#393 — Is History Repeating Itself?

Sam Harris speaks with Simon Sebag Montefiore about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, the history of the Jews, and the rise of global antisemitism. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That's why Sam Harris created the Waking Up https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life's most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Simon Sebag Montefiore. Simon, thanks so much for joining me.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  It's great to be with you, finally.

• 0:52Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, we've been on a WhatsApp thread together for quite some time. We won't divulge the other attendees, but it's great to finally meet you, however remotely. You have written these just marvelous, magisterial histories. I'm reading two simultaneously, but you've written many others. But the two I'm reading, Stalin, The Court of the Red Czar, and Jerusalem, The Biography, really, combined, they offer just an amazing lens through which to look at the present. My interest in talking to you as a historian is to help me worry about the present and the near future, and I think you're uniquely well-placed to do that, given your expertise

• 1:36Sam Harris?

  in both Russian history and the history of the Middle East. Before we jump in, can you just give me kind of a potted intellectual biography? What have you, what do you consider your areas of focus as a historian?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  You know, my background was I did history at Cambridge University. Then bizarrely, I went into banking for a short disastrous career. And then I went out to the Soviet Union as it disintegrated in the early 90s. And so that was really my training ground. That was a brilliant, a brilliant place, a fascinating place to see, to see an empire falling apart. And I think for a young historian, to see, to see with their own eyes an empire falling apart is, is the best training you can have. Better than, better than books. And so that was a very interesting time. And then from that, I started to write about Russia, which I'd, which I'd started really when I was at university.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  And I, I started writing about Catherine the Great and Potemkin.

• 2:38Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And that was a very, that's, that's a subject that's become very relevant, of course, because they, apart from their very colorful sex life and amazing letters and their light, their place in the Enlightenment, the Russian Enlightenment, they were also empire builders. And of course, they conquered South Ukraine and Crimea and built all the cities that are now being fought over, Odessa, Sebastopol, Dnipro and so on. And that led through a weird, through a weird favor to me in a way from, from Vladimir Putin himself to having access to Stalin's archives and being one of the, one of the first people to be able to work in those archives.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  And of course, that was the sort of, that was the big thrill really, being, starting to work on Stalin and that's the book you're reading, Stalin, the cause of the Red Sar.

• 3:29Sam Harris?

  Yeah, not a, not a cheerful subject. It's quite unbelievable how horrific history gets. Uh, one, one hopes one is not living in a period of history like, uh, the period, some of the periods you've written about, but increasingly our present starts to begin to feel like we've entered the stream of history. And I remember the first period of my life where I felt all of a sudden, okay, this is, this is history with all of its dangers. It was, it was immediately after nine 11. I just felt like, okay, my life, my, what I consider to be a normal life, sort of post history, however naively, naively that lands for you. Um, after nine 11, I thought, oh, really anything can happen at any time.

• 4:14Sam Harris?

  And this is the kind of thing that very unlucky people experience in history. And more and more, I mean, I don't think I've ever shaken that epiphany, but, um, you know, one does try to go to sleep. But more and more, it seems like we can't quite escape the tide of of history here. How do you, we're certainly going to jump into a discussion about the Middle East and and the rise of antisemitism. I think we'll touch on the war in Ukraine and, you know, as you know, Russia has its finger in in the chaos on both of these sides of of the world.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure.

• 4:51Sam Harris?

  I guess my first question is, as a historian, is your historian hat more or less always on as you read the newspaper? Or do you too go to sleep at times thinking you're living in some post historical period where normalcy will will reign?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  My historian hat is always on and at the moment, it's just impossible. It's very hard to sleep at all and there's there's just there's such turbulence, but also it's fascinating to watch in the worst in the worst way. I think one has to, one goes back to some of those, you know, one of the great analysts of power in history, Lenin, you know, with with that famous quote, you know, nothing happens for years and then everything years happen in weeks or days. And of course, one remembers, one always remembers how, you know, right before the Russian Revolution, he said, he said to his wife, Krybskaya, I don't think the revolution's going to happen in my lifetime, you know? And then when it, when they've had the first reports of the fall of the Tsar, he said, he said, can it be true? Is this a, is this a hoax?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  So, you know, no one, no one knows what's going to happen, even the most shrewd analysts. And of course, historians are terrible prophets, as, you know, the end of history and many other, you know, pieces by brilliant historians have have shown. But I think the thing to understand at the moment is how exceptional the period that we were living through, that we grew up in was, how extraordinary. And of course, we didn't realize it when we were in it so much, but the period from from forty five, forty eight, fifty to

