The harbinger of the Messiah

Empires and kingdoms come and go and some probably never existed. The great Babylonian Empire that flourished for for well over a thousand years is only remembered in the ruins of devastated Iraq. The Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC lasted for over a millennium and was destroyed by the Islamic conquest in 651 AD and later the Mongol conquest. The Greek Empire of Alexander the Great didn't last anywhere near that long. The Roman Empire disintegrated in the face of the onslaught of barbarian tribes form the East and the North. The short-lived Muslim kingdom’s of Spain and North Africa disintegrated and were ultimately defeated because of internal strife and bigotry. But they live, survive, in their reflections in Jewish culture. The great debates of the rabbis are largely about how to live a Jewish life among these dominant cultures. My son, Rabbi David Sedley, mentioned the bizarre story of Shlomo Molcho, a 16^th century Jewish mystic, a cabalist, who met Pope Clement VII and the Emperor Charles , carrying the flag of a non-existent Jewish kingdom. The man, with incredible chutzpah, claimed to be the precursor of the Messiah. His story didn't end well, he suffered a martyr's death. But the fact that the Pope and the Emperor were prepared to receive him shows that they thought that Jews knew something useful that they didn't know. The Jewish people survived generation after generation, despite constant persecution, when mighty empires crumbled. Perhaps the Jews held the secret of the Messiah.