Who Are the Jews? Volume 1

Soul of the Israelites

By Seymour W. Itzkoff

SUMMARY        “Soul of the Israelites” refers to the teachings transmitted by the Prophet Moses to the Israelites from their God YHWH.        Central to the book’s argument is the solution to the two great mysteries concerning the formation and destiny of the Israelites.        1. Who were these people; how were they formed into tribes and then a nation? 2. Who was Moses, an historical figure, a religious myth of the imagination? How did his teachings come to be so central to the destiny of this people?        The tribes of Israel, the twelve sons of Jacob, united in the monarchy, were in all likelihood of tripartite origins. First, the Isra/el/ite highlanders from Canaan/Shechem, worshippers of the traditional God, gods of the Middle East, El/Elohim. Second, the nomadic tribes of Sinai, the Negeb, northwest Arabia, and the oases of south

       Canaan, what would become Judah, worshippers of the fiery war god, YHWH. Third, Moses and the returnees from the Delta of Egypt. These latter, now worshippers of YHWH of the wilderness tribes, had, through the efforts of Moses, transformed this God into a moral and intellectual force unique to existing religious belief.
       Moses was too powerful and too concrete a human being to have been an invention. But his individual gift of vision was not his alone. The rigorous belief system that Moses provided to this rabble of Asiatic escapees from the corvée was their only hope of returning to that land of “milk and honey.”
       YHWH did not permit Moses personally to attain that goal. That role passed forward to future generations of judges, prophets, priests. Despite the efforts of the wisest of them, both the rulers and the am-har-etz, the people of the land, failed the Law. The Mesopotamian destruction of the Kingdoms and then the Temple, 586 BCE, was sanctioned by YHWH. Expelled from their homeland, once more in exile, the Israelites were again to be tested, to reconstruct their moral identity, their nationhood, and their Temple, 2500-586 BCE.

About Seymour W. Itzkoff

       Seymour W. Itzkoff was trained in philosophy at Columbia University. Now an Emeritus Professor, he taught for many years at Smith College. He is the author of nineteen scholarly books, including several studies of the neo-Kantian philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, and a book on the art of ‘cellist Emanuel Feuermann. Most recently, his Inevitable Domination by Man, An Evolutionary Detective Story, has received critical scientific acclaim.




This book is available for $25. It has 221 pages with illustrations and a cloth cover. Copyright 2004. ISBN: 0-913993-17-4

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