• 6:28Speaker 01

  To, okay, nine eleven, or the election of Donald Trump, or whatever, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even October seventh. How exceptional was that period where, you know, the leaders of, of, actually, you know, every president of the United States had kind of similar views of the world, you know, give or take small differences. They had a view of, an internationalist view of an admission to the world. And where Soviet leaders, despite believing in world revolution and their mission to change the world, were also extremely conservative, really. And where, you know, people did respect the United Nations, that was a supranational

• 7:11Speaker 01

  sanctuary of something called international law, which existed because people believed it existed. And where various views became taboo in most liberal democracies, antisemitism, where a great liberal reformation happened with gay rights, and that, another advance is the pill, the right to abortion, all these things were kind of one in this kind of period, which I call in my world history, the great liberal reformation, because it was so radical, but of course, we took it for granted. And all, of course, all of these things will have to be fought for again, and are now under threat. And that exceptional period, it's hard to think of a period where anything like that

• 7:53Speaker 01

  really existed, you know, maybe the Roman Empire with, when the Roman Empire faced the Persians and the Cisianians, there were these kind of, you know, two polar powers that really kind of kept a sort of peace, but of course, it was a much more brutal, brutal world. And of course, the rest of the world was, was, was not included in those two powers. It was really just Mediterranean and, and the Near East.

• 8:16Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So, so the end of this world is a sort of return to the way things have always been with massive number of powers. I guess you'd say, you know, the sort of, the seventy year peace is what was coming to an end, what you were witnessing coming to an end, beginning to end with nine eleven, which included a sort of chess game between two great powers. Then twenty-five years of American paramancy, a sort of game of solitaire, and now suddenly, fascinatingly, a, a sort of multiplayer game where smaller powers followed their own interests in ways that we can't even, we, we don't understand. And then, of course, the success, the key thing about this was the success of liberal

• 9:00Speaker 01

  democracy, which again was extraordinary. And one forgets that, you know, the European, half of Europe was in dict- under dictatorship until 91. Even Western Europe, you know, was under dictatorships until 1974, 75. So again, one just forgets, a lot of it is perception. We've just forgets how recent all this is.

• 9:21Sam Harris?

  Yeah. So, I mean, do you think we've reached a point where the unraveling of liberal world order, as we've come to know it, has reached a point of no return, where you're expecting America to pull back, that multilateralism will be less and less effectual, and we're going to see a period of greater chaos globally? Or you, do you think we can pull back from the brink here and return to what we in our, in our lifetime have considered more normal? Where if we can't get quite to, all the way to Fukuyama, we can get to something like,

• 10:03Sam Harris?

  you know, the expectation going forward is that liberal democracy and its, however many discontents it has, will prevail, or at least be the, the expected norm globally? And, and that there'll be enough power on that side of the equation so that, you know, despotism will still seem both pathological and, and anomalous?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I think that, first of all, I don't think history ever kind of repeats itself exactly. It never goes back. But that doesn't mean that democracy, liberal democracies can't resurge and triumph. And, but that needs, that needs changes within liberal democracies. I mean, America is still the greatest power that's ever existed in terms of military power, economy, and all sorts of other tests, at measures. And, and American power is still the most dynamic force in, in, you know, in the world game, if you like. But the democracies are having a huge crisis within themselves. And, you know, as Ibn Khaldun, the, the great Arab North African historian and the-

• 11:06Speaker 01

  In the fourteenth century, said, he said, like, great kingdoms don't fall because of of military defeat or economic defeats. They fall because of psychological defeats.

• 11:15Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Which is a very interesting concept. And he said, you know, the the loss of Asebia, it would, forgive my appalling Arab pronunciation, but the the loss of cohesion, of solidarity, of of values that hold together um a society in a common goal. And this, of course, brings us to stuff that Thich Nhat Hanh has written very well about, about, you know, overqualified, overentitled population, et cetera, et cetera, which which, of course, these are things that are stopping democracies behaving with confidence. And if America regained its confidence, you know, America has the has a huge power to change things. But we should be under no illusion, the success of liberal democracy was not because there was, you know, liberal democracy was was not just because liberal democracies are very nice to live under.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  It was also because liberal democracies were successful.

