The story, Nobody's Child, follows a Reality TV gameshow where childless couples compete to win a baby.

My research had proved that anyone with a few thousand dollars of credit on their cards could order a baby over the internet — virtually downloading it, the way you might a piece of software.

Within days of the launch, newspapers stumbled across the shocking saga of Californian twins Belinda and Kimberley Kilshaw. These six-month-old girls, who are in the care of Flintshire social services as I write,were sold by a broker to a US couple for $6,000, then removed from that family by their birth mother and resold to a British husband and wife. And when the diarist saw my press release, suspicions started to fly that I had been tipped off, perhaps by the FBI, who are taking a close interest in the drama.

Jewish Telegraph readers will know that life, in this case, is taking a lead from fiction. I announced my plans to publish Nobody's Child exclusively on the internet, a chapter a week for 50 weeks, last month.

The eruption of the adoption scandal at the precise moment that I chose to launch the book is proof to me of the unsettling power of synchronicity. My story has not come a day too soon.

When I set out to patent the process described in the story — a TV-internet mechanism which allows viewers to vote on which couple should get the baby — I hoped that a Reality TV gameshow with a human child as first child could not happen for years. Now it is happening before my eyes.

Alan and Judith Kilshaw are not good TV performers. The woman appears too eager to hammer home her point of view, the man too meek to stop her.

A parent must be bold in defence, but these people seemed to strut their defiance in front of any camera that rolled.

They appeared to be unmoved by the pleas of the first couple, Richard and Vickie Allen, whose other child was said to be bewildered and missing his sisters.

They were accused of ruthlessness in their dealings with the birth mother and the broker.

I do not, of course, know these people. But it feels like I do, because I have seen a lot of footage, much of it played over and over again. It feels as if half the country know them like bad neighbours.

If the Kilshaws had been younger, better looking, childless, more vulnerable, less ready for a fight — they would have stood a better chance of winning the media battle.

Because that is what will settle this custody case: media performance.

Judith Kilshaw’s admission on Sunday that she was prepared to use black magic to win back the twins will be proof to many that this is no fit mother. Kilshaw admitted casting black magic spells, such as crouching over a baby’s grave in a sick fertility ritual. She said she was willing to ruin political careers, family lives and businesses with her dark powers if the babies were not returned to her.

I believe that if she attempts black magic, she is insane. She will destroy herself and her family — the havoc that has already descended upon her is proof of that.

All witches, good or evil, know they are constrained by the Threefold Law of Return. In the Sixties, hippies used to call it ‘bad karma’ — put simply, it means that any evil wishes you release into the world will find their way back to you, three times stronger. The magic books say: ‘Whatever energy thou doth send forth, so shall it return unto thee, threefold.’

A witch might try to inflict cancer upon an enemy — the only thing about the spell which is certain to work is the Threefold Law of Return. Those cancer wishes will come back in a fatal dose.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker beginning to life for these two babies. Rejected by their mother and sold to one couple —taken from their home and sold again — flown halfway across the world and paraded before endless cameras — taken again, into care. Welcome to the 21st century family: lawyers, reporters and social workers. This reminds me so forcefully of the value of the extended family which is the Jewish archetype.

If only the twin’s birth mother had been Jewish, she might have had aunts, sisters, grandparents or nieces who would have helped her care for the babies. There is nothing new in bearing illegitimate children. There is nothing new in adoption — it can be a wonderful way of spreading love, and it is one of humanity’s highest forms of altruism.

What is new is the bloodthirsty frenzy that erupted when the Kilshaws took their story to the press. Without a family to protect them, the babies were at the mercy of these raptors.

Jewish lore, of course, gives a simple answer to the question vexing social workers and lawyers: What is to become of the children?

When King Solomon was asked to judge which of two women should take custody of a child, he proposed cutting the baby in half and giving a piece to each woman. One ‘mother’ assented. The other recoiled in horror, and it was this woman who won the judgment.

Judith Kilshaw, with her vicious declarations that she would wreak occult vengeance on all who had thwarted her, seems the perfect target for Solomon’s contempt.

The story, Nobody's Child, follows a Reality TV gameshow where childless couples compete to win a baby.

My research had proved that anyone with a few thousand dollars of credit on their cards could order a baby over the internet — virtually downloading it, the way you might a piece of software.

Within days of the launch, newspapers stumbled across the shocking saga of Californian twins Belinda and Kimberley Kilshaw. These six-month-old girls, who are in the care of Flintshire social services as I write,were sold by a broker to a US couple for $6,000, then removed from that family by their birth mother and resold to a British husband and wife. And when the diarist saw my press release, suspicions started to fly that I had been tipped off, perhaps by the FBI, who are taking a close interest in the drama.

Jewish Telegraph readers will know that life, in this case, is taking a lead from fiction. I announced my plans to publish Nobody's Child exclusively on the internet, a chapter a week for 50 weeks, last month.

The eruption of the adoption scandal at the precise moment that I chose to launch the book is proof to me of the unsettling power of synchronicity. My story has not come a day too soon.

When I set out to patent the process described in the story — a TV-internet mechanism which allows viewers to vote on which couple should get the baby — I hoped that a Reality TV gameshow with a human child as first child could not happen for years. Now it is happening before my eyes.

Alan and Judith Kilshaw are not good TV performers. The woman appears too eager to hammer home her point of view, the man too meek to stop her.

A parent must be bold in defence, but these people seemed to strut their defiance in front of any camera that rolled.

They appeared to be unmoved by the pleas of the first couple, Richard and Vickie Allen, whose other child was said to be bewildered and missing his sisters.

They were accused of ruthlessness in their dealings with the birth mother and the broker.

I do not, of course, know these people. But it feels like I do, because I have seen a lot of footage, much of it played over and over again. It feels as if half the country know them like bad neighbours.

If the Kilshaws had been younger, better looking, childless, more vulnerable, less ready for a fight — they would have stood a better chance of winning the media battle.

Because that is what will settle this custody case: media performance.

Judith Kilshaw’s admission on Sunday that she was prepared to use black magic to win back the twins will be proof to many that this is no fit mother. Kilshaw admitted casting black magic spells, such as crouching over a baby’s grave in a sick fertility ritual. She said she was willing to ruin political careers, family lives and businesses with her dark powers if the babies were not returned to her.

I believe that if she attempts black magic, she is insane. She will destroy herself and her family — the havoc that has already descended upon her is proof of that.

All witches, good or evil, know they are constrained by the Threefold Law of Return. In the Sixties, hippies used to call it ‘bad karma’ — put simply, it means that any evil wishes you release into the world will find their way back to you, three times stronger. The magic books say: ‘Whatever energy thou doth send forth, so shall it return unto thee, threefold.’

