Politics & Power Quote by John Adams

Adams is doing something audacious here: praising a people widely stigmatized in the Christian Atlantic world not as a tolerated minority, but as the engine of civilization itself. The line is structured like a lawyer’s brief. He starts with a sweeping comparative claim ("more to civilize men than any other nation"), then tightens it with a counterfactual meant to preempt the obvious objection: that his admiration is merely theological. Even if stripped of God, revelation, and providence - even if reduced to "blind eternal fate" - he insists the conclusion stands. That rhetorical move matters because it recasts Jewish influence as historical, not just scriptural, and it signals an Enlightenment sensibility trying to reconcile reverence with reason.

The subtext is partly political. In the early republic, "civilization" was a loaded word: it implied moral order, literacy, law, commerce, and the habits that make republican self-government plausible. By crediting "the Hebrews" with civilizing force, Adams is implicitly arguing for Jewish inclusion within the American project - not on pity or exception, but on contribution and pedigree. It’s also a rebuke, delivered politely, to Christian triumphalism: Christianity, he hints, inherited its ethical infrastructure.

Still, the compliment carries a period-specific reduction. "The Jews" become an instrument - a providential tool - more symbol than living community. Adams’s admiration is real, but it’s also utilitarian: he values Jewish history as a civilizing technology, a way to ground modern freedom in ancient moral authority.