defence Force). Since that attack, Israel has been involved in a non-stop effort to defend itself and its people.

There are two aspects to the subject of the future of the State of Israel: one is historical/political, the other is in Apostle Paul’s teaching in his Letter to the Romans chapters 9-11.

We will begin with the historical/political side.

Prior to the Arab/Islamic conquest of the Holy Land in the middle of the seventh century, most of the people in Palestine were Christians, with a Jewish minority living alongside. The Islamic conquest resulted in the Arab Muslims gradually becoming most of the Palestinian population.

While most of the Jews had been living in the Diaspora for centuries, they maintained a strong yearning for a return to their ancestral land. They expressed that longing during the Passover celebration each year with the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem.”

During the 19th century, Jews were persecuted in Russia and discriminated against in Western Europe. The rise of anti-Semitism became evident in the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Captain Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was charged by the French High Command with spying for the Germans. He was found guilty and spent time at Devil’s Island in French Guyana, South America. French author Émile Zola took up the defense of Dreyfus and wrote his famous letter “J’accuse” in defense of Dreyfus.i

Theodor Herzl, a Jewish correspondent of a Viennese newspaper, covered the Dreyfus trial. He became convinced that there was no hope for the Jews to achieve complete emancipation in Europe. He became the father of the Zionist Movement, which advocated the establishment of a national home for the Jews. After many debates at World Zionist Congresses, it was decided to establish this home in Palestine. After his death, the Zionist Movement was assumed by Chaim Weitzmann, a Polish Jew who was teaching chemistry in England. During the war he helped the British Navy by inventing materials used to combat German submarines. Eventually, the British Government published the Balfour Declaration, which favored the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

At the end of WWI, the British assumed the government of Palestine with a mandate from the League of Nations. For the next 30 years, Great Britain found strong opposition from Palestinian Arabs against the plan. In 1946, the British Government brought the matter to the United Nations. A U.N. Commission of Inquiry studied the matter and proposed the partition of Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State. The Jews accepted the plan; the Arabs rejected it. Britain ended its presence in Palestine on 14 May 1948 at midnight. David Ben-Gurionii, with other Jewish leaders, declared the birth of the State of Israel on 15 May 1948.

Those opposed took immediate action. Armies from Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt entered Palestine in response. By mid-June 1948, the United Nations Security Council managed to pass a cease-fire between the opposing sides. But that was not the end of the conflict. Other major wars between Israel and the Arab countries took place in 1956, 1967, and 1973. Eventually, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat took the initiative of signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1978, and in 1994, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel.

During the second decade of the 21st century, the United States succeeded in getting several Arab countries to agree to normalize their relations with Israel. This is in a set of documents called the Abraham Accords.

The Accords ended the official Arab denial of the right of Israel to exist. However, a determined foe of Israel is now the Islamic Republic of Iran. To prove its utter faithfulness to Islamic tradition, the Iranian regime assumed an active opposition to Israel. It supports the radical Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian HAMAS in Gaza, with weapons used to continually harass Israel. While it is impossible to predict the future, the past 75 years give evidence that Israel’s existence may be frequently challenged.

Thus far the political history of the modern State of Israel.


As a Christian committed to the Biblical views of world history, I turn to The New Testament teaching on the Future of Israel.

In Romans 9 – 11, Saint Paul begins by focusing on the future of Israel, as some Jews had come to faith in Christ, while the vast majority had rejected Him as the Messiah.

Paul lists the privileges the Jews had received as witnesses to God’s glory: the Covenants, the receiving of the Law of Moses, the worship in the Temple, and the promises of God. He refers to their founding fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Finally, the Apostle mentioned that the promised Messiah was a descendant of the Patriarchs.

In Chapter 10, Saint Paul describes his desire and prayer for the people of Israel to be saved through faith in Jesus Christ. He acknowledges their zeal for God, a zeal demonstrated though efforts to obtain salvation by keeping the Law, something available only by faith in Jesus Christ. To be saved “one must confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised Him from the dead” (10:9)

Chapter 11 sums up Paul teaching about the future of Israel.

God has not rejected His previously chosen people, Israel. God’s relationship with Israel as a nation continues. Israel’s hardening will end when the “fullness of the Gentiles” has come to God through faith in Jesus Christ. Paul warns Gentile believers not to feel superior to Jewish unbelievers, since it was their faith in Christ that brought them salvation.

The future of believing Israelites is not to be separated from the future of believing Gentiles. Israel’s hope for the future is the same as that of believing Gentiles.

Chapter 11 of Romans ends with a poem structured as a hymn, expressing Paul’s profound reaction both to God’s ways and to His mercy to sinful human beings. He finishes his hymn with a statement of worship: “to God be the glory forever, Amen.”


iJ’accuse, (French: “I accuse”) a celebrated open letter by Émile Zola to the president of the French Republic in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who had been accused of treason by the French army. It was published in the newspaper L’Aurore on Jan. 13, 1898.

iiDavid Ben-Gurion, orig. David Gruen, (born Oct. 16, 1886, Płońsk, Pol., Russian Empire—died Dec. 1, 1973, Tel Aviv–Yafo, Israel), First prime minister of Israel (1948–53, 1955–63) 

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