Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was one of the most prolific authors of all time. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic, worked on Latin documents, and made himself very well-informed about Christianity, but turned against it. But he was extremely naive about Jews; bear this in mind.
Click for Detailed notes on McCabe - scroll down for selections from A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (1948).
Here's the full A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (about 1.3 MBytes; Word format; includes notes on some of its limits)
Click for Detailed notes on McCabe - scroll down for selections from A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (1948).
Here's the full A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (about 1.3 MBytes; Word format; includes notes on some of its limits)
McCabe's Encyclopaedia has many mentions of Jews; this is his complete entry under the title Jews, the. Surprisingly, his entry under Jesuits is much longer! As with many people even now, very little link is perceived between 'Jews' and 'Christianity'. Partly this is the result of a constant campaign to claim huge rifts between those groups. The truth appears to be exactly opposite, the Church supporting Jews in practice, in exchange for services provided by Jews.
–RW 1 Sept 2023
Jews.
J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia
Jews, The. The word "Jew" is a corruption, through the French, of the Greek and Latin for Judaean or descendant of Judah. The Hebrews [see], as it is proper to call them before the Captivity, split into two kingdoms, that of Israel in the north (Samaria) and that of Judah in the south. After the Captivity (586-536) they were bitterly hostile to each other, and the cult of Jahveh was organized in the south, to which a large number of the descendants of the exiles returned from Babylonia. From that time we get an antithesis of Samaritans and Jews, or Judaeans. Both remained poor and obscure, so that Herodotus never mentions them, and they did not attract the attention of Alexander. Judaea, as a province of Egypt, passed to the Ptolemies, and then to the Seleucids, until the wars of independence, in the second century B.C. The chief interest in their history after the fifth century is that the poverty and troubles of Judaea led to an increasing flow of migration to Egypt, Babylonia, and Phoenicia. When Alexandria, a short sea-voyage from Pales-tine, became a great city it attracted large numbers and brought them under the influence of Greek culture. Some experts attribute a special influence to a body of followers of Pythagoras in Alexandria, who are held to explain the appearance of the ascetic Therapeuts, Essenes, and Pharisees on the one hand, and the new Jewish mysticism (Odes of Solomon, Philo Judaeus, etc.) on the other. See Dispersal, Prof. Guignebert's Jewish World in the Time of Jesus (1939), and Isidore Lévy, La légende de Pythagore (1927). In the later history of the Jews the outstanding facts are the savagery of the treatment they received in Christian countries and, in contrast to this, their splendid contributions to civilization in co-operation with the Arabs and Persians as long as these were under liberal or sceptical Caliphs. In Spain, particularly, they were conspicuous in every field of culture as well as in industry and trade, and, since the Arabs had no incentive to travel from rich and beautiful Andalusia into the bleak Christian lands, it was Jewish merchants who stirred Europe and roused it from the Dark Age - apart from the direct contact of the South of France and Barcelona - by displaying the products and teaching the science of Moslem Spain and Sicily. See W. J. Fishel, The Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam (1937), The Cambridge Mediaeval History (vol. VI, p. 478), and (for a summary of their achievements) McCabe's Splendour of Moorish Spain (1935, Ch. XVII). For post-mediaeval history see M. Raisin, A History of the Jews in Modern Times (vol. VI of Graetz's Popular History of the Jews, 1930 ed.).Return to Joseph McCabe Selection
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