The Gift Of The Jews By Cahill: Summary

The Gift of the Jews is a book that follows Jewish history from its roots and credits Jews for our conceptions of history. Throughout the book, it uses direct quotation of ancient texts and explains their importance. This format creates an informative and explanatory narrative that utilizes old stories to both reveal old history and do so in an interesting manner. The author, Thomas Cahill, starts by discussing the situation and relationship between Sumer and the Semitic nomads. This chronologically follows Avraham (Abraham) and his contributions to changing society. The book covers possibly the oldest historical events through discussing the civilization of Sumer and the Semitic tribes that inhabited the surrounding area. This places the time period around 5000 years ago, as stated by the book. “Somewhat more than five millennia ago, a human hand carved a written word, and so initiated history, mankind’s recorded story. This happened in Sumer…” (Cahill, 11). This statement explicitly sets the time and place. Additionally, early innovations helped set the stage for writing and cities. The book gives strong credit to improvements in agricultural technology. “Someone’s brilliant idea to dig trenches (and then to fashion canals and reservoirs) so

“The Jews started it all – and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that makes all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick” (Cahill, 3). This opening clearly underlines both the author’s understanding of the modern attitude towards Jews and his positive opinion of them. The portion, “The Jews started it all,” is a shock statement, one made simply to garner attention. The rest of the sentence consists of the author’s justification, stating how he sees Jews as the foundation of modern thought. In many ways this sentence is hyperbolic, but it still delivers the authors bias, which is that he likes Jews and their