Indeed, there are recurrent hints in the Bible that the Israelites had feelings of guilt about taking the Canaanites’ land,147 a curious adumbration … - Paul Johnson

Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system.

Rousseau’s ideas brought about-he moved the political process to the very centre of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. ‘Everything,’ he wrote, ‘is at root dependent on politics.’ Virtue is the product of good government. ‘Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed.’ The political process, and the new kind of state it brings into being, are the universal remedies for the ills of mankind.49 Politics will do all. Rousseau thus prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the twentieth century.

In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions.