A theme that appears to be common within the recent Jewish narrative is the framing of the history of the Jews as some sort of “miracle.” They argue that their survival for over two thousand years while being faced with a diasporic experience is nothing short of a supernatural phenomenon.

Rabbi Allen Miller could be considered representative and mainstream. He states in his article, “The Ongoing Miracle Of Jewish Survival” (published in the Eurasia Review, dated February 2025):

Jews also believe that the survival of the Jewish people is a real miracle. The Jews are the only nation. religion or people in the western world today; who still celebrate the same holiday (Passover), use the same language (Hebrew), and pray to the same God, as their ancestors did more than 3,000 years ago.

Interestingly, this very same rabbi had also penned another article on a similar theme back in 2022, titled “Is Jewish Survival A Miracle?” Furthermore, he’s very far from being a lone and isolated voice in a vast desert. In Dan Cohn-Sherbok’s Atlas of Jewish History (Routledge, 2013, p.156), we learn about an individual named Rabbi Samuel Hirsch. He was associated with Reform (or liberal) Judaism and put forward the idea that the only miracle of the Jews’ after the end of prophecy is the survival of the Jewish people.

The latest iteration of this “miracle” is having survived the Holocaust, when Europeans targeted Jews in a systematic campaign of extermination. Such racial hatred resulted in the death of some six million Jews.

Some Jewish religious philosophers, however, have been much less enthusiastic.

A few have proffered the “death of God” theology as a way to try and rationalize the “absence of God” during the Shoah. Others, like Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, were less radical in their treatment of the issue, looking instead within the Jewish tradition itself to things such as the Torah expression of “hester panim,” which translates literally as the “hidden face (of God)” and refers to the absence of Divine Providence. The traditional example that they present is that of the Book of Esther—the usual narrative about Jewish survival celebrated during the Purim festival—, which doesn’t mention “God.” Muslims, on the other hand, remember God even under the most “normal of circumstances,” let alone in the face of complete and utter annihilation!

That being said, there is actually a way to interpret Jewish survival through the Torah, though perhaps not quite as a miracle…

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Jewish Survival: A Curse?

Despite the Jews identifying as the “chosen people” and, in post-Biblical texts, perverting this divine favor into a cult of racial supremacism, the Bible contains countless negative depictions of the Jews, including curses for their eventual disobedience.

Nonetheless, I would like to focus specifically on one passage in particular which is found in Deuteronomy, the last of the five books which make up the Torah, which itself is in turn attributed to the prophet Moses (peace be upon him).

Essentially, it is supposed to be part of the prophet’s final address before the Jews enter into the “Promised Land.”

The context of chapter 28 is that of “blessings” which have apparently been promised by God to the Jews if they are obedient, accompanied with the promise of “curses” if they decide to renege on their covenant. The elucidation of these curses makes for an alarming read, not only due to their sheer number (around double or triple the number of “blessings”) but also due to the intensity of these curses. For instance, they mention that the Jews will end up resorting to cannibalism.

The following is from verse 15 of the above-mentioned chapter 28 from Deuteronomy:

However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you.

[…]

The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.

[…]

Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand. A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. The sights you see will drive you mad. The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.

The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your ancestors. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone. You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the Lord will drive you.

[…]

The foreigners who reside among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. They will lend to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, but you will be the tail.

All these curses will come on you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you.

[…]

Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities.

[…]

Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known. Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.

RELATED: Talmudic Rewriting of Moses as a Defender of Polytheism

This makes for a pretty sobering read for any self-reflecting Jew, and Jewish scholars did indeed consider this to be a prophecy, especially when they were forced to try and contextualize the Babylonian Exile and the destruction of the First Temple (7th century BCE), as well as the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) and the subsequent Roman Exile. At one point, Jews made up between 5–10% of the Roman Empire, but Emperor Hadrian’s genocidal campaign against Jews following the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century saw a decline in Jewish demographics.

Scholars argue that if Jews hadn’t been faced with any sort of persecution from the Roman times to the Holocaust and were allowed to experience a “natural growth,” their current population wouldn’t be 15–20 million but rather approximately 200 million.

So, was this a “miracle” or a curse?

I would like to focus on one particular verse, namely verse 37, which was highlighted in bold within the above-quoted text. The verse in question reads as follows

You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the Lord will drive you.

Rashi, from the 11th century, as the most influential Jewish commentator of both the Bible and the Talmud, comments on this verse as follows:

לשמה [THOU SHALT] BECOME AN OBJECT OF ASTONISHMENT — This word means the same as תמהון, etourdison in old French, English astonishment. — Whoever will see you will be astonished about you.

למשל [THOU SHALT] BECOME A PROVERB — i.e., when an extraordinary misfortune comes upon a man people will say: “This is like the misfortune that befell Mr. So-and-so!”

ולשנינה AND A BYWORD — This is an expression of the same meaning as (Deuteronomy 6:7)

ושננתם, “And thou shalt speak often”. — “And thou shalt become a ״שנינה therefore means: they (people) will talk about you (make you the topic of their conversation). Onkelos, too, renders it thus: ולשועי, which has the meaning of “relating about a matter”, just as ואשתעי is the Targum rendering of ויספר, “and he related”.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a major theologian who passed away in 2020, comments:

Your very name will become an insult. When one wishes to speak of failures and miserable situations, he will compare them to your case as the classic example.

