c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The late comedian Lenny Bruce once joked that anyone living in New York is Jewish, even if they aren’t. Best-selling author Thomas Cahill, who is anything but joking, believes that also holds true in a significant way for anyone whose outlook on life was molded by Western civilization.

In his smart-alecky manner, Bruce, who was Jewish, turned the pervasiveness of Jewish life in New York into a punch line. In his latest book,”The Gifts of the Jews”(Doubleday), Cahill _ a New Yorker himself, albeit a practicing Roman Catholic _ takes Bruce’s line a giant step further.

He writes that virtually all of Western civilization is an outgrowth of Jewish sensibilities, a premise based on his reading of the scriptural writings Jews call the Torah, or Hebrew Bible, and others have labeled the Old Testament.

Beginning with the patriarch Abraham, Jewish thought has produced innovative notions about the nature of time and life’s possibilities that have profoundly altered human consciousness, according to Cahill, author of the hugely successful”How the Irish Saved Civilization.””We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes,”he says.”Most of our best words, in fact _ new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocabulary; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice _ are the gifts of the Jews.” The story of David and Goliath, Cahill continues, forever made the underdog the sentimental favorite and gave rise to hope at a time when fatalism was the cultural norm, just as the Jewish Sabbath led to the weekend and the concept of time spent in leisurely scholarship.

From the biblical promise that”the meek shall inherit the earth,”he adds, came the notion of justice, compassion and mercy and the importance of the individual _ leading, in turn, to Western law, social services and even the framework for the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The Exodus from Egypt _ celebrated again this week with the start of the Passover festival _ encouraged all freedom struggles that followed, while the revelation at Sinai anchored the religion of ethical monotheism in the human psyche, Cahill says.

From the Hebrew Bible itself, with its”two great themes, love and death,”he posits, flowed the sum of Western literature.

Even the”big bang”theory may be traced to Jewish thought, he maintains, begging to differ with the many who argue that the principles of modern science were a brainchild of ancient Greece.”I think what the Greeks really did was give us our filing cabinet, our scientific categories; you know, what we stick things into,”Cahill said during a recent telephone conversation.

But the Greeks thought the world had existed forever.”They didn’t think of a beginning, a middle and an end,”he said.

The Hebrew Bible, however, told of creation where there had been nothing.”The Jews are the people who invent time as we now think of it; that things once were not and now they are, and that we are going in some direction, and that there will be some sort of crisis or ending”said Cahill.

Without this,”our modern scientists just couldn’t have thought of the big bang, because they would still be thinking in Greek terms of matter being eternal,”he said.

Cahill spent two years at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary studying Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible to prepare himself for writing”Gifts,”the second in a planned series of seven volumes he calls”Hinges of History.”His 1995 Irish book was the series’ first installment.

Cahill, for many years Doubleday’s director of religious publishing, hopes the books will tell the story of Western civilization by focusing on”those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the great patrimony of the West.” While he declined to say what groups or individuals would be the subject of future books in the series, he did allow that”there’s no question that Jesus is going to pop up in (a future book). I don’t think he can be avoided.” Cahill’s style is to distill enormously complex material and present its essence in an entertaining, accessible format.”Gifts”reads like a witty and sophisticated monologue; a meditation on the interplay of cultural history and religious thought.

Cahill’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject strikes some as overreaching, however.

Writing in The New York Times, critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in an otherwise highly favorable review, said:”Mr. Cahill is fond of hyperbole. So one might take it with a grain of salt when he writes of the Old Testament Jews that `it may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings have ever had,’ or `We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish.'” Cahill, anticipating such assaults, prepared himself for the criticism by writing his Irish book prior to his Jewish tome _ even though that ran counter to the historical chronology, he said.

In”How the Irish Saved Civilization,”Cahill told the story of how fifth-century Irish monks _ hidden away in monasteries, laboriously copying texts by hand as the Dark Ages swept across Europe _ preserved the storehouse of early Western classical poetry, philosophy and other such writings.”I thought that we should do some casting from the shore before we went deep-sea fishing,”said Cahill, who has degrees in classical literature and philosophy from Fordham University, an M.F.A. in film and dramatic literature from Columbia University, and has also studied Scripture and theology at Union Theological Seminary and elsewhere.

Having garnered his audience _ almost 700,000 hardcover and paperback copies of the Irish book are in print, with 5,000 orders coming in weekly, Publishers Weekly magazine reported _ Cahill said he felt comfortable tackling the more difficult Jewish book.

Mass acceptance, he said, allows him to declare unequivocally, for example,that”it seems to me that virtually the entire modern world is based on the Book of Exodus”and it’s story of national and individual freedom .

But why, Cahill was asked, was it the Jews who achieved all he credits them with?

The traditional Judeo-Christian religious response is the covenant between Abraham and God, the saga of the chosen people. Cahill’s response is less religiously fundamentalist, more contemporary anthropological.

For him, the answer lies in Jewish history and the struggles of a people forced continually to find ways to insure their survival.

Except, perhaps during the reigns of Kings David and Solomon, said Cahill, Jews have always lived on the margin of society. For the author,”it was because they were a strange little tribe of desert nomads at the margins of large societies that they were able to see so deeply into the truth of things.”People at the margins,”Cahill said,”always see more than the people at the center.”

DEA END RIFKIN