A witch might try to inflict cancer upon an enemy — the only thing about the spell which is certain to work is the Threefold Law of Return. Those cancer wishes will come back in a fatal dose.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker beginning to life for these two babies. Rejected by their mother and sold to one couple —taken from their home and sold again — flown halfway across the world and paraded before endless cameras — taken again, into care. Welcome to the 21st century family: lawyers, reporters and social workers. This reminds me so forcefully of the value of the extended family which is the Jewish archetype.

If only the twin’s birth mother had been Jewish, she might have had aunts, sisters, grandparents or nieces who would have helped her care for the babies. There is nothing new in bearing illegitimate children. There is nothing new in adoption — it can be a wonderful way of spreading love, and it is one of humanity’s highest forms of altruism.

What is new is the bloodthirsty frenzy that erupted when the Kilshaws took their story to the press. Without a family to protect them, the babies were at the mercy of these raptors.

Jewish lore, of course, gives a simple answer to the question vexing social workers and lawyers: What is to become of the children?

When King Solomon was asked to judge which of two women should take custody of a child, he proposed cutting the baby in half and giving a piece to each woman. One ‘mother’ assented. The other recoiled in horror, and it was this woman who won the judgment.

Judith Kilshaw, with her vicious declarations that she would wreak occult vengeance on all who had thwarted her, seems the perfect target for Solomon’s contempt.

But appropriate is not the same as exciting. Or intriguing. I love the notion of falling fish because it’s so utterly strange.

There is a woodcut in the 16th century Historia De Gentibus by O Magnus, depicting 22 fat, pouting fish dripping from a raincloud. This was hardly the first recorded instance of weird creature showers —1,800 years ago in Sardinia, frogs fell like hailstones.

In living memory, 150 perch-like silver fish rained down in a tropical storm close to Killarney Station in Northern Territory, Australia, in 1974.

Most scientists would prefer to ignore these reports. Even when the stories are confirmed by hundreds of witnesses — such as the fish-fall in London just before the Great Fire, when market traders swept up baskets of whiting and sprats, and sold them — science is sceptical.

The Great Fire, they would say, was so long ago that these reports can safely be discounted.

Science ought to be sceptical about inspiration too. A scientist cannot put a composer or a writer in a laboratory and command: ‘‘Under test conditions and full scrutiny, create a masterpiece.’’

Any genius would complain: ‘‘I can’t summon inspiration at will!’’

And that would be touted as proof that inspiration does not exist — or that, at the very least, no causal link can be established between genius and inspiration.

The truth of course is that inspiration exists in brief bursts, for just the time that it takes for a fish to fall from the sky.

Prayers are like inspirations, for they are fuelled by a blaze of fervent desire that flares up in the heart.

No one but a mystic could live in a perpetual state of prayer, just as no one but a madman could live in a constant stream of inspiration.

You may be fingering the edge of the paper, ready to turn the page, thinking, ‘‘I don’t know what Geller’s on about this week’’. I’ll tell you, but first I’ll explain what inspired this column: reports that intensive salmon harvesting causes dangerous mutations in the meat, which can produce carcinogenic toxins.

In other words, fish can give you cancer, if they come from the worst sort of battery fish-farm.

The conditions in which salmon at some Scottish farms are bred defy description.

More than 125,000 tonnes of salmon is shipped annually from hatcheries where the water is bathed in regular rapid bursts of intense light — brief artificial days that fool the salmon, packed 250,000 to one giant cage, into growing more quickly.

‘‘Salmon are farmed in cages at higher densities than battery hens,’’ Don Staniford, a researcher for Friends of the Earth Scotland, told one Sunday paper.

‘‘They are fed a diet marinated in chemicals and artificial colourings, injected with vaccines and growth promoters, then starved for 10 days before being slaughtered.’’ These fish do nothing inappropriate. They swim, they are caught, they are eaten. There is no chance of a factory-farmed salmon ever falling from the sky.

But the way they exist, lifelessly, is literally poisonous — to them and to us. Prey to infestation by swarms of sea lice, the farmed fish are passing the disease on to wild salmon which swim outside the cages.

The wild fish are dying out, reduced to 10 per cent of earlier levels.

For fish and for humans, a life without inspiration and prayer, in which mundane behaviour becomes an unbreakable norm, is deadly. It destroys itself and the lives around it.

Factory farming of human beings has never been more popular. We cram ourselves into ever smaller cars, crawling on ever busier roads between ever denser cities.

We shut ourselves in ever smaller office cubicles, ever more tightly pressed to computer screens.

We pack ourselves like sardines or salmon onto public transport and return home to watch other people live even more restricted lives on reality TV gameshows.

There is an escape but you won’t find it in the cage. By allowing your mind to do the impossible, by falling into the sky like a fish, your spirit can become inspired to be free of the humdrum.

This takes faith. And faith takes prayer. Science may ignore fish-falls but God believes that everything is possible — so place your faith in God.

This was the notion that was tugging on a hook in my mind as I sat with a paintbrush in my hand at Poole Pottery in Dorset.

Its managing director, Peter Mills, had invited me to create my own design for a limited edition of Poole plates.

It was a wonderful privilege, and I was excited at the prospect of seeing my own artwork thrust into the kiln and baked at a heat that could reduce a human being to a handful of ash.

My imagination was full of possibilities, and I questioned Peter about the technical challenges in encrusting a design with rock crystals and amethysts.

The first design had to be simpler. Just colours on clay. An image with beauty and meaning. I painted a fish.

So what’s new? What’s new is I don’t usually do it this way.

Usually I get an idea of what I want to write, and I hunt down as many news cuttings on the Internet as I can find, and I read them and mark them in fluorescent pen and read them again.

Then I go out with my dogs and I try all the different opening paragraphs I can imagine, and sometimes I dictate half a column in my head before I realise it’s all wrong, and sometimes I dictate a whole column and then get home without it, and my column is lying forgotten in a field somewhere and I have to start over.

Maybe you wouldn’t always know that from reading it. Maybe it would appear more polished and coherent if I just sat down and wrote.

Film director Michael Winner, who writes a notoriously scathing column for a Sunday tabloid, boasts that his pieces are never premeditated. They simply come from the heart.

This week I want to discuss something which is almost too hard to talk about: how Jews all over the world often give way to the temptation to look down on each other for being Jewish in a slightly different way.

There is a snobbery which any Jew would deny sharing, though all of us see it in others. There is the faint disdain felt by Jews born in Israel for those born elsewhere, and the equal disdain of emigrants to Israel for the Jews who have lived all their lives there.

Certain nationalities, such as the Yeminis and the Ethiopians, have long been regarded by some other Jews as inferior.