• 12:04Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  And the the biggest influence, I mean, people, when I wrote my world history, people said, why is there so much war in your in your world history? This is full of violence. And I said, well, of course, you know, wars are when everything is speeded up and intensified. You know, inventions, ingenuity, all of it happens during warfare. And we were seeing that now with drone warfare and what, you know, all this, all that's happening in in the Middle East and Ukraine. That's another thing we can talk about. But the point is, the reason why there was such liberal democracy was so successful. And everyone wanted to have a system that looked like a liberal democracy, even if it wasn't a liberal democracy, was because of the the victory of of World War Two or forty five.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I mean, started with nineteen eighteen, but then again, in nineteen forty five, which was really a sort of Soviet victory, but it was it was widely regarded as a victory of America, of American power.

• 12:57Sam Harris?

  Hmm.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And that made, if you look at all the new states created after nineteen forty five in the sixties, they all looked like America. I mean, even China today, even Russia have presidencies, legislatures. I mean, it's all based on America because America set this this standard, even though they were never democracies and certainly never liberal democracies. But the point was, everyone wanted to look like America. And Of course, a lot of these countries that we presumed were democracies maybe weren't as democratic as we thought all along anyway. And one only has to look at all the states created in Africa, for example, which are now disintegrating. That's another subject to discuss perhaps later.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  But it was a great compliment to America that many states became liberal democracies. It was a great compliment to the success of America in wars that were incredibly consequential and mattered. And also wars, let's be clear, that had clear victories.

• 13:53Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  It's very hard to achieve now.

• 13:56Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah. So I think we can focus many of our concerns through the nexus of the city of Jerusalem. I mean, so much of

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:08Sam Harris?

  what ails us in terms of the past shattering and possible future shattering of our world can be. It doesn't capture everything, but it captures a lot when you look at the fixation of the three monotheisms on that single city. I remember reading Gershom Gorenberg's book, The End of Days, maybe 20 years ago or so. And, you know, this would be obvious to you as a historian, but this was the first time I realized that the destruction of a single building, the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, could produce World War III, right? I mean, the level of religious fanaticism aimed at that single piece of real estate

• 14:49Sam Harris?

  is such that the world's Muslims and Christians and Jews view it as a, I mean, it's, it is a sacred symbol, but it is a non-negotiable one, right? I mean, it's not at all fungible. It seems there's nothing you could offer the world's 2. billion Muslims in trade for that, that single building that would be satisfactory. And so it is with the millennial expectations of evangelical Christians, perhaps even Christians more widely, who expect that the Messiah will return and this is, you know, they're joined by Orthodox Jews in this expectation, once the temple is rebuilt by the Jews there. And you go into this history in some detail in your book Jerusalem.

• 15:34Sam Harris?

  But let's talk about that because it is amazing when you step back, certainly from a secular perspective, to realize that our world is essentially rigged to explode based on the millenarian superstitions of billions of people focused on a single building and certain, you know, patently absurd details like the production of a perfect red heifer to be sacrificed so as to sanctify the implements that would rebuild the temple. What are your thoughts on the Temple Mount, Simon?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Well, the Temple Mount is the most intensely revered piece of land. It's a compound, an esplanade. It's a platform actually built by Herod the Great, you know, created by Herod the Great during his reign. It took most of his reign to build it. And Herod the Great actually sort of formed what we now think of as the Temple Mount, probably on a much rougher structure. And it hasn't, you know, the actual sort of space of the platform has not changed much since he built it. He was basically made king of Judea in 40 B.C. by Antony and Octavius, the future Augustus.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  And they walked with him through Rome and they said, "Go back and conquer Jerusalem and we'll give you some troops to do that." It had been taken by the Parthians. And so that's the sort of origin of the actual space as we see it now, on which the two Islamic, beautiful Islamic shrine stand. And you're absolutely right. I mean, all of the expectations of fundamental believers of all the three Abrahamic religions are focused on that space. And many of them believe that outside the Golden Gate, which is the Eastern Wall, beautiful structure, probably built by Herakles, by Xanthan, April, on the, on

• 17:33Speaker 01

  the, on the eastern side, believe that that is the place that, that the apocalypse will happen. And you're absolutely right. I mean, when I was writing about Jerusalem, and I sort of, I sort of realized, you know, so many things could go right. This could be shared. This could, there could be a peace process that could lead to this being a sort of international, um, the, the holy basin, as it's called by American peacemakers, that it could turn into a, a place, a sort of Vatican, almost, for all three religions. But it could also, anything that goes wrong there could, could, um, ignite a catastrophe, a Holocaust, a, a world, and a World War Three that would involve everybody, because everybody is involved in, in the future of that place. And it's, that's why it's an

• 18:18Speaker 01

  extraordinary thing. And I guess one of the realizations today is that for years, we thought, again, going back to our sort of view of the world until nine eleven, we knew there were religious people. There were many, there were many evangelicals in America, um, and, and West Africa. There were, there were Islamic fundamentalists and so on. There were Jewish fanatics. But we felt that along with liberal democracy, a sort of secularity was kind of spreading across the world, and we were beyond that, that sort of religiosity.

