THE EIGHTH DAYThe Hidden History of the Jewish Contribution to Civilization
by Samuel Kurinsky
ABOUT THE BOOK:
© 1994 Samuel Kurinsky, all rights reserved
Ground-breaking and myth-shattering, The Eighth Day is an invaluable source-book for anyone interested in Jewish history.
It is equally valuable for those interested in the way historiography has itself evolved. All subject peoples have suffered the destruction of their historical heritage by their conquerors. The Jewish people have been quintessentially the victims of an historical holocaust throughout their three-thousand-year experience in hostile Diasporas.
The religious and ethical contribution of Judaism to civilization has rightfully been acknowledged; but the seminal role the Jews have played in the technological and artistic evolution of civilization is absent from our histories. The Eighth Day goes a long way toward the reconstruction of this "Hidden History" of the Jews. It likewise opens a new view of the histories of technology and of human society.
The myth that the early Jews were nomads is exposed in the very first chapter by the presentation of biblical archaeological and documentary evidence to the contrary. The thesis is set that the Jews stemmed from the first civilization to invent the alphabet and the axled wheel, a civilization which gave birth to the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Wherever the Jews were dispersed into the Diaspora, they carried that literacy and technological expertise with them.
The Eighth Day sets the stage for an entirely new historical paradigm.
The Eighth Day opens a revelatory page of Judaic history.
Excerpts from the Introduction
Ancient archeology, as much or more than any other science, is based on theory and hypothesis more than on fact. Many historiographical constructions are hatched from a single artifact, or from a mere reference from a witness whose credibility cannot be proven. The further we probe into the past, the less material we find with which to reconstruct history, and the more subject to interpretation the reconstruction becomes. Written records are unreliable because they are for the most part written, or rewritten, by those who attain power... Once empowered, they employ their synthetic rendition of recorded history as a cover for the iniquitous actions by which power was achieved, as a vindication of crass ambition, and as a rationale for sustaining their hegemony over people and territory.
Conversely, records that present the subjected peoples in a positive light are deliberately deleted or remolded and replaced to suit the interest of their conquerors... Ancient records should therefore be interpolated accordingly...
...The horrific Holocaust perpetrated upon the Jewish people by the Nazis is but the most recent manifestation of an agelong series of desecrations suffered by the Jews. The human loss, the unprecedented, deliberate eradication of six million people for no other reason than they were born of the wrong parentage. is so appalling that another ghastly aspect of the Holocaust is overlooked. Another egregious consequence that both the Jews and the world suffered as a result of Nazi bestiality was the irretrievable loss of mountains of historical data. Uncountable millions of books and documents were put to the torch upon the razing or confiscation of thousands of Jewish enterprises, of thousands of Jewish cultural institutions, and of some six hundred synagogues. The architectural loss was the least part of the disaster that befell the world no less than the Jews; The loss of the vast corpus of documents covering virtually the entire range of the Jewish European experience is a loss that cannot be reconstituted with the same facility with which buildings can be reconstructed. The Jews were a substantial cultural and industrial factor of Central European civilization, but masses of documents that define that history, that demarcate Jewish identity and record Jewish accomplishments, were consumed in the flames of that secondary holocaust...
...Yet the twentieth-century Nazi Holocaust of four year?s duration is merely the latest and not the most momentous of the recurrent devastations that have plagued the Jews over three thousand years....
....The thrust of the thesis being herein presented is to unshroud the extraordinary accomplishments of the Jews and to put in proper perspective the vast contribution the Jews have made to the technological and artistic evolution of civilization. Literacy, a learned trait, is ascribed as the main reason for the extraordinary accomplishments of the Jews as a culture and as a nation...
....There is no doubt that the same effort should be applied to the case histories of all peoples who have suffered oppression. In the search for their roots, many people have discovered how unjustly history is written, how peoples meriting recognition have been relegated to the dust-heap of history, the greatest indignity of all. Science itself has suffered in the process, for truth, the greatest leveler, is also the most effective ladder to the future.
Therein lies our story.
This book is out of print and no longer available.