There is snobbery that builds walls on the edges of religious divides, so that the Orthodox feel they are better than the Reform, the Ashkenazi better than the Sephardi, the Mizrachi better than the Agudat Israel.

I could go on but I won’t, because I am writing from the heart and not the thesaurus here.

This is such a sensitive subject that I do not believe I could approach it any other way.

I have plunged in, like a January bather into an icy river, and now that I’m splashing about I shall try to make a few waves.

Judaism has survived because it is a story often told and long remembered.

An oral tradition that became the first and greatest book, it has snaked through human history like a thread through a tapestry.

It can be seen everywhere, at the centre of the picture and around the borders, in isolated glimpses and in elaborate patterns.

Unlike Christianity and Islam, which began as solid cores which spread by evangelism, missions and crusades, Jewishness is borne in family ties and friendships.

The knock at the door on a Tuesday evening, which so many friends tell me they faintly dread, always heralds the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Elim Pentecostals.

Never the synagogue. That is as it should be, I would hate to belong to a religious tradition which sought out the weak and the wavering, to encourage a faith upon them.

But there is a world of difference between a self-contained community and a divided community.

The divisions are best illustrated by an extreme example.

Consider the example, and then see whether it applies closer to home.

In Mexico, where I lived luxuriously during the mid-70s, in a poor country which I shall always associate with outrageous wealth, the descendants of Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition are seeking to return to the mainstream of their faith.

And it seems they are often not welcome. In Puebla, a rural state east of Mexico City, live families whose religion has evolved from 16th Century Judaism.

At least 300 families are believed to have sailed to Mexico, then a savage wilderness, to escape a vicious Christianity which pursued them across the Atlantic.

When the Inquisition reached Central America in 1648, the Jews removed themselves to the mountains.

In this isolation, their faith survived in mutated forms.

The Inquisition persisted for almost two centuries, but real positive faith dies harder than hate and by 1820 the persecution was gone . . . and the religion was still there.

I find this story inspiring. The more recent Jewish emigrants to Mexico apparently do not.

Snobbery keeps Mexico’s indigenous Jews at bay when they seek to join the newer arrivals.

As a result, many say that they feel closer to Israel than to their Mexican neighbours.

Some Zionists might praise this situation, but to me there is great sadness in any community where some families feel thousands of miles distant from others.

Luckily some mainstream Mexican Jews accept the historical Jews gladly.

An 85-year-old Conservative rabbi called Samuel Lerer has inducted 3,000 people into the mainstream: ‘‘When you see someone who prays with heart and soul,’’ he says, ‘‘can you not accept them as Jews?’’

His words come from the heart. They are without thought or polish.

And they express in a single breath the sentiment which I have been labouring the length of this column to convey.

I’m glad they came when they did. I’ve run out of space. Next week I’ll think before I start tapping the keyboard.

I only hope I’ll still be able to write the things we don’t dare say.

I was the only human strange enough to be accepted by the star-troopers as an intelligent lifeform, and my grateful species awarded me the Nobel Peace Prize in perpetuity.

In my dreams, as I said. But I did once think I had a serious chance of winning the physics prize.

I was working at the most prestigious laboratories on the planet, demonstrating the simple effects of complex forces: telepathy, psychokinesis. dowsing.

If we could prove beyond doubt that the human mind was supreme over the physical world — and I contend we proved just that — then surely the Nobel Physics Prize would be mine. In my dreams.

Science, I discovered, does not reward those who ask difficult questions, especially if there are no easy answers. Instead of teams of research scientists, hit squads of character assassins are dispatched — once the questioner’s credibility is damaged, the questions can be dismissed with a sneer.

I have watched this happen many times, as brave mavericks put forward evidence which turned atomic theory, psychology or medicine inside out — proponents of cold fusion, alien abduction phenomena and digital homeopathy were all ridiculed and their fascinating, challenging ideas were trampled by the sheep-like herds of scientists.

At the same time, I noticed that any halfwit could be a Nobel Laureate.

That was impressed on me again this week when I read the claims of James Watson, the American who with Francis Crick won the Medicine Prize in 1962 for the discovery of DNA.

Watson and Crick are revered as the locksmiths who took an imprint of the human Key of Life.

Sadly, as Watson demonstrated in a lecture at California’s Berkeley University, he is no longer capable of opening his mouth without drivelling. The 72-year-old ex-Harvard professor told 200 fellow scientists that dark- skinned people had a more powerful sex-drive.

‘‘That’s why you have Latin lovers,’’ he said. ‘‘You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.’’

That kind of weak wordplay would be poor material in the hands of the warm-up man at Bernard Manning’s nightclub.

In a university it is insulting, and it’s little surprise that Berkeley’s professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, Susan Marquessee, stood up and walked out.

‘‘These aren’t issues one can state as fact,’’ she said.

So here’s a simple fact: the existence of Bill Clinton, not a man with prominent Italian genes, automatically trashes Watson’s half-baked theory. But Watson had more to say.

Fat people are unambitious, and he wouldn’t hire them. And thin women are miserable, beause men don’t fancy them.

To prove this, he flashed up slides of cheerful chubbies and miserable models.

This man has the Nobel prize for Medicine. He is one of the most admired scientists on the planet. So much for scientists.

Watson’s degeneration into a spouter of attention- getting claptrap is not a symptom of senility.

It’s something less deadly and more embarrassing — celebrity starvation.

Almost 40 years after his heydey, the DNA pioneer is reduced to grabbing his headlines by spewing such soundbites.

The syndrome is often triggered by a sudden burst of media attention rather than neglect.

The celebs who gradually fade away are weaned off their headline highs, and their egos are allowed to deflate gradually.

But if they are rediscovered, and enjoy brief comebacks, celebrity starvation can kick in with a vengeance. I believe this is what did for James Watson. Last year, he and Crick were named among the Men-of-the-Century in every magazine from Time to Genome Watcher’s Weekly.

Newspaper editors who previously had half an idea that DNA was discovered by the Wright brothers were suddenly desperate for the Watson-Crick line on everything: the Olympics, e-commerce, Chechen civil war, the price of petrol.

The decoding of the human genome heightened the frenzy. And abruptly, as fevers do, it ended. The US went to the polls and editors everywhere were suddenly very very bored of DNA.

Those double helixes, so pass. What is a forgotten celeb to do, except make another brilliant, epoch- defining discovery?

Or, if that happens not to be possible, to hurl a steaming heap of racist nonsense dressed up in a nice white scientific lab-coat?

No-one needs to be reminded of the dangers of letting respected people deliver racist opinions without at least the support of serious research.

Juxtaposing pictures of ‘oversexed’girls in bikinis and ‘undersexed’ Muslim women in yashmaks, as Watson did at Berkeley, isn’t serious . . . and it isn’t funny either.

