The Hand of G-d in History:
Historical Lessons from Henry VIII and Saddaam Hussein
It was an unseasonably warm day in February. Sunlight poured into room 227 on the second floor of Dickinson Hall. Professor Jordan was lecturing our class about Henry VIII’s Proclamation Act of 1539.
(Which, for those of you who are not intimately acquainted with English History, declared that “Proclamations made by the King’s Highness with the Advice of his Honourable Council shall be obeyed and kept as though they were made by Act of Parliament.”)
In plain English, this Act declared that anything the King said was law.
“It can be hard to understand this when you look back on the past from the vantage point of the present,” Professor Jordan said,
“but, in 1539, Henry VIII was the most powerful English King who ever lived. If he had had a strong legitimate male heir, it is entirely plausible that the English monarchy could have become as absolute in nature as the French monarchy.”
And then, it hit me.
It hit me like a train:
The entire history of the modern world was determined by the distribution of Y chromosomes in Henry VIII’s testicles.
As lewd as that may sound, it is an undeniable historical fact.
Henry VIII’s marital problems were legendary. He was the progenitor of the modern-day bad husband and absentee father. Rather than go to couple’s therapy, he forced his entire nation to convert to Protestantism.
(Infographic explaining Henry’s Marital Problems)
England left the Catholic Church because Henry’s first wife did not bear him a son. Although the wives were always blamed, we know from genetics that it is the father who must furnish the Y chromosome.
Henry had his second wife executed because she did not bear him a son.
His third wife did bear him a son, but she died, and the boy was weak.
We will save the other three for another time.
When Henry dies, the succession order is:
Edward VI, Protestant
Mary I, Catholic
Elizabeth I, Protestant
This turbulent succession meant that the national religion of England was constantly flip-flopping, eventually eroding the power of the English monarchy and leading to civil war 100 years later.
The political history of England following the civil war is the history of Parliament, not the monarchy.
It is Parliament that will establish republican structures in the English government, and it is Parliament which will serve as the model for the American federal government.
The English monarchy will constantly try to regain some of the authority it lost, but no monarch will ever come close to having the amount of absolute power that Henry VIII had.
~
As I sat in class on that warm winter day, I saw 500 years of modern history flash before my eyes.
The religious wars of England, the rise of the Puritans, the founding of the American colonies, the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, the Age of Empires, the birth of Communism, the First World War, the Lost Generation, the Second World War, the Cold War… all of modern western history emanating from a single point.
The more history I have learned, the more obvious this fact becomes:
History is miraculous.
It is a series of events happening in a chaotic vacuum that, somehow, all lead directly to this precise moment we are all living in now.
Most people do not see history this way. Most people see history as a fragmented collection of events that all happen, more or less, by happenstance.
However, it is not the history that is fragmented; it is our vision.
Like a blind man touching an elephant, when we study historical events, we limit our vision to but one part of an incomprehensibly large whole.
But when we step back, the full form begins to come into shape. As we step back, we start to realize just how big history truly is, and we begin to understand that it is not a matter of feet that we must backtrack; it is a matter of miles.
And when we have finally stepped back far enough to see the whole frame, everything from Hammurabi to Hitler, the Hand of G-d finally shows itself.
History is not happenstance.
Across 4000 years of human history, if there is one thing that has always been true, it is that miracles are the norm and not the exception.
A miracle, according to Maimonides, is not when G-d does something impossible. A miracle is when G-d expands our understanding of what is possible. And here we can use G-d and history interchangeably.
Take Dunkirk.
Three hundred thousand British soldiers were marooned on a French beach with no protection from the German advance. They were the entirety of the British army.
If they fell, so too did Britain’s ability to fight.
Without a navy to protect them, Churchill mobilized the civilian population to sail their boats across the channel and rescue the army.
In all of recorded history, there is no other example of such national bravery and personal courage.
It was as preposterous of a military idea as it sounds.
And yet, because of the unshakable British spirit and a lucky day of rain, the civilians got almost every single soldier off that beach.
Of course, that is not the only time the West was saved by the weather.
At Waterloo, Napoleon was poised to split the British and Prussian forces, but the rain stopped his advance.
Two historical moments with civilization defining consequences, both determined by the rain.
And these are just two of thousands of examples where tiny little details affected hundreds of years of human history.
