Don’t know the answer to that one. Maybe the right people at the right time. But a look at history tells us what God accomplished by choosing a people: raising the bar for the human race.

Without the Hebrews first you don’t get either Christianity or Islam afterwards.

The one thing I think most Jews miss is that the Diaspora was an essential part of God’s plans. You take a bunch of people who want to stick only to themselves like most tribal peoples do, and thrust them into the wider world, where they are forced to interact, forced to share the teachings given to them.

What most everybody misses: anti-Semitism is blaming the messengers.

But not one easy to relate.
And so by language men are limited, and by limits most unleashed.

The secret to being different is the same as being best
At being what the other’s not when he is being less’d,
Sometimes it’s better to be not what other men are most
Depending on their inward heart, or what their soul will boast,
There is a grand nobility in being far outcast
If motive is as purity that seeks the fault surpass’d,
One should not claim to ostracize or search to limit men
For vanity in self-diverged is but a common sin,
And if a man demands that he is separate and apart
He may just find that arrogance has settled in his heart,
But if he keeps his distance to assure his soul is clean
Then he has found the better part of wisdom most pristine,
So to your secrets secret men and keep your motives right
Join up fast or stand alone, it is the good man’s plight,
A coward is the kind of man who never joins his mates
And yet there is a bravery that solitude relates,
The secret to being different is the same as being best
The better hold within yourself, the rest you must divest.

Ron, you wrote,

“Lots of people understand why it’s not odd. Churchill may not have, but this article doesn’t seem to suggest anything but sympathy, limited by his own class’s attitudes — the suggestion implict, for example, that assimilation would be a good thing.”

Even if he wrote this, which he did not, it needs to be juxtaposed to his famous support — in the face of tremendous resistance; popular, political, civilian, and military — of the Zionist cause. Clearly Churchill did not wish the Jews to disappear at all. Rather, he wished to see a Jewish homeland — including all of Jerusalem (!!!) — established.

And lest anyone reading this bring up the Palestine White Paper, note that this was absolutely against Churchill’s wishes, and he spoke out against it. Churchill was hated for his frequent and explicit advocacy for the Jews.

Can you recommend a history of the ashkenazi in Poland-Lithuania and Russia from the 10th century or so on. I thought Thomas Cahill’s book “The Gifts of the Jews” might be it, but no. A good book, just not about that. (I guess I’m gonna have to start reading those amazon reviews)