For thousands of years, humanity has suffered at the hands of cunning tyrants, individual men who use charm, rhetoric, and deception to maintain power over the masses. From the ancient times of the biblical tyrant Nimrod and the Pharaohs, through the terrible reigns of the Caesars, to the despotic regimes of the Hitlers and Stalins of more recent times, human society has been structured to benefit those in power at the expense of the common people. The sole exception to this arrangement - the only society to be formed around the needs and rights of its members and not the selfish whims of flesh-and-blood rulers - is the Jewish society. Thousands of years ago, the Jewish nation became what Nobel laureate Elias Canetti called a "naked crowd"; a society built on transparency and inclusiveness, impervious to the attempts of would-be tyrants to control the "crowd" through mind-games, linguistic manipulation, and mass hysteria. While the Jewish people have, over the course of history, occasionally lost touch with this foundation of their society, they have never lost the dream of a truly free society for all.

In this book, José Faur articulates the essence of the Jewish alternative to the cunning societies of world history. ( )