But we all occasionally need reminding that scientists are ordinary humans, however much they want to play God.

Prey to human weaknesses, craving attention and believing their flatterers, they tell us nonsense and call it fact.

Our defence is our spirituality. The statements of scientists must be judged not only with our brains but with our hearts.

The brain might doubt: ‘‘This man Watson is so revered, his past discoveries have been so important, that perhaps I should suspend my judgement.’’

The heart never suspends judgement. The Jewish spirit must never be afraid to judge anyone, however esteemed.

This is the way God judges, with love and not logic.

And when God comes to judge James Watson, and weighs the profundities of his real work against the fripperies of his attention-seeking, I am sure the Almighty will be kinder than the media.

As the New Year dawns, 2001 will be a symbol no longer. It will be the date on our cheques, the newest file in our archives, the heading in our diaries.

The human mind needs symbols. 2001 is not a number: it has been a symbol which contained our hopes and dreams of a peaceful, healthy future, with technology to make life comfortable and medicine to make life long.

I shall be meditating upon this vision of 2001 as the clock strikes midnight at the turn of the New Year.

To help focus my mind, I have created five pictures, all based on Jewish symbols, which I would like to share with you.

The first is a menorah. It is growing from the ground, a holy plant with heart-like leaves, and two Stars of David blaze like blossoms on its branches. The smoke from its central flame spirals to infinity.

The second is a Star of David, burning with angelic brightness. The eye at the centre is the human ‘third eye’, the intuitive sensor which is located on the forehead, above the bridge of the nose.

Hearts twist in curlicues from the points of the star.

The third illustrates my conception of the mind’s power to affect reality. A ray of energy bursts from the third eye of a human head, seen in profile at the top left of the drawing.

The ray energises a three-part object which might be the metal prongs of a fork — or which might be the trifold aspect of human nature: intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

The object is bending under the ray’s force. Above it, stone tablets — the Ten Commandments of Moses — are being born in ablaze of fire.

The fourth again shows a ray beaming from an eye, but this time it is balanced with a symbol of food, fertility and Earth’s richness — a fish.

The fish is swimming deep in the human subconscious, cut off from the thinking part of the mind by a thick barrier which is nevertheless permeable to the bubbles which seep up.

In this way, our consciousness feeds on the thoughts we can never grasp — elusive, slippery images, never words, which dart like fish through our minds' depths.

The last and most complex image is based upon a word which is a symbol to all mankind: Jerusalem.

A Star of David blazes in one of its letters, but look closely and you will also find Muslim crescents and Christian crosses. Above Jerusalem, a man and a woman (but which is which?) exchange infinite love with their mouths and eyes.

Their minds are joined by the numeric symbol of mystery and universal oneness — 1111. And below the city, a gun fires bullets which turn to dripping hearts, slowly bleeding into a chalice whose base is a fish.

All of these images were created from a deep longing for love, wholeness and peace. These three blessings I wish each of you in the New Year. Happy 2001!

What am I supposed to tell them? One, I’m happily married; two, I don’t drink; three, I just want to stay home with my family; four, my mother already lives with us; five, I’m a vegetarian.

Oh, and by the way, I’m Jewish.

Maybe I should be more confrontational about this. My dear friend Rabbi Shmuley Boteach insists he won’t even walk into a room where there’s a Christmas tree. If a posse of carol-singers asked him to join in a chorus of Oh Come All Ye Faithful, I expect he'd truss them in their own tinsel.

But I hate to look like a killjoy. The people who are planning to misbehave at the parties or carve the turkey on a Mediterranean liner, they just want to have some fun.

Most people in Britain are not practising Christians, even if they come from Christian backgrounds. Christmas is not a religious festival to the majority of Britons, and they think it’s puritanical when anyone tries to introduce a spiritual element.

Especially when that element is wholly negative: ‘‘Sorry, I’m a Jew, I don’t do Christmas. Do I ask you to observe Yom Kippur?’’

So I’ve written about 20 variations on the same piece, all of them opening with the admission that I love buying presents so much, I couldn’t care whether Christmas was originally Christian, Muslim or Zoroastrian. I’ll go for any festival that involves platinum-card meltdown in Harrods.

Every piece includes the Geller get-lucky formula: Look into his/her eyes and say, ‘Tell me something you feel passionate about’ — instantly you introduce the erotic word ‘passionate’, and light the fuse on an intense heart-to-heart.

I reveal the Geller hangover cure: drink water. If you can't drink only water all night, then drink half a pint of water for every glass of wine before you go to bed. If that means six mugs of water, then six it is — you’ll thank me in the morning.

Instead of extolling the pleasures of spending late December at home, I recall the bizarre winter I spent in Japan, living without a phone or a TV in a cottage beneath Mount Fuji, recovering from a serious eating disorder. I use this to warn of the dangers faced by anorexics and bulimics at this time of glutinous feasting.

And on the mothers-who-come-to-visit question, I preach forgiveness — forgiveness of their irritating habits, and personal forgiveness, absolving yourself of all the embarrassing and ungrateful things you have done and said to your family over the years.

You can’t change the future, but you do have to make the future. Don’t waste energy in the wrong direction.

Finally, the turkey — would you really insert a fistful of Paxo under its tail if the poor thing was still alive? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’ then no amount of MindPower advice is going to help you. If not, then have a vegetable platter this year.

But in these articles I rarely talk about the festival which is perhaps my favourite of the whole year, the one that named me: the Hag ha-Urim. I was born on December 20, and so I was called Uri.

This festival is said to commemorate the rededication of the Second Temple by Judah the Maccabee in 165 BCE, but I suspect it stretches back far beyond that.

It is easy to imagine the ancient nomads of the east Mediterranean seaboard, marking the shortest days of the year with prayer and feasting, in expectation of the gradual recovery of the sun’s power.

I love the excitement of children as the candles of the menorah are lit, day by day. I love the Ma’oz Tsur, and the game of sevivon.

If seasonal decorations are required, that’s easy: earlier this year I bought a beautiful collection of witches’ balls at Sotheby’s, glass globes blown more than 150 years ago which are supposed to ward off the evil eye.

Bad magic is reflected back upon the spell-caster by their multi-coloured surfaces. These globes are the original Christmas baubles — I bet almost no one remembers that when glass balls twist and spin and glitter on the trees, they are imitating a pagan rite.

I love to light candles and say the ‘Al na-Nissim’, that great prayer which concludes: ‘‘And thereupon your children came into the shrine of your house . . . and did light lamps in your holy courts, and appointed these eight days to be kept with praise and thanksgiving . . . and we thank your great name.’’