• 18:48Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Because that's turned out to be completely false. And actually, you know, religious people have a sort of force and a focus that secular people don't have, but which secular people are afraid of and are extremely impressed by. And so we're seeing that, and we're seeing that on the sides taken by different people in the Middle East right now. Of course, you know, it's, it's not a coincidence that that space is revered by the three religions, because one, each one led to another in a succession. And the holiness of each was borrowed, commandeered, stolen, reinvented, rechanneled by its successor. And each successor...

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Retoolled, relaunched and sort of slightly changed those those stories in order to contribute to the heritage, to the to the ancientness that is essential for legitimacy in religion. And then, of course, that's why when you look at texts like the Bible, for example, the Quran, others, some of the texts sort of seem like seem like very clear writing. Some of it is literally history that we can check and some of it is unintelligible or weirdly detailed, like the famous Red Hefter in Jerusalem. But the point is, these texts are a mixture of ancient, of a library of ancient texts that have been superimposed on each other.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And the most holy thing is the revelation that builds on an ancient story that already exists, an ancient holiness that already exists. And this this concept of holiness is redoubled, multiplied many times by the destruction of those places. So the destructions of Jerusalem, two most famous destructions, Nebuchadnezzar in five eight six and Titus in seventy, but there were many, many catastrophic events there. But especially those are so mythic in scale and so total that the very ruins became holier than the buildings that they'd replaced. And of course, they became hallowed by the legitimacy, by the authority, by the by the

• 21:02Speaker 01

  the ancientness of of what had gone before. So, you know, the revelation of the it was a coincidence that Jerusalem became the holy city. Could have been any many different places, though a religious person wouldn't say that, of course. But, you know, historically, talking about geostrategy, there was no reason why Jerusalem should become such a significant place. It wasn't a it wasn't a port, it wasn't on a trade route, it was a small hilltop, mountain top in. In the blistered Judean mountains in Canaan, what became known as Judea. But, once the Jews had made it their holy city, once they'd written, the decisive thing that happened was not the decision, I think, not just the decision to make it the holy

• 21:47Speaker 01

  place and to build a temple there, but to write it down. And that was what was special about it, because Jerusalem gained a biography, the Bible. And that biography meant that other people could read it, could find out about it, could be translated, it could be known by successors. And so, the early Christians, which were of course Jews, despite what you might read on Twitter these days, on X these days.

• 22:12Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Actually, that's a point that I hadn't thought to raise with you, but I've always found it fascinating that the, certainly theological versions of antisemitism are a kind of reductio ad absurdum of themselves, when you realize that Jesus and Mary and all of Jesus's disciples were Jews, living as Jews, acting as Jews, thinking of themselves as Jews. It's amazing that you can get a genocidal antisemitism out of that piece of legacy code somehow, in a Christian context, it's probably less surprising in a Muslim context.

• 22:54Sam Harris?

  But perhaps we can just talk about the roots of this intersection of religious belief on the Holy Land, you know, more broadly. I mean, one thing that was also surprising to learn in your book is that Jerusalem itself has been abandoned, or effectively abandoned at various periods in history. I mean, it became essentially a little village of ruins. But let's talk about the roots here, because I'm going to want to lead you in this conversation to an analysis of what's happened post-October 7th. And with notions of settler colonialism and the illegitimacy of Jewish claims to that particular piece of real estate, and the view worldwide that the Jews...

• 23:38Sam Harris?

  And the nation of Israel is our interlopers of a kind and a remnant of colonialism. So knowing that we're going to get there, let's talk a little bit about the history of the region, of Jews in the region, and of the emergence of Christianity and Islam out of that region.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  The Judeans, which was, the word Jew comes from Judean. The Judeans were one of the Levantine people who emerged in Canaan and controlled between about 1,000 B.C. and about, you know, the beginning of the new, for about 1,000 years, for about 10 centuries, lived in kingdoms that they mainly ruled in the small land that was around Jerusalem. If you were a believing Jew, you'd say that they were the chosen people who came out of Egypt in the Passover story, and you would believe that they were the chosen people. If you were a secular person and look at history, you would say that they were one