Note that this is what Jews complain about when it comes to the matter of antisemitism, i.e., that antisemites “see Jews everywhere” and that “Jew” itself has become a sort of insult denoting certain specific psychological attributes and moral characteristics.

RELATED: Not All Jews: The Spiritual Resistance Against Modernist Antisemitism

A Qur’anic Prophecy?

In the Christian tradition, a way for them to justify the “survival of the Jewish people” is via the doctrine of “Jewish witness” put forward by Augustine (4th/5th century), the greatest theologian of Western Christianity. Augustine presented the importance of the Jews as a race based on the fact that, despite Judaism having been “superseded” by Christianity, the Jews stood as “witness” because they preserved the Old Testament and, therefore, also the prophecies about Jesus (peace be upon him) contained therein. Thus, for Augustine, Jews would remain a “witness-people” until the return of Jesus (peace be upon him).

For Muslims, there is a relevant passage that is found in the Qur’an:

And behold! Your Lord has solemnly proclaimed that He will assuredly send forth against [all the rebellious among] them — until the Day of Resurrection — those who shall afflict them with the worst torment. Indeed, your Lord is assuredly swift in punishment. Yet, indeed, He is most forgiving [and] mercy-giving [to the penitent]. Thus We rent them apart into [diverse] communities [and scattered them] throughout the earth. Some of them were righteous, and some of them were otherwise. So We tried [those of] them [who were sinful] with [both] good things and adversities, that they might return [to the way of God]. (Qur’an, 7:167–168)

Notice here how these verses also imply that the Jews will “survive.” They mention that the rebellious among the Jews will be afflicted with those who will torment them “until the Day of Resurrection.” It could thus be said that, in a way, the Qur’an informed us of the so-called “miracle” of this “Jewish survival.”

Traditional Muslim scholars interpreted this through the Jewish historical experiences, with them having suffered persecution and humiliation at the hands of various empires and authorities. A recent scholar of great repute, Mufti Muhammad Shafi’ (may Allah have mercy on him) of Pakistan, who passed away in 1976, also included matters of recent geopolitics, commentating on the verse as follows in his famed Qur’anic exegesis, Ma’arif al-Qur’an:

The first two verses (167 and 168) have referred to the two punishments given to the Israelites. Firstly, Allah will keep sending up to the Day of Doom, some individuals or groups of people who will punish and bring disgrace to them. In fact, this is what has been happening to them up to this day. They had been dominated and treated disdainfully by others, as has been recorded by history. We may not be in doubt about their present government in a part of Palestine, as it is a common knowledge that the state of Israel is, in fact, a part of the world powers, created by them for their political objectives against the Muslim Ummah. They are still ruled over and dominated by the colonial powers. It is, in fact, a military base of America. The day these powers stop providing them with their aid, they shall not be able to maintain their existence for long.

The second punishment has been mentioned in verse 168. That is, Jewish populace has been cut into fragments scattered in all the parts of the world. They could not integrate themselves into a solid nation. The phrase وَقَطَّعْنَاهُمْ فِي الْأَرْ‌ضِ أُمَمًا “And we divided them on the earth as separate communities”. has referred to this fact. The Arabic word قَطَّعْنَا signifies breaking into pieces. While the word اُمَم is plural of Ummah, which means ‘a group’, ‘a party’. The verse means that Allah has divided them into fragments, making them scattered on the earth.

This indicates that being integrated in a whole or having an entity as a nation is a blessing of Allah, while getting disorganized into parts separated from each other is a punishment from Him. The Muslims have always enjoyed the blessing of having their own entity and being recognized as an organized people in the world. Starting right from Madinah during the time of the Holy Prophet ﷺ up to this day, they have their own independent rule in various parts of the earth. The presence of Islamic countries from the Far East to the West is an obvious proof of this fact.

You will notice that, despite all of their efforts, the Zionist project has indeed been a failure till today. Not all of the world’s Jews have been gathered in one place. In the United States, the number of Jews is roughly the same as those in Israel (7 million). Of those in Israel, the largest subgroup among Jews, around 40%, are “hilonim,” i.e., secularists. They haven’t “recuperated” all “their” territories as, far from securing a “Greater Israel,” they don’t even possess all of the lands they won through the recent wars, such as in 1967 (including the Sinai or Gaza). Finally—and perhaps most important of all—, their Third Temple is still not operative.

So, if “Jewish survival” is indeed a miracle, isn’t it also a “Muslim miracle,” as well as a “Qur’anic prophecy”?

In an op-ed titled titled “So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?,” published in The Jewish Chronicle, the oldest enduring Jewish newspaper, Jewish academic David Wasserstein wrote back in 2012:

Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity – also in Christendom – through the medieval period into the modern world.

[…]

Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.

The survival of the Jews (and also the survival of the Palestinian-Arabs) is thus, from every angle, an argument in favor of Islam!

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