I picked up a copy of A Short History of The World' by H.G Wells, 'revised and brought up to date by Raymond Postgate and G.P Wells', dated 1965. There was this particular passage that intrigued me.
'Now of all these civilised Semites who were beaten and overrun in these five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its ancient traditions, and that was this little people, the Jews, who were sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And there were able to do this because they had got together this literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It was not so much the Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the ideas of the people about them, very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship, adventure, and oppression.
'Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was invisible and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with hands, a Lord of Righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this was a new idea, this God of the Jews, in the Heavens, high above priests and sacrifices. And this God of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen them to be his peculiar people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of Righteouesness in the world. They were a people exalted by their sense of a common destiny. The belief saturated them all when they returned to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylon.'
Any comments? One of my first times posting here, don't kill me mods D:
The first, perhaps most important thing to note, is that it is usually impossible to say exactly why things happened the way they did, when we're talking about groups of people. Yes, it could've been Jewish theology. It also could've been incompatible culinary tastes preventing assimilation, or linguistic superiority, or whatever.
However, there are a few important points regarding the Babylonian exile and the bible. First, the Babylonian exile was not actually a complete exile of the entirety of the Jewish people. It's pretty clear that not everyone was sent out, and that there were Jews there when a limited number of exiles returned (i.e. the book of Ezra). So to start with, you don't necessarily need an explanation of why Judaism survived the Babylonian exile.
It's also very difficult to determine exactly what the average Jew believed. Even if we could reliably date biblical books, figuring out whether they represent a mainstream opinion, a "going against the grain" sort of opinion (which many frame themselves as), or the view of a particular subset of society is very challenging. The social group and time that produced the book may be different from the group and time that caused it to gain broad acceptance.
Ideas like the Israelites being God's chosen people and the Temple being his chosen place are present in the bible. But, when was the bible written? Parts of it were probably pre-exilic, parts of it maybe not. Was the average Israelite actually familiar with the contents of the bible? Ezekiel in particular is framed as a book written in exile, and it has ideas that might be appealing to people in exile, such as God appearing to a prophet in Babylon, along with visions of both divine judgement and the promise of redemption. But how widespread were those concepts? How did they figure into the average person's lifestyle? Did they exist before the exile, or were they the product of it? And at the end of the day those aren't very different from other prophetic texts in the bible...for which you could ask the same set of questions.
So, were the ideas that made Judaism exile-compatible the cause for its survival in Babylon, or were they a result of Judaism coming to grips with the exile? That's not really something knowable at present. Neither is exactly what your average Jew's relationship with the Temple in the First Temple era. So it's really not possible to say to what extent this is true.
I mean, it is a nice idea, once which I guess I'd like to be true. And it certainly could be. It's probably somewhat easier to support for later time periods, when we have a much clearer picture of Jewish religious practice, but still we're trying to distill a wide range of people over a long time period into a single motive. But to explain exactly why things happened as they did in a time period for which our sources to not have clear dates and there's no clear indication for what beliefs were widespread is mostly an exercise in guessing.
In the context you provided, Wells is using this sentence to emphasize what he is saying in the two previous sentences. Let me paraphrase the first three sentences for clarification:
The Jews were able to perpetuate their ancient traditions because they had this literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. All the other civilized Semites failed to maintain a body of text through five tumultuous centuries, and their traditions faded from practice as a result.
There is not enough context to know precisely what he is discussing in the two paragraphs you provided. However, we know the Torah is a compilation of several works over the course of centuries. Genesis, for example, was compiled from the tenth through the sixth centuries. By the time Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, the Torah was still not quite in the form we have today.^1 As such, the 'Jews' were making 'their Bible'.
Regardless, Wells' point is the act of maintaining a written text perpetuated certain stories that had a significant place in Jewish thought and culture around whatever time period he is discussing. This is what he means when saying their Bible made the Jews, that stories in their religious texts had a major impact on their thought and culture.