ABSTRACT
Jewish history, both before and after the people's exile from its ancestral land, before and since the renewal of Israel's statehood, has been so unique as to defy facile analogy and frustrate comparative research. Its utter singularity would rather incline one to assume with G. Vico that, in addition to "the ordinary help from providence which was all that the Gentiles had," the Jews were accorded "extraordinary help from the true God." Vico's view of the uniqueness of the Jews and of Jewish history notwithstanding, his "philologie" approach — the logic of myth, language, religion, poetry — would suggest no categorical break between Jewish and gentile history. Confirmation of the suggestiveness of Vico's "philologie" approach, however, seems to come from another quarter strongly affirming the common background of Greek and Hebrew civilizations. Vico's assertion of Jewish exceptionalism appears to be mild, indeed, compared with Franz Rosenzweig's radical and penetrating interpretation of Jewish history and destiny.
