Judaism as Pan-Semitic Religion

H.G. Wells writes in The Outline of History:

The Jewish idea was and is a curious combination of theological breadth and an intense racial patriotism. The Jews looked for a special saviour, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the benevolent but firm Jewish heel. As the political power of the Semitic peoples declined, as Carthage followed Tyre into the darkness and Spain became a Roman province, this dream grew and spread. There can be little doubt that the scattered Phoenicians in Spain and Africa and throughout the Mediterranean, speaking as they did a language closely akin to Hebrew and being deprived of their authentic political rights, became proselytes to Judaism. For phases of vigorous proselytism alternated with phases of exclusive jealousy in Jewish history. On one occasion the Idumeans, being conquered, were all forcibly made Jews. There were Arab tribes who were Jews in the time of Muhammad, and a Turkish people who were mainly Jews in South Russia in the ninth century. Judaism is indeed the reconstructed political ideal of many shattered peoples - mainly Semitic. It is to the Phoenician contingent and to Aramean accessions in Babylon that the financial and commercial tradition of the Jews is to be ascribed. But as a result of these coalescences and assimilations, almost everywhere in the towns throughout the Roman Empire, and far beyond it in the east, Jewish communities traded and flourished, and were kept in touch through the Bible, and through a religious and educational organization. The main part of Jewry never was in Judea and had never come out of Judea.

Undoubtedly we are living in a phase of "exclusive jealousy" in Jewish history, thanks in part to the fanaticism of the Haredi who run the conversion process in Israel. Yet the Haredi ethos is a relic of European ghetto paranoia and by no means the "true face" of Judaism. Israel, and Judaism in the broader sense, could become the shield of today's "shattered peoples - mainly Semitic" who suffer recurrent Islamic persecution in the Middle East: Assyrians, Chaldeans, Berbers, Yezidis, Circassians, Lebanese Phoenicians, heterodox Muslims. I speak not of forced conversions but of elective affinities finding theological and political expression. Not in our lifetime, but perhaps in a century we shall witness the rebirth of proselytizing Judaism that recognizes Abraham as the father of many nations.