Courage and Clarity

I’m just doing a little reading about the Sassoon family, as part of some ongoing research into the British Library Hebrew Torah Codex Or. 4445:

A page from Or. 4445. The Sassoon family were instrumental in the codex’s ending up in the British Library.

To that end, I’ve just opened Cecil Roth’s The Sassoon Dynasty (written 1941) and have come face to face with this dedication:

In our day, where virtue signalling is so rife, perhaps we’re tempted to read the latter paragraph with jaded eyes.

But this book was published in April 1941—Britain’s ‘darkest hour’.

When France had fallen, Britain was isolated in Europe and the US hadn’t yet joined the fray. As far as I can tell, it was not at all clear at that point that it was not the Lord’s intention to ‘punish the sins of the world by allowing [Hitler] a momentary victory’.

Against that backdrop, this dedication—not least its final paragraph—struck me as a beautifully courageous, and theologically clear, statement. Like with Assyria and Babylon, Roth knew that the Lord sometimes uses the cruelest of nations for His purposes (see Isaiah 10 and Isaiah 47). But like Assyria and Babylon, Roth also managed to hold clear in his mind that such of their ‘victories’ were always momentary.