And I love to choose gifts, and I love to give them. I know the tradition of Chanucah gelt is wholly Jewish, and that the rabbi will read of the gifts brought by the princes for the dedication of the Sanctuary in the wilderness.

But I have my own justification of extravagant present-giving — the three pagan kings, according to the Christian gospels, came to Bethlehem to worship a Jewish boy child.

Why should I not express my own love for Jewish children, and adults, by giving?

To all my readers, I wish the greatest gift of all —peace of heart.

This means, for instance, that I can buy a plot in the Western Australian desert, and it will be mine. Access is difficult but not impossible.

But I cannot sell the title deeds for my cellar to anyone requiring a secure cool spot to keep their wine, unless I also guarantee right of passage from my gates to the wine-racks.

The buyer has to be able to reach the land, or the sale is meaningless.

This rule apparently invalidates the certificate that hangs on my wall, proclaiming my ownership of an acre on the moon.

I bought it from an online outfit called MoonEstates.com for £10 plus VAT.

I haven’t tried to reclaim the VAT from HM Customs and Excise yet — for the sake of a quiet life, I think I might let that one pass. It wasn’t the hope of securing valuable mineral rights that attracted me — I have no idea whether there is gold or oil buried in my dusty little acre. My old friend Captain Ed Mitchell, the sixth US astronaut to walk on the moon, assures me that it’s just dust and rock, all the way to the core.

It wasn’t the idea of putting a hotel up there —the views would be fantastic, since the land is on the moon’s light side, overlooking the Earth . . . but the weather can be uncomfortable sometimes, owing to the absence of an atmosphere.

Around lunchtime, it’s 100 degrees centigrade in the shade, if you can find any, but by bedtime it’s 155 degrees below.

And it wasn’t a simple urge to have another conversation-piece on the walls. I’ve got a life-size wooden effigy of Elvis next to the sofa, which is all the conversation-piece anyone could need.

Partly, I splashed out a tenner on the moon to enjoy a joke against international law. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 clearly denies any government the right to lay claim to the moon or a planet or star. But it forgot to make the same rule apply to individuals.

Californian Dennis M Hope spotted this loophole 20 years ago. Setting up his own Lunar Embassy and styling himself The Big Cheese, Hope filed a ‘declaration of ownership’ with the UN, the White House and the Kremlin.

Since then he has made a good living, selling slivers of his empire — he now owns three aeroplanes.

None of Hope’s planes will get him — or me — to my plot on the moon.

But I defy anyone to say that access is impossible. Ed Mitchell’s been there, after all.

Extraterrestrial tourism is expected to blast off within a decade, and it has long been my ambition to look down on our planet from space.

I love the sheer cheek of this enterprise.

Francis Williams, a Cornishman who proclaims himself Lunar Ambassador to the UK, secured the rights from Big Cheese Hope to market the moon.

He’s sending up all the pompous astronomers who secretly think that they own space because they are the only people who can explain exactly how planets stay in orbit or why eclipses occur.

A consultant to the Royal Astronomical Society, Jacqueline Mitton, spluttered: ‘‘Nobody takes a blind bit of notice of any certificates issued of ownership of moon or anywhere else in outer space.’’

I wonder if she realises that nobody takes a blind bit of notice of the RAS either. The man in the moon has always enjoyed a joke at big sister Earth. He shines strange magic upon people who try to keep their feet on the ground.

Though most physicists would prefer to ignore it, data from a Las Vegas casino shows unequivocally that the phases of the moon are a significant factor in gamblers’ luck — when the moon is full or new, takings at the tables fall by around two per cent.

Parascientist Dean Radin proposes in his book The Conscious Universe that the efficiency of human intuition improves by a measurable percentage at these key phases.

Jewish wisdom regards the New Moon as sacred. Rosh Chodesh marks the beginning of the Hebrew month, a tradition which may have developed from pagan moon festivals.

Rosh Chodesh was granted by God to women, for refusing to aid their menfolk in building the Golden Calf at Mt Sinai.

The cycle of the moon, of course, is mirrored by the menstrual cycle.

The Qiddush Levanah, a joyous blessing recited during the moon’s waxing, has undertones of hope for the coming of the Messiah. With every moon that is born, so is hope for mankind.

This prayer is often printed in large type, so it can be easily read by moonlight. Pesach and Succot begin at the full moon. A waxing moon is auspicious for marriages, and Jewish women who are trying to conceive will still sometimes wear a crescent pendant.

All the while I have been writing this, a Jewish songwriter’s beautiful ballad —Paul Simon’s Song About The Moon — has been echoing in my mind.

I took a few minutes just now to find the CD and play the track, and I heard Simon sing: ‘‘If you want to write a song about the heart, and its ever-longing for a counterpart; If you want to write a spiritual tune, Write a song about the moon.’’

I’m glad I own a piece of that.

Messages of defiance in Hebrew on militant Moslem pages. Depictions of Yasser Arafat as a pig, in situations that would make even a pig blush.

The young Jewish hackers who mutilated Arab internet sites were striking a modern blow against an enemy whose tactics were mired in the Dark Ages.

Palestinian teenagers threw stones — Israeli schoolkids hurled back packets of data.

Arab terrorists plotted suicide attacks — Israeli intellectuals fooled Iranian servers into shutting themselves down.

Fearing international condemnation, Michael Eitan, head of the Knesset’s Internet Committee, announced that hack-attacks on Moslem sites were illegal.

‘‘We need to explain to the Israeli public that we are not a country of piracy and that children should not be declaring war,’’ he said. No one listened.

Angry but impotent, Lebanon Shi’ites who saw their websites being picked off by electronic sniper fire launched a global plea to Moslem hackers in Europe and the US. Following a report in the Beirut Daily Star that two pro-Hezbollah sites were recruiting whizkids, more than 60 Israeli sites were hit.

Army, government and tourism web pages were torn down, sent up, blacked out or kicked in. Denial-of-service attacks, the kind of mass email onslaughts which froze the web giants eBay and Yahoo! earlier this year, were used to cripple Jewish internet service providers.

One email, sent like a chain letter from sympathiser to sympathiser, claimed: ‘‘The more money the Jews lose in fixing and strengthening their systems means less money to buy bullets and rockets for use against our children . . . Maybe you can’t hold a gun and fight, but you can contribute to the struggle.’’

Such propaganda is, of course, idiotic as well as cynical. Israel’s defence budget is not tied to her computer network costs. Soldiers are not told, ‘‘Only two bullets each today, boys — we’ve had some unexpected website expenses.’’

And the damage done, in what the Arabs have started to call ‘‘an electronic jihad’’ is superficial. The public face of Israel’s computer superstructure may be bruised, but the brain behind the face is not even jolted.