• 24:43Speaker 01

  of the peoples that emerged from Levantine Canaanite peoples who lived in the region, that they created kingdoms, north, a kingdom called Israel, and the south, a kingdom ruled by a house of David, which appears on the Tell Dan Steele. So we know that there was a house of David, and that David and his successors in the house of David, a dynasty, ruled from Jerusalem, that they built a temple there at some point, maybe not as early as, it's impossible to prove when it was exactly built, but it was built, and that was the first temple. It was built on the, on the, what is now the Temple Mount, Mount Moriah, in Jerusalem,

• 25:28Speaker 01

  and there was a northern kingdom, Israel. They were tiny kingdoms that really prospered during a period when the great powers of the region, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and so on, were in times of crisis. When those, when those, when those big empires woke up again and were restored to power, they swept down and conquered these kingdoms. The peoples of Israel were removed to Babylonian exile. Jerusalem was destroyed in five eight six, but the Judean people remained there. In sixty three, well, in the in the four, in the three twenties, Alexander the Great

• 26:13Speaker 01

  arrived, his successors, two kingdoms, the Seleucids and the Assyrians, ruled Syria and and Egypt and and fought for about a hundred years for control of Judea and Jerusalem. Sixty three, in a hundred, in about a hundred and sixty four, they rebelled against the Assyrians, created a new kingdom, the Maccabean Kingdom, the Hasmonean Kingdom.

• 26:37Sam Harris?

  We're still, we're still BC here, right?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yes, which is celebrated by by Jews in the in the Festival of Hanukkah. And they ruled for about a hundred years. And then they broke up in civil war. Some people make parallels with Israel today with that process where where that kingdom disintegrated. And then the Romans arrived in about sixty three, in the in the person of Pompey the Great, a great Roman warlord. And, you know, then his successors gave Judea to Herod the Great, who was a fascinating character, a key character, because his mother was Arab. She was Nabatean, which was the Arab Kingdom in what is now Jordan and Northern Saudi Arabia.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  And his father was an Idomian, an Edomite, a recent converts to Judaism. And so he's an interesting person, half Arab, half Jew, half Judean, if you like. And he created a dynasty that lasted for five generations, only ruling various bits of Roman dominated Near East. And in seventy, in sixty six, there was a huge rebellion against the Romans during the reign of Nero, partly caused by Nero's managerial incompetence in his in his rule of the empire.

• 27:55Sam Harris?

  And winning personality.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  And winning personality, general, general sinister character. And, you know, he was one of Nero is interesting because he's one of those, one of those politicians who merged entertainment and politics, which we should be familiar with today.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  And use the power of entertainment and the power of politics to feed on each other in it to promote himself. But moving aside from that, there was the Jewish revolt run by, led by fundamentalist Jewish fanatics, I think we'd say now, and many of the Judean people backed the Romans. And in fact, the Herod family were one of the, you know, and the historian Josephus, actually, in the end backed the Romans, thinking Roman, Roman Hellenic life was preferable to life under a Jewish religious state.

• 28:47Sam Harris?

  These are the Maccabees?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  These weren't the Maccabees. These were, these were different sects and factions that fought each other murderously. And in the end, were stormed by Titus Caesar, the son of the Emperor, Emperor of Aspasia, who emerged out of the civil war of sixty eight, the year of three emperors, and stormed Jerusalem and destroyed it for the second time completely. Many Jews then went into exile, but many Jews remained there. And in the one thirties, another Emperor Hadrian decided to build a Roman temple on top of the ruins of the, of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, of the second temple, which, which had been destroyed.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  And this caused a second huge Jewish revolt led by Simon Bar Kokba. And once again, this led to what, what everyone agrees is it was a genocidal war against the Judeans. They were banned from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitalina and remained under a new name for, for three hundred years. But the Jews or Judeans always revered it, prayed around its ruins, but were spread around the Mediterranean for the first time. So there was a glut of Judean slaves, for example, in Romans. It's funny to think of Jews as slaves, but there was, most of the, many of the slaves in the Roman Empire were Judean, of course, because after these wars.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  And out of this came a new Jewish religion that was always linked and looked back to Jerusalem, but also looked to the Torah as a kind of portable Jerusalem almost, which they carried with them always. And the religion changed fundamentally. Before then, Jewish religion had been based on sacrifices on the temple mount, outside the temple to God. And since they no longer had the temple and they no longer had access to the temple mound itself, a new sort of religion developed which where Jews prayed in synagogues and they lived, you know, in Spain, in Italy, in Cyprus, in North Africa. So that that was a new era and at the same time,

