ABSTRACT
“In the fifth century storm upon storm out of the dark North swept away in a great deluge of barbarism all the civilization of the western half of the Roman Empire.” So, portentously, begins G. F. Young's history of the Medici. 1 The sentence could well describe the first half of the twentieth century with its two world wars, the holocaust of peoples and particularly European Jewry, the era of revolutionary tyrannies—an unprecedented deluge of barbarism which, as one looks at Poland, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, has not ended yet.