The two are kept totally separate. Any hacker who crashes a government information page and imagines he is damaging the country’s real information network is deluded.

In an investigation into what it sarcastically called Cyber War I, the Jerusalem Report dryly concluded: ‘‘National security was not endangered . . . It’s a nuisance, nothing more.’’

But on the real computers of the Ministry of Defence at Ha Kiryah in Tel Aviv, programmers are staring at a much greater threat. According to analysis leaked to the Times, the Palestinian uprising is following a predictable pattern which appears to lead inevitably to bio-terrorist attacks in Britain and America as the Middle East conflict goes global.

The recruitment of hackers from schools and colleges worldwide has already shown that no war can ever be restricted to the Holy Land again. The internet has made our planet much smaller than a global village — it is a single house. And if there is a fire in one of the rooms of your house, the whole building is threatened.

In the scenario which Ha Kiryah computers suggest is unfolding, one huge terrorist attack in an Israeli city will be enough to sweep away the ceasefires permanently.

Too many terrorists hate peace for this scenario to seem anything but a certainty — one massive explosion, 100 women and children slaughtered in a school or a marketplace, 100 million viewers taking sides.

The initial atrocity will be forgotten as Israel wreaks a terrible revenge, pounding the Palestinians with incalculably greater might. Syria, Jordan and then Iraq will be drawn into the conflict.

America, torn for months between supporting the Israelis and pandering to the Saudis, will seize the opportunity to drop nuclear devices on Iraq.

In the worst possible outcome, nuclear devices in terrorist hands or wielded by rogue Russian factions will be detonated in the States. This is the Doomsday scenario.

More probable is a long campaign of terrorist attrition against the West as the Arab states keep failing to dislodge Israel. The merest hint that Islamic fundamentalists are deploying bombs containing anthrax, necrotising bacteria and ebola viruses will plunge cities into panic.

Remember how Israeli children were trained to don gas masks during the Gulf War? Those pictures could be repeated worldwide if real terror takes grip.

These scenarios differ from the projections traditionally drawn up by war-room analysts, because they are using computer algorithms based on patterns seen throughout the natural world at every mathematical level, from the shaping of coastlines to the spread of diseases, from the growth of a coral to the onset of a species’ extinction.

Impartially, unemotionally, the computer uses chaos theory — the branch of maths which locates ever-repeating formulae at the heart of madness and disorder — to project an image of the future.

Chaos theory is based on uncertainty. What the computer sees is not what must unavoidably happen. One tiny, unforeseen change in the pattern — a single voice speaking out for peace, a single act of love in the midst of the hatred — can be enough to set a whole new future unfolding.

According to chaos theory, the breath of a butterfly’s wing in China can be enough to set a cyclone spinning across the Atlantic.

And by that law, the force of a single prayer can be enough to roll a wave of peace eastwards up the Mediterranean, to purge the Holy Land of war.

Henry was the coolest teenager on earth, a quarter of a century ago, when he was The Fonz on Happy Days. Since then he’s become a powerful producer/director in Hollywood and picked up a Golden Globe and an Emmy.

Now he’s starring on Broadway — and he was the festival’s guest of honour.

All, as his photos reveal, by the age of 19. I looked at the youthful grin in my brochure, and discovered that the Gala Patron Dinner with Henry would cost me $500. So I stayed in my room and watched a re-run of Happy Days instead.

This was my first Jewish Book Festival, though I’ve wanted to go for years. I thought it would be like Frankfurt with gefilte fish, but this celebration of reading and publishing could not have been more different from the hard-bargaining flash of the German fair.

Everyone in St Louis was happy to be talking about the thing they loved most — books. About writing books, discovering books, printing books, selling books, ordering books, transporting books, stocking books, borrowing books, losing books, cataloguing books, valuing books, remaindering books, admiring books, preserving books and publicising books.

I hardly had the heart to tell anyone that my own latest book, a novel called Nobody’s Child, will not need to be printed, transported or stocked. There are two simple stages in the life of this book — I write it, you read it.

Nobody’s Child is being published on the internet. With the aid of a small web-design team I have created a site where you can read the first two chapters, about 10,000 words, for free.

I want you to drop by. If you’re hooked, if you want to know what happens next, you can order the next installments.

Every Thursday for the next year I will be publishing one chapter and emailing it to subscribers. Each weekly installment costs just 30 US cents — that’s about 20p — and will be 2,000 to 3,000 words long.

You buy the installments in sets of five, and the only time you have to log on to the site is to renew your subscription.

The total cost of the novel will be $15, around a tenner.

Nobody’s Child is the name of a US gameshow, where three couples compete to win a baby. Tens of millions of TV viewers will scrutinise the contestants’ lives, via dozens of cameras around their homes and workplaces.

Ultimately, the choice is with the viewers — they’ll vote to say which couple gets the right to adopt.

Denny and Nat Monroe are black and appear well-off, living in a pleasant LA suburb. Andy and Mouse Beck are poor, white kids on a trailer park. Terry Impey and Colin Lord are gay — they’ve got cash to spend and a sumptuous apartment in Atlantic City.

The show’s host is a savvy shock-jock named Rob Roy McClean. Right now he’s not saying how he found the baby. It’s nobody’s child . . . until America awards it to the winners.

I believe the web is the future of publishing for novels.

Not all writers will want to work in installments — though I am relishing the prospect of communicating directly with my readers as I write, with one eye on the feedback and a clock on my desk.

But within a decade all writers will see their work go straight to the consumer as soon as it’s finished.

The only obstacle right now is the inconvenience of reading on a computer screen, and the advent of flexible, wafer-thin screens will change that.

Masaya Hijikigawa at the Semiconductor Energy Laboratory of Japan has invented a screen no thicker than a pane of glass. By coating the sheet with silicon vapour which dries to a layer only 0.04 millimetres deep, he created a patchwork of transistors which combine to act like a microchip.

Hijikigawa is hoping to sidestep energy issues by implanting solar cells into his intelligent screens.

The next step will be to coat the silicon directly onto a human eyeball, creating a screen which is invisible to all but the user.

To read a bestseller online, all you will need to do is close your eyes.

There will be a good deal of scepticism to be overcome before that happens, to judge from the reaction I’m getting from friends in book retail to my uristory website.

The common reply is: ‘‘It’ll never catch on — people will always enjoy the physical aspects of reading, like bookshops and the feel of the paper.’’

Horse-riding sceptics were dubious about the attractions of the motor-car too.

I don’t expect that books will become redundant, as horses did. But there are something like 200 million people reading text online every day, and they are getting used to the sensation of absorbing written information from a visual display unit.

The publishing world had better get used to it too. In both Europe and the US, the Jewish community has always been at the forefront of publishing.

