While the world pauses briefly to mark the Holocaust, Christians should tarry a little longer; should stop and think about what it actually sought to achieve, and why.

On his first state visit to China in 1998, Binyamin Netanyahu was taking the honour guard salute in Tiananmen Square when his host, Premier Zhu Rongji, asked him, ‘Mr Prime Minister, do you realise that your people, the Jews, and my people, the Chinese, are two of the oldest civilisations on the planet?’

‘You are right, sir,’ Netanyahu responded, ‘but what is really striking about this is how many Chinese there are in the world today, and how few Jews.’

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, China has 4,000 years of recorded history and its population stands at 1.4 billion. One-fifth of humanity is of Chinese nationality. On the other hand, the Jews – who likewise have a documented timeline of approximately four millennia since Abraham entered Canaan – number just 15 million (seven million in Israel). Only 0.2 percent of humanity is Jewish.

How is this possible? Reason – and the record...