On The Bookshelf

After the contributions of the Jews,
claims author Thomas Cahill in a new book,
everything else is a footnote. ,,

SANDEE BRAWARSKY

Special to The Jewish News

T

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he future began with
Abraham, as Thomas Cahill
explains in his new book,

The Gifts of the Jews: How a
Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the
Way EVeryone Thinks and Feels
(Doubleday; $32.95). Here, the best-
selling author of How the Irish Saved
Civilization turns his attention to the
Jews.
•
"For the ancients, the future was
always to be a replay of the past, as the
past was simply an earthly replay of
the drama of the heavens," Cahill
writes. When Abraham, having heard
the voice of God, left the land of his
ancestors for places unknown, he
turned a significant corner not only in
his life but in the course of humanity
To do something new at a time
when every day was like the one
before was to spark an evolution in
sensibility. Subsequently, there was a
shift from cyclical time to processive
Sandee Brawarsky is a New York-
based freelance writer.

time, from repetition to adventure,
from many gods to the One God.
The concept of history as a process
unfolding in time was born, as were
the ideas of individualism, faith, the
Sabbath.
"This Jewish revolution is the great
revolution in sensibility across the
spectrum," Cahill elaborates in an
interview. "Before the Jews, everyone
thought the same way."
He compares the shift in thought
and feelings from a cyclical view to a
processive view as greater than
"exchanging the flat world view for
the Copernical."
"If you want to know who you are,
where you came from, you have to be
able to look at the process that finally
created the Western world," he asserts.
After the contributions of the Jews,
everything else is a footnote. ,,
The former director of religious
publishing at Doubleday can visualize
the moment in 1970 when he first
began thinking about the idea of this
volume. While traveling in Ireland for
a year writing a book with
his wife on Irish literary
landmarks, he visited several
fertility festivals based on
pagan rituals in the western
countryside.
This was a world that
predated the Jews, and he

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5/15
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118

Thomas Cahill: His new
book is a selection of
both the Jewish Book
Club and the Catholic
Book Club.