We have to get a grip on new technology. Or the forefront will move on without us.

Not nearly as good as the one a six-year-old asked me yesterday: ‘‘Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? Because they taste funny!’’

But when I walked into the office of a friend’s accountant on Thursday, I really wanted to know — what is it with accountants?

Are they trying to rebel against the staid image of their sensible careers, squinting like Humphrey Bogart through a blue and stinging haze as they tot up the VAT column?

Do all accountants secretly wish they were private detectives? I said something like this to Steven as I walked into his office.

Or I may have said: ‘‘It smells like Yasser Arafat’s ashtray in here. Why are you killing yourself?’’

Steven looked sheepish. ‘‘You sound like my kids,’’ he said. ‘‘I know, I ought to give up. But smoking helps with the stress.’’

I replied severely: ‘‘The only thing about smoking that eases stress is the breathing. Cigarettes encourage your mind to focus on each breath, and that’s the beginning of a meditation.

‘‘Good breathing calms you, so why not cut out the middle man and just breathe fresh air? Surely that makes good accounting sense.’’

‘‘It’s all very well for you to say that, you’re a mystic, people expect you to meditate. But it’s completely counter to my whole culture. Meditation is an eastern thing, and I’ve never been further east than Eilat.’’

‘‘You’d drive a Japanese car, wouldn’t you? You’d eat a Chinese meal? What’s wrong with trying an Indian idea — are you scared you’ll turn into a Buddhist?’’

But I sensed I was losing the argument. Steven feels comfortable controlling his stress with an expensive and foul-reeking poison which will eventually kill him, slowly and painfully.

He does not feel comfortable with a spiritual form of relaxation. My own accountant would tell me to turn this insane contradiction into a lucrative series of videos and audio-cassettes with an accompanying coffee-table book entitled The Jewish Guide to Meditation.

But the secret of meditation is to start small, so I’ll begin with this column.

If you are put off the idea of meditating by a fear of sitting stock still for six hours, saying nothing but ‘Om’, don't worry. I have trouble sitting still through a movie. Or through dinner.

But I find it easy to meditate several times a day. For a start, you don’t need to be sitting. The only important thing is to focus your mind on one simple thing, and this can be done as you walk.

Go for a stroll around the block or across a field and back — try to be completely aware of everything you see, hear and smell. Let your surroundings fill your mind. Don’t think of anything else.

Or meditate in the bath: for a few minutes, just count your breaths. That’s all there is to it. Breathe in, that’s ‘1’. Breathe out, and it’s still ‘1’. Think about the breath, in your nose and throat and chest. Taste it. Feel yourself surrounding it.

And think about the number, how it sounds and how it looks in your mind’s eye.

Breathe in again, that’s ‘2’. Breathe out . . .

It is no accident that ‘breath’ in Hebrew can mean ‘spirit of God’, and that this meaning is echoed in many languages.

‘Inspiration’ means literally ‘to breathe in’. In Sanksrit the word is ‘prana’ which also means the life-force of the universe. ‘Pneuma’ in ancient Greek means ‘breath’ and ‘air’ as well as ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’.

The three Chinese characters symbolising ‘breath’ are, literally translated, ‘signifying the conscious self and the heart’.

‘Ki’ in Japanese and ‘qi’ in Chinese mystical traditions, mean both ‘air’ and ‘spirit’.

In five breaths it is easy to attain calmness if you mentally recite a poem said to have been written by the Buddha. This translation was made by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn:

‘‘Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out. Breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath. Breathing out a long breath, I know I am breathing out a long breath. ‘

‘Breathing in a short breath, I know I am breathing in a short breath. Breathing out a short breath, I know I am breathing out a short breath.

‘‘Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing out, I am aware of my whole body. Breathing in, I calm my whole body. Breathing out, I calm my whole body.’’

In Kabbalah tradition, the mind may meditate on the Tree of Life after lighting it up with one of the many names of God. My favourites of these names are ‘shalom’ and ‘olam’ —peace and everlasting worlds. Simply to repeat these words in my mind is a sure formula for relaxation.

It is impossible to dwell on the trivial anxieties of daily life when everlasting worlds are re-echoing in the chambers of the brain.

Another absorbing meditation which uses the Tree of Life is to imagine the 10 rings, from the Malkuth at the base to the Kether at the crown, encircling the body like the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom.

This visualisation is a popular one with the new wave of Kabbalah teachers who are promoting Jewish mysticism at Hollywood parties. The circles of the Tree of Life, or smoke rings . . . which do you suppose are better for you?

Bill Clinton has Dirty Harry perched on his shoulders and Tony Blair is shouting through a megaphone.

Memory games, you see. I play them automatically, creating visual images to remember names.

Blood = Gore. Shrub = Bush. Clint-on, Blare . . . childish, you might say. Effective, I answer.

I meet hundreds of people at parties, conferences, signings and studios. They usually remember my name, because 'Uri Geller' is a byword for what I do — mystery, spoon-bending, mind-reading.

I am a walking brandname. And because they remember me, I am expected to remember their names.

They would be hurt if I didn't. So I have to make a conscious effort to stimulate my subconscious. It's easy, and anyone can learn the techniques quickly. It is, literally, child's play.

So I was shocked to discover that most people forget almost all the information that bombards them daily.

According to a Microsoft poll, fewer than half of British children could point out London on a map.

Two out of three children questioned by Country Life magazine didn't know where acorns came from.

And 24 per cent of Britons, according to American Airlines, think Mexico is a state of the USA.

This amazes me, because most children I know are eager to show off their knowledge of history and current affairs, and often put adults to shame.

Perhaps the children of my friends are uncommonly intelligent. And perhaps that is because most of them are Jewish.

Jewish homes still put a strong emphasis on learning.

Our children are expect to confront the information that flows at them, instead of sitting passively and allowing it to wash around them.

That rule applies to everything we teach them — languages, social customs, work practices, religious rites.

A boy preparing for his barmitzvah is very different to a lad the same age who is trying to master his PlayStation.

Jewish culture has always been in earnest about learning.

To test this politically incorrect theory, I've put together a quick quiz on Jewish names in the news and well-known facts from recent history.

At least, I think they're well known.

The answers are multiple choice — only one of the three choices is correct in each question.

Check your results at the end: you don't win a million if you get them all right, but I would like to hear from you, whatever your score — please email me.

1 Who is currently Israel's foreign minister? a. Shlomo Ben-Ami b. David Levy c. Moshe Arens

2 Which British home secretary was Jewish? a. Douglas Hurd b. Michael Howard c. William Whitelaw

3And which British Chancellor was Jewish? a. Nigel Lawson b. Geoffrey Howe? c. John Major?

