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The modern world is still suffering from the native incapacity of the Jews to be political. The art of making and preserving a City, which we call be the Greek name, “Politics,” was never an indigenous growth among the Hebrews. The City of the Greeks and the other civilized nations of antiquity was hateful to them. Their ideas were essentially anti-political. The politics of Judaea, when there were any, were borrowed from the Egyptians and Babylonians and, later, from the Greeks. These borrowings were regarded with violent disapproval by the champions of Hebrew orthodoxy, who objected to organized civilization on two grounds. Some, like Amos, hated it just because it was civilization and not nomadic barbarism. It was in the desert that God had made his covenant with the Chosen Race, and in the desert there was nothing else to think about but God. So, Back to the Desert! was their war-cry. Others, the Ebionites, objected to civilization because it was hierarchical, because it made for social inequality. They gave prophetically indignant utterance to the envious hatred of the poor in cash and in spirit against the rich and talented and cultured. A pious and universal mediocrity was their ideal.
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“One and Many,” pp. 17-18

 

Aldous Huxley

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Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.

 

William Saroyan

 

[In Italy, when every sentence is liable to be scanned for traces of anti-Fascist sentiment] it is obviously safer to begin by choosing a more congenial subject than a free Athens or a free Rome. In Germany the effect of National-Socialism has been the opposite. Racial doctrines and political antipathy to the whole Roman Empire and its cognate ideas have had the result of discouraging study of the Italic peoples and of Rome, the mistress of the world. On the other hand, a peculiar kinship has been detected between the ancient Greeks and modern Germans. Not only the Greek civilization in general, but Thucydides in particular, has proved exceptionally congenial. The intensely political outlook of Thucydides may be made serviceable to a doctrine which asserts the absolute dominion of the State over every phase of individual existence; and, as the more striking figures of Caesar and Augustus had already been captured as prototypes by Mussolini, Hitler might well be made to look very like Pericles—or Pericles, rather, to look like Hitler.

 

Enoch Powell

 

How can anyone have a true sense of the Hebrew race without crossing this terrifying desert, without experiencing it? For three interminable days we crossed it on our camels. Your throat sizzles from thirst, your head reels, your mind spins about as serpent-like you follow the sleek tortuous ravine. When a race is forged for two score years in this kiln, how can such a race die? I rejoiced at seeing the terrible stones where the Hebrews' virtues were born: their perseverance, will power, obstinacy, endurance, and above all, a God flesh of their flesh, flame of their flame, to whom they cried, "Feed us! Kill our enemies! Lead us to the Promised Land!"
To this desert the Jews owe their continued survival and the fact that by means of their virtues and vices they dominate the world. Today, in the unstable period of wrath, vengeance, and violence through which we are passing, the Jews are of necessity once again the chosen people of the terrible God of Exodus from the land of bondage.

 

Nikos Kazantzakis

 

You neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

 

Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot

 

They [the Greeks] were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

 

Edith Hamilton