• 30:58Speaker 01

  the Christian religion had separated itself from Judaism. Jesus, Joseph, Mary, their family were Jews, the Judeans were Judeans, but they lived in, they were, they were, they were, they were known as Nazarenes because they came from Galilee. And in the early part of the Christian story, they were really a Jewish sect. They prayed, they followed one of, one of Jesus' brothers or cousins, James, they, they prayed in the temple like other, like other Jews. And it was, it was only really after seventy, after the destruction

• 31:38Speaker 01

  of, of the temple had shown that, shown many that God had withdrawn his blessing from the Jews. Again, war, failure in war is so decisive in history. And, and that many people, many, that many decided that actually they needed to embrace a new revelation in the revolution, revelation of Christianity. And of course, it was the preaching of Christianity to non-Jews and the fact that Christianity would accept, open their arms completely to, to non-Jews that made it, was partly made it so successful. But it was also, it's a rebellion against the class structure in, in the Roman Empire, enslavement. And also, it had, it had a new concept which was,

• 32:22Speaker 01

  if you behave well in this life, you'd go to heaven in your, in the next one. So salvation, so was a promise. And so it, it contained new things that have really affected us right until this day. And the conversion of Constantine to, in, in the fourth century, Constantine, the ruler of the whole Roman Empire, the conversion to Christianity was a decisive moment in world history. Hmm. And, and made, and really allied Christianity with power, with state, with empire. And, and Jesus with, with war and, and victory.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Three hundred years later, in Arabia, emerged the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad. He claimed to speak as the messenger of God, but he was knowledgeable about both Christian and Jewish religion. And whether he read it or he heard of it, he'd certainly travelled with members of his family, who were merchants, to Syria, to Judea, to Palestine. And so he encompassed, he embraced these stories as prophets. He embraced Moses, David, he embraced Mary, he embraced these people, Jesus, as prophets in his new third and final revelation.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  And part of the success of Muhammad was based on what seemed like an eclipse of the Roman Empire, in a time that must have seemed like a sort of world disaster. After, he died in 632, but in the early part of that century, Persians, the Sassanian Persians invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, defeated it, took Egypt, Jerusalem, and fought their way, all the way to close to Istanbul. And the world seemed to be tilting in an extraordinary way. No one knew what would happen.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And during that period, the two great powers, the Sassanian Persian shahs and the emperors in Constantinople, had formally financed proxy kingdoms of Arabs that fought as their kind of border proxies in the Middle East. And they discontinued these pensions that they paid to these local kings, these Arab kings. So there were a lot of, there's always been a great mystery, like, how come these Arabs from great obscurity managed to conquer so much of the world? And part of it was religious fervour, part of it was military toughness, part of it was sort of military efficiency, a centrality of belief.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  And part of it may have been that there were these kind of actually sort of experienced and trained warriors around, trained by both superpowers, if you like, who were available. But anyway, Mohammed was not only the founder of a religion like Jesus Christ, but he was also a head of state and a commander who created a new community and a new state. And his successors sent their troops out into the world and a world that was completely destabilised. And the early, it seems like nothing is certain of that period, it's such a misty period. But it seems like they very shrewdly offered all mono atheists the chance to join this

• 35:51Speaker 01

  religion, which at the time had rules that were unclear, that were inchoate, that were developing. And there are, for example, in Jerusalem, are very clear records that when they took Jerusalem, first of all, it was surrendered to them by the, by Christian bishop without fighting and in return for tolerance. But secondly, that when they, when they arrived there, they immediately went up to the temple mound, which had been left empty as a sign of Christian disdain for the, for the Jews. And they built an early, an early mosque there on the site of the Al-Aqsa. And they also, they also later built the Dome of the Rock in 691 on the site, almost certainly

• 36:36Speaker 01

  on the site of the, of the Judean or Jewish temple. But in those early, in those early mosque and the early Dome of the Rock, Christians and Jews were allowed, it's believed, to pray there as well. And of course, the rules hardened later as the religion became a formal, the formal faith of the great Arab empire. But all that time, Jews had been there in the, in that region, had prayed around the walls. And when the Muslims came, they allowed the Jews to return to live there, providing, as deemed, they recognised Islamic, the supremacy of the Islamic religion and the Islamic state. And that was the basis in which Jews lived there for many centuries to come.

• 37:21Sam Harris?

  So how do you understand the roots of antisemitism? I guess the simplest theological rationale for it is that the persistence of Jews as Jews is just logically... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.