4Which entertainment heavyweight regards himself as Jewish, even though his mother was not? a. Michael Winner b. Michael Grade c. Michael Caine

5Who was the first president of Israel? a. David Ben-Gurion b. Chaim Weizman c. Itzhak Ben-Zvi

6Which Jewish scientist was invited to be the first president of Israel? a. Albert Einstein b. Sigmund Freud c. Paul Erdos

7What's the first name of Senator Lieberman, Al Gore's running mate? a. Jack b. Jerry c. Joe

8Who is currently Chief Rabbi in the UK? a. Lionel Blue b. Shmuley Boteach c. Jonathan Sacks

9Which man was most recently the Prime Minister of Israel? a. Menachem Begin b. Yitzhak Shamir c. Shimon Peres

10 Which man converted from Judaism to Christianity to further his career in politics? a. Benjamin D'Israeli b. William Gladstone c. Winston Churchill

11Which superstar is Jewish? a. Barbra Streisand b. Marilyn Monroe c. Madonna

Answers: 1a; 2b; 3a; 4b; 5b; 6a; 7c; 8c; 9b; 10a; 11a

His hair was long and matted, his beard was straggling and dirty.

In his rags and frayed sandals he seemed to mock the opulence all around him — the well-dressed, well-fed people who moved among the antique furnishings.

Beside him stood a young man — his son perhaps, until I looked more closely. The youth had an earnest, idealistic face, but his clothes were of the same battered material.

A carrion bird hovered close by. It looked as if it might expect one of us to throw a handful of crusts at the old man’s feet. If a crumb dropped, the bird was ready to swoop.

My hand reached instinctively to my pocket for spare change. I stopped the ridiculous gesture.

This creature was not a beggar. He was a holy man. A prophet. And he had been dead for thousands of years.

I was standing before an 11th century painting of the Prophet Elijah. And if you doubt my story, if you do not believe that a medieval work of art can provoke such a modern reaction, then I urge you to visit the Courtauld Institute of Art at Somerset House on the Strand, and see the temporary exhibition of Byzantine icons from Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai.

‘The Prophet Elijah fed by a raven’ was painted by an artist known only as Stephanos, around 1200 CE. It symbolises a prayer for forgiveness: Elijah clasps his hands in supplication, and the hand of God appears in answer to the prayer.

It once decorated the Elijah Chapel on the path to the summit of Mount Sinai. The ascent beyond the monastery can only be achieved on foot.

Generations of monks have hewn 3,750 steps into the Sinai stone, from St Catherine’s to an amphitheatre known as the Seven Elders of Israel.

From the Seven Elders 750 steps rise further, to the Chapel of the Holy Trinity on the very peak of the mountain.

The younger man is Moses. Again this icon is a prayer for God’s forgiveness by Stephanos; an inscription over the Burning Bush is a prayer for the soul of a man, or a boy, named Manuel.

Moses reverentially holds the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. He has removed his sandals to stand on the holy ground, the same piece of mountainside where the Moses Chapel was built and where this icon hung for centuries.

Until this exhibition, entitled ‘Sinai, Byzantium, Russia’, neither artwork had ever left the monastery. They are on display with 18 other pieces.

Seven have never been seen outside St Catherine’s. One, an icon of St Nicholas, has been exhibited previously, and the remaining 10 are key works from the holdings of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Almost all are clearly Christian pieces. The depiction of the 12 stages of martyrdom of St Catherine, for instance, impresses and fascinates me as an 800-year-old work of devotion and spirituality, but I feel no kinship with the Christian saint.

Sinai is a powerful symbol in my spiritual heritage, though I do not share the beliefs of the monks.

The paintings of Elijah and Moses struck me in a very different way to the other icons.

These two men are, with Abraham, the founders of my faith. They stood austere and aloof from the saints, apostles and martyrs — I had a sense that I had discovered my father and my grandfather among a glittering reunion of my distant cousins.

To see these men in relation to the overtly Christian icons was a stark reminder that the Jewish faith is far more ancient than any other.

It was to the Jews that God spoke in the desert, so many millennia ago.

St Catherine’s, though its monks worship Jesus, is an enduring memorial to the original faith, the religion which literally set down the spiritual laws which still guide us today.

The cornerstone of the monastery is a Jewish rock.

Its collection of icons is one hundred times larger than this exhibition —there are 2,000 artworks there. The library holds twice as many unique and ancient manuscripts.

One is the Chrysobull of Mikhail, Tsar of Russia, a parchment dating to 1630. It describes itself as an imperial charter to the abbot of Sinai or his successors and the brethren of the monastery ‘‘of the most holy Mother of God of the Burning Bush’’.

This document replaces an earlier one which was stolen when an abbot was killed on the road. It grants the right to travel to Moscow every four years, free of charge, to raise alms and financial assistance for building work.

In a time when all reporting of the religious and political conflict in the Holy Land speaks as though the history of Israel began in 1948, this exhibition reveals an overpowering truth: all man’s spiritual beliefs interlock at Mount Sinai.

Israel is as old as Elijah. Neither Christianity nor Islam — for the mountain is a holy place for Muslims also —could have existed without the Jews.

After February 4, 2001, many of these artworks will return to St Petersburg, a city known for most of the last century as Leningrad.

The word ‘Leningrad’ appears nowhere in the exhibition.

The recent miseries of Communism in Russia are no longer relevant, a forgotten sickness.

I pray that the hatred between religions which have riven the Holy Land in the past five decades will be wiped away as swiftly.

And the consequences are clearly stated: millions of people will die.

This document was written in March 1940 by two physicists — one Viennese and one a Berliner.

In a highly secret communication, they informed their government’s chief scientific adviser: ‘‘A ‘super-bomb’ which utilises the energy stored in atomic nuclei will, for an instant, produce a temperature comparable to that in the interior of the sun. The blast from such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area.’’ The scientists’ report, sent with the memo, contained the first mathematical proof that atomic bombs could be manufactured from portable quantities of uranium. But the memo never reached Hitler. It was not seen by Goering, Hess, Bormann or Goebbels. Because the scientists, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, were Jewish, they had fled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Their memo was addressed to Sir Henry Tizard in London, and within a few days Britain had launched its atomic bomb project. Peierls and Frisch went on to head divisions of the Los Alamos team which beat the Axis powers by developing nuclear weapons in the summer of 1945.

Had these two men not been Jewish, world history would have been utterly different. But as researchers Jean Medawar and David Pyke prove in a book called Hitler’s Gift (Metro, £20), it was not simply a lucky chance for civilisation that Jewish scientists made the breakthrough.

In the first 32 years of the 20th century, 100 science prizes were awarded by the Nobel committee; 33 