The Rise and Decline of Civilizations: Lessons for the Jewish People by Shalom Salomon Wald, Academic Studies Press, Boston and Jerusalem; ISBN 978-1-61811-377-1 ©2014, $33.00, p. 372, plus appendices, bibliography, notes, and index
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California — Physical scientists think that the world can be explained by theories and their concomitant mathematical equations. Economists, too, have laws relating the interaction among people, money, and the marketplace. Social scientists establish relevant and significant constructs through statistics, and linguists know that languages have deep structures, giving sentences oral meaning and written form. How about historians, do they have theories and laws? Does history repeat itself? Can we actually learn from history?
Dr. Shalom Wald, a senior fellow of the Jewish People Policy Institute with a background in economics, sociology, and history seeks to apply historical theories to the Jewish nation, a subculture within empires, civilizations, and nation-states during the last two thousand years, in his book Rise and Decline of Civilizations.
Parts I and II present a lively discussion of the meaning of civilization, as empire, culture, nation, and people. In addition, Wald clearly and cogently summarizes and extracts salient points from the writings of twenty-three “macro-historians,” historiographers who examine large, long-term historical trends. Some of the twenty-three studied just one or two civilizations, extrapolating their findings to new civilizations, others compared several cultures, looking for commonality, and still others searched for a single unifying principle that guides human history. Some of these twenty-three perceive history to be linear, with a beginning and an ending, others concluding that history flows in cycles.
Wald tells us that traditional Judaism recognizes history in linear terms, having its beginning at the creation of the world, then “driven by religious-spiritual causes and events.” But, his selection of historians presents a wide-raging view of Jews and Judaism’s impact on history.
Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, for example, is anti-Semitic, which only became apparent in his posthumous letters. Max Weber, the founder of German sociology, seeking to answer the question, “Why did the West rise?” responds by showing the connection between Protestantism and capitalism, and asserting that the Jewish religion provides civilizations with a rational ethic, free of magic and salvation.
Many of these historians identify civilizations’ rise and decline primarily as a function of what is happening within the civilization and not by external threats. As an example, Toynbee says that decline “is provoked by ‘schisms’ or deep splits in the population—in the souls of the people—when different and contradictory modes of feeling and behavior emerge.” He is deeply interested in the Jewish people, initially presenting many anti-Jewish arguments, but toward the end of his life reversing course, expressing his “eloquent hopes for a new rise of the Jewish people.”
The fourteenth century Islamic historian Ibn Khalun, understanding that just as a person is born, matures, and dies, so a civilization’s death is inevitable, pointing to internal dynastic leadership as the greatest threat to survival, and arguing that after the third or fourth generation a dynasty has moved from benign to totalitarian. He is “schizophrenic” with regard to the Jews. Ancient Israelites are part of a great people, but his present day Jews are too prideful and self-delusional.
In Part III, Wald looks for commonality among the various theories, categorizes them into broad models, and applies those paradigms to the history of the Jewish people. The Challenge-and-Response model proclaims that “civilizations do not rise naturally; they rise as a collective response to a natural-geographic or human stimulus.” The Windows of Opportunity model argues that civilizations rise to fill historical voids and decline when the window closes. The Global Interconnectedness theory says that “civilization rise and decline together, on a global or at least continent-wide basis.”
Wald does just the opposite in Part IV. Here, he looks at specific historical variables, dimensions of these theories, which he calls “drivers of the rise and decline of civilizations,” describing how these constructs have impacted the Jewish people. Among these are: how a civilization’s religion strengthens or weakens the people, the level of education and their commitment to science and technology, the degree to which language unifies or separates civilization, and the ability of its leadership to find creative solutions in the face of adversity.
As one example of his analysis, Wald points out that although Aramaic replaced Hebrew as the everyday language of the Jews, Hebrew remained a unifying force through Torah reading and prayers. Now, Jews are mostly monolingual and split into four language groups: English, Hebrew, French and Russian. He now worries that Diaspora Jewry might fall victim to the “Alexandria syndrome,” a condition reminiscent of Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, a place where Jews could not communicate with Greek speakers and Greek speakers could not communicate with those who knew only Hebrew or Aramaic, resulting in the disappearance in Alexandrian Jewry by the second century CE.
In another example, Wald draws on the biographies of Nehemiah (c. 5th century BCE), Don Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), Josel of Rosheim (1480-1554), and certain rabbinic leadership in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple, showing how management skill, authority, and power in a county’s elite can spell the difference between a nation’s thriving and untimely death. Throughout, Wald reiterates that the fall of a civilization is never monocausal, but combines internal and external elements, including material and nonmaterial sources, environmental cause, and war.
Wald concludes his book with two case studies: how the small country of Holland transformed itself into the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and how Turkey is molding itself in modern times. In each case, he looks for significant drivers of history and possible parallels with modern Israel.
Rise and Decline of Civilizations could not come at a more appropriate time. John Hawkins who runs “Right Wing News” sees numerous signs of America’s decline, including massive debt, inability to control its borders, and a shrinking middle class. Harvard business professor Michael E. Porter after studying 132 nations and evaluating 54 social and environmental indicators for each of them notes that “While the U.S. enjoys the second highest per capita GDP of $45,336, it ranks in an underperforming 16th place overall….70th in health, 69th in ecosystem sustainability, 39th in basic education, 34th in access to water and sanitation and 31st in personal safety.” In early December 2014, the trusted Internet financial source MarketWatch announced that America no longer has the world’s largest economy; that title officially belongs to China.
To this extent that these are true, what is the relationship between Israel’s future and America’s decline? Are we forced to take a pessimistic view of the fate of not just Israel and America, but Civilization, with a capital C, or are these just passing problems that will be successfully resolved in due course? Is history linear with just bumps in the road leading to some inevitable end, or does history repeat itself, dooming us to repeat cycles of Enlightenment and Dark Age-like existences? Within its well-constructed chapters Rise and Decline of Civilizations repeatedly stresses the idea that we can learn from history, carefully examines modern-day problems through theoretically-crafted historical frameworks, and progressively lays out numerous examples of how civilizations have successfully and unsuccessfully delayed their decline and death.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. Your comments may be placed in the box below or the author can be reached directly via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com