The Gift Of The Jews Thomas Cahill Chapter Summary
Andres Luke Camarillo
REL 1310
December 11, 2014
Extra Credit Book Review: The Gift of the Jews by Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahill’s book The Gift of the Jews provides perceptive insight on the development of the Western world through the heritage and faith of the Jewish people. Cahill presents that the Jews provided the origin of the Christian faith, justice, and even history itself. The Jews introduced both pivotal and world-altering changes to the way humankind views and interprets the world. Most texts will present a main point with several themes, however, Cahill shows the reader how without the Jews, many of these themes (adventure, vocation, progress, etc.) would never have been in the first place. The title of the first chapter presents to the reader the underlying message of the entire novel: the Jews are it. The Jews are the inventors of Western culture and the progenitors of so many of the ideas and concepts that today’s society has been built upon. Cahill argues that since the earliest of time humans have considered tools and discoveries not as innovations but gifts from the eternal. Of these gifts, written word, the domestication of animals, agricultural tools, the
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The cyclical beliefs of the ancient societies are finally confronted when the Jews emerge from captivity in Babylon. The antiquated ideas of the Old Testament God who beckons for sacrifice and doles vicious judgment are traded for the belief that God wants justice for the people whom he loves. Cahill iterates this “breakthrough” in societal beliefs as an important advance for the development of Western civilization. By breaking the physical, cyclical, and Earthly nature of thinking, the Jews gave meaning to life through a spiritual component this completing Cahill’s original statement, “We dream Jewish dreams and Jewish
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