THOMAS CAHILL

On how Jews changed the perception of time: 320k WAV audio file 928k QuickTime movie

Cahill's book The Gifts of the Jews

Hinges of history

Thomas Cahill on how Jews shaped the world

(CNN) -- Arguably, history is the record of pivotal moments in time that dramatically altered the course of human events. That is the theme of a series of books by the writer Thomas Cahill, formerly director of religious publishing at Doubleday.

His bestseller, "How the Irish Saved Civilization," has been translated into a half dozen languages. His follow up is a more ambitious book, "The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels." Cahill discussed his new book with Miles O'Brien on CNN Sunday Morning.

O'BRIEN: How did you get the idea for this book?

CAHILL: I think all of the ideas come from the same source. I'm really interested in the way in which ideas and perceptions and feelings and values influence the whole course of our history and make us the people that we are.

And it's trying to trace back to their ... origins of who we are that set me on this course of the first book about the Irish and now this book about the Jews which really brings us back to the very beginning, to the very fountain head of western civilization.

O'BRIEN: So many things we take for granted you traced back originally to Jewish culture. Give us a few examples.

CAHILL: When we take our Civilization One courses, which I think everyone takes at some time or another, we're almost always given the impression that the Greeks were the great gift givers to the western idea, and really they're kind of secondary compared to the Jews.

The Greeks gave us, in effect, the form of Western civilization. They gave us a kind of filing system to keep our ideas in. But the Jews really gave us our whole value system ... the way we look at almost everything.

For instance, the Jews completely changed human notions of time. Before the Jews, time was thought to be a kind of circle that came around again and again. The Jews insisted that time was real and that the future hadn't happened yet, and that it was unpredictable. Therefore, they gave us the idea of surprise and innovation.

They also gave us our interior. They gave us a sense of personal identity, so that each person sees himself as a individual with an individual destiny. That's a Jewish idea.

O'BRIEN: You also mentioned in your book that Western literature is heir to the Bible itself, which has two great themes of love and death, among other things.

CAHILL: I mentioned that at the very beginning of the book, and what I'm suggesting is that the Bible is full of the things that we always go to literature for. Namely, love and death. And, as I say, its caricature is sex and violence.

So there's every good reason why we should find the Bible interesting just as a literary document. But beyond that, it is the great formative document that made us who we are. It's the foundation stone of all of western civilization. And not just in its religious aspects, but in all of its cultural aspects.

O'BRIEN: Regarding the view that the meek shall inherit the Earth. That manifests itself in our justice system and any number of other ways. That's something we take for granted, but can be traced back to Jewish culture, right?

CAHILL: Justice is a Jewish value. It is the ultimate Jewish value. Without a Jewish sense of justice, we would have a very different society. But I think it's also the Jewish value that is yet to be completely understood. We understand a lot about time and we understand a lot about individuality. We still understand very little about justice. It's the one value that I think we have yet to realize fully in our own societies.

O'BRIEN: We always like to ask our authors what they're reading currently. What's on your book stand?

CAHILL: A very good mystery story. I find that after I've spent the day thinking about cultural exchanges, I like to sort of clear my head in the evening, so I'm reading a mystery about ancient Rome.

O'BRIEN: Tell us what your next project is. What's the next hinge in history?

CAHILL: I think it's always a mistake for an author to talk about what he hasn't written. I do plan five more books in the hinges of history series, and I think each one should be a surprise. In the same way that the Jews invented surprise, I'd like to surprise my readers at least five more times.

Related story:

• The latest on the Middle East peace process

---

 

---

Sound off on our message boards & chat

© 1998 Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Terms under which this service is provided to you.