Where Was The World: Preface
Preface:
Thank you for being here. All of you.
Before we start, I should share with you all what brings me to this project in the first place; to share the forces that motivate a dude with experience in only engineering and applied maths take on a relatively outlandish project in such a tangential space.
I think studying maths was the most pivotal thing I’ve ever done. It let my malleable and uncommitted brain begin to think in terms of axioms, to appreciate the laws of nature, and to view the world in terms of its governing cause and effect relationships. But for a while, my math-oriented way of thinking came at the cost of flexibility. Throughout my years at college, everything was so black and white. I had no patience for some of the more holistic natural sciences, because I viewed them all as suggestions. Philosophy was rich, Sociology was irrelevant, and history was futile because it was over.
In my last year of school, starting in September 2023, I front-loaded most of my tough courses into my first semester so that my buddies and I could start building out a gaming startup when my second semester started in January. For the first time, I had to begin to appreciate nuance in the world that math doesn’t bring one privy to.
My excitement about the world began with ingenuity. I wanted to understand how all new things worked and why they were worth pursuing, for the individual pursuer, and for the world at large. It was soon after I began trying to understand the recent world that I realized how ignorant I had been for neglecting all the people who had tried to understand our world before me.
I was immediately thrilled by ancient civilizations, and how pivotal events throughout history shaped the world that we live in today. I was hooked by the idea that different findings, trends, and relationships could be used as metrics to try and decouple history into building blocks. Though this type of attempt at describing history in a purely well-defined manner will never be perfectly robust, I think that a great beauty of history is that we have the liberty to connect the dots between what we know and what we don’t, with whatever means at our disposal.
This is where philosophy, sociology, religion, domestic schools of thought, and practically all other fields of study come into play. Then once we get our facts down, we get to appreciate this history using the poetic twist that we use to tie everything together.
I’ve always been interested in Jewish history in theory; in ninth grade, I loved my Jewish History course that spanned from ancient Jewry in Babylon until shortly after Rome. Now that I’ve become excited about the forces that shaped our world, something in me has felt the need to try and tie these two things together: I want to try and map out exactly where the Jews were in the world, and all in accordance with world society at large. Hopefully, laying out our history through this lens will help me, and maybe some of you, to better understand the way that our world came to be, intertwined with the influence that the Jewish people had on evolving societies, as well as the influence that society had on the Jews.
This project will be a massive undertaking for me, and if it gets anywhere, I’ll have learned a tremendous amount. The entire work is motivated by a question that I knew I wanted answered, but an answer I couldn’t seem to find anywhere.
I hope you all enjoy!
Dan