Toriah.Org: Foundations of Torah Thinking

In his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson (who is not Jewish) described the nature of the Jewish contribution to mankind as follows:

No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At a very early stage of their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering... The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs for humanity; both divine and man-made. The Jews, therefore, stand right at the centre of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.

The most influential intellectuals around the world are mostly naturalists. They assume that God exists only in the minds of religious believers. They believe that we are a mere concatenation of chemicals and cosmic dust, living out our lives in a blind and purposeless universe that came into being for no reason. Judaism is a protest against such despair in the name of God and in the name of humanity.

The history of the Jewish people starts with Abraham and Sarah. They and their their descendants (at the mountain of Sinai) undertake a long and momentous journey through the millennia of history.