“There is no other example in history of a community which has been chased round the globe quite as much, which has survived its own death as a nation by two thousand years, and which, in between autos-da-fé and gas chambers, kept praying at the proper season for rain to fall in a country on which they have never set eyes, and drinking toasts to “Next year in Jerusalem” during the same astronomical stretch of time, with the same untiring trust in the supernatural.” Arthur Koestler