David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and member of the National Council of the Arts. He is the author of several books and many technical articles, as well as essays, art criticism, and fiction. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer-communication and distributed programming systems worldwide. According to Reuters, his book "Mirror Worlds" (Oxford University Press, 1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web and was "one of the inspirations for Java"; the "lifestreams" system (first implemented by Eric Freeman at Yale) is the basis for Mirror Worlds Technologies' software. Gelernter is also the author of "The Muse in the Machine" (Free Press, 1994), the novel "1939" (Harper Perennial, 1995), "Machine Beauty" (Basic Books, 1998), and most recently, "Judaism: A Way of Being" (Yale University Press, 2010).

Question: Why do you\r

believe Judaism is the central intellectual development in Western \r

history?

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David Gelernter:\r

It seems to be, beyond doubt, that Judaism is the most important \r

intellectual\r

development in western history for two reasons: one having to do with \r

the\r

aesthetic and spiritual, and the other having to do with the ethical. If I begin with ethical and moral\r

issues, Judaism invented the idea of mankind as an entity. \r

So we see striking differences between\r

ancient Israeli literature and Greek literature, let’s say in the first \r

1,000\r

years, the first millennium B.C. \r

There is a word in Greek that has no equivalent in Hebrew, namely\r

“barbarian.” Barbarian meaning, somebody that\r

babbles—a Greek word meaning someone who babbles, who doesn’t speak \r

Greek, who\r

is foreign, who is culturally inferior by definition and of very little\r

interest. Not only different, but\r

boring. Judaism, meanwhile insofar\r

as to develop the idea of a single god, which was a revolutionary and \r

bazaar\r

idea at that time, first emerges 3,000 some odd years ago. \r

I figured that if there really only one\r

god in the world, he had to be everybody’s god. Everybody\r

should have the right to say, this is my god. Must\r

have that right. And then if you look who that\r

community, who the faithful are in principle, it’s everybody. So, Judaism has the idea that ethical\r

laws, moral rules and strictures apply to everybody. Not that everybody \r

has a\r

sort of liability to carry them out. \r

There were stricter requirements of Jews, or Israelis, than there\r

are\r

of people in general. Judaism has\r

never been a proselytizing religion. \r

It doesn’t really care—as a matter of fact is indifferent—whether\r

people\r

become Jews or join the Jewish community, but is very clear on what the \r

basic\r

moral obligations of mankind are with respect for life, respect for \r

justice,\r

kindness to animals, a familial, what should I say, sexual fidelity and\r

refraining from sexual crimes. \r

These are the so-called “Seven laws of the sons of Noah,” meaning\r

that\r

they apply to everybody.

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So, without going into a lengthy disquisition, \r

Judaism has\r

the idea that there is a simple moral code which goes not only for the \r

Israeli\r

people, or the Israeli nation, but is applicable to everybody and has \r

the\r

revolutionary idea that not only is there one god, but there is \r

essentially one\r

man; one mankind, the whole world. \r

So on festival occasions at the Temple of Jerusalem, 70 \r

sacrifices would\r

be brought at certain points. It\r

was thought that there were 70 nations in the world; one for each \r

nation.

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Judaism has an aesthetic and spiritual side also, \r

of\r

course. Judaism is obsessed with\r

imagery. One often finds that its\r

stereotypes are either basically right or exactly wrong. \r

They are rarely sort of in\r

between. Judaism is often\r

described as being hostile to imagery. \r

But we know that can’t be right because of the Hebrew Bible \r

underlies\r

western literature. Hebrew poetry,\r

the poetry of the psalms, the prophets, the Book of Job, is the basis of\r

Western literature. Hebrew prose\r

narrative is the basis of Western narrative. There\r

is no such thing as great poetry without imagery, the\r

idea is absurd. There is no such\r

thing as great writing that isn’t vivid and vibrant and that means based\r

on\r

images. And we find, in fact, the imagery of the Bible is the imagery \r

that\r

recurs throughout Western literature and Western art, from ... the \r

split-open Red Sea, to the handwriting on the wall,\r

to chariot of fire. These are\r

images that are not only painted in the developing tradition of medieval\r

art\r

and western realist painting, but they recur in Western literature of \r

all\r

languages down to this afternoon.

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So for both of these reasons, Judaism has a \r

commanding role\r

in the creation of the culture and civilization that we’ve occupied for \r

several\r

thousand years, and especially so with the emergence of the idea of the \r

liberal\r

nation. The liberal modern nation\r

which is a sort of joint invention of the United States and of Great \r

Britain in\r

the 17th century and the 18th century. \r

These were Christian nations, but the Christianity of early \r

America and\r

of Britain in the Elizabethan, and especially the age of the civil wars \r

and\r

Cromwell, is what is often called “Hebraic Christianity,” or “Old \r

Testament\r

Christianity.” It was a profoundly\r

Hebrew-inspired sort of Christianity. \r

Not that people thought of themselves as Jews because they did \r

not, but\r

both the early United States and the early Britain repeatedly referred \r

to\r

themselves as “The New Israel” and the idea of freedom and liberty \r

emerges in\r

the United States on the basis of the story of the Exodus, the biblical \r

verse,\r

“Let my people go,” which is repeated many times by Moses to Pharaoh \r

becomes\r

fundamental in American history not only when religious zealots, who \r

were\r

persecuted in England immigrate in the 17th Century to the United \r

States, but\r

when the United States declares it’s own independence and freedom as a \r

nation\r

during the Civil War when the North becomes gradually resolved under \r

President\r

Lincoln to free the slaves, and then the Civil Rights Movement of the \r

‘60s,\r

late ’50s and ‘60s again.

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So, the notion of freedom, the notion\r

of equality, which is derived by the founders of English and American\r

liberalism from the opening of the Bible, which says, “All men are \r

created in\r

God’s image, therefore you’re not allowed to make distinctions on the \r

basis of\r

race, color, and creed. All men\r

being in God’s image are to be treated justly and fairly.” \r

Abraham Lincoln put that most\r

concisely. And interestingly, the\r

idea of democracy too, if you read the early literature in the United \r

States,\r

developing the idea of modern democracy in the 1600’s, especially New \r

England and\r

in Virginia, to some extent, biblical verses are \r

quoted constantly. Not only the ones in which \r

Moses sets up what is described\r

as a Jewish commonwealth, he’s told to essentially let each tribe \r

furnish its\r

own leaders. Tell Moses who his\r

leaders will be. But it’s also the\r

case of the Hebrew Bible is an aggressively anti-monarchy book. There are vivid denunciations of the\r

idea of a king, the rights of kings, an absolute king. Prophets\r

in the Bible confront kings\r

for them in the name of God to be fair and to be just and to be \r

honorable, and\r

in fact, Israel was told that if it had any sense, they wouldn’t have a \r

king\r

to begin with.

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So in lots of ways—and this is something that used \r

to be\r

well known—the last couple of generations in western culture, I would \r

say\r

since the Second World War, have been secularizing generations in which \r

we were\r

more apt to look at ancient Greece than ancient Israel. But\r

as a matter of historical record,\r

it’s easy to trace these ideas, also in the philosophy of the English\r

Enlightenment. It’s easy to open a\r

book of Locke and notice that he keeps quoting the Bible, or Hobbes, or \r

Seldon,\r

or others of the English philosophers who provided the intellectual\r

counter-weight to the active and pragmatic liberalism of the founding \r

fathers.

Recorded on April 1, 2010.