How can we possibly account for these moments in the historical narrative?
From the fragmentary view, they are all just one-off events, moments of happenstance. Some might call them miracles; others might call them something else. But they see them as isolated occurrences that deviate from the historical norm.
The miracle, they say, is a historical anomaly.
However, given just how many of these historical anomalies have occurred, would it not be more accurate to say that miracles are the historical norm, not the deviation?
The Hand of G-d has left its fingerprints all over the historical narrative. It is written plainly for all to see.
The question for historians is not if there are miracles in history; the question is, what do they mean?
I could write a book on any number of a thousand historical miracles, but I would like to share just one for now.
This story is about a series of very strange miracles that happened because of Saddaam Hussein, antisemitism, and Colin Powell.
This is the story of what the U.S. Army found while they were looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction.
~
For thousands of years, Jews lived in relative prosperity in Iraq. The Babylonian Talmud, the crown jewel of Jewish wisdom, was written and composed in Iraq, and, not long ago, the great rabbi, the Ben Ish Chai, lived and studied in Baghdad. He was one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the 19th century.
(Rare photograph of the Ben Ish Chai. He is in the middle row, the furthest on the left, wearing the coolest turban.)
Beginning in 1941 with the Farhud, Iraq began to sour on its Jewish population. With the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, most Arab nations expelled their entire Jewish population.
Iraq, however, did not.
Twenty years later, though, Saddaam Hussein came to power. After the Arab embarrassment in the Six Day War, Jews in the Arab world were once again under attack from their Arab neighbors. Jews were banned from holding government jobs, and their right to movement was heavily restricted.
In 1969, Saddaam hung 14 people accused of spying for the Israeli government in 1967. Most of them were Jews.
This massacre encouraged the massive exodus of Jews out of Iraq, but there were terrible restrictions on their movement.
They were only allowed to carry one suitcase, and they were not allowed to take any religious books with them.
All of the wisdom of the Iraqi Jews was confiscated by Saddaam Hussein.
Within a few years, the once thriving Jewish community had disappeared from Baghdad.
Three decades and thousands of atrocities later, in 2003, Saddaam found himself in the crossfires of Secretary of Defense Colin Powell and the rest of the Bush administration.
The accusation? That Saddaam was hiding Weapons of Mass Destruction somewhere in Iraq.
Against this backdrop, the United States sent the full weight of its military might against the dictator. Within days, Iraq fell.
But when the American soldiers were searching through Saddaam’s intelligence building, the infamous Mukhabarat, they found something very strange.
There were no WMDs in Iraq, and there was no evidence of them anywhere in the flooded building.
Floating in the flood water were thousands of ancient looking documents written in a strange script.
They were the Jewish texts Saddam had confiscated 35 years earlier.
Miraculously, many of the documents were not damaged, and a crew of experts found a way to freeze the water, preserve the documents, and ship them to a museum for proper care.
There were texts and tractates in this collection that had never been seen before. It was one of the greatest discoveries of ancient Jewish treasures in modern history.
For whatever reason, the United States leadership was so convinced that there were WMDs in Iraq that they spent a massive amount of American blood and treasure to find them.
Instead of bombs, they found books.
Somehow, in the war between Saddaam Hussein and the United States, the real winners were the exiled Iraqi Jews.
If this is not a miracle, then I do not know what is.
It is a story that crosses thousands of years of history, from the day the first Iraqi Torah was written, until it was discovered in the Mukhabarat.
A story that begins with the exile of the Jewish people from the land of Israel to Iraq, and one that ends with the exile of the Jewish people from Iraq back to Israel.
When those Jews resettled in Israel, they were finally home, but they were still missing their sacred heritage, the texts of the forefathers.
Itt was not enough for G-d to return their bodies of flesh to Israel; He also sent for their bodies of work.
G-d sent a small cadre of angels disguised in American uniforms to the Mukhabarat to excavate and save those sacred texts.
The more history I learn, the more obvious G-d’s hand becomes. If this is an avenue that interests you or if there are other historical events like this you would like to read about, please let me know in the comments. This is a favorite subject of mine, but I never know if anyone else is interested.
And if you would like to read the full story of the Iraqi Jewish texts, you can find the incredible story here:
Jewish heritage discovered in Iraqi building once owned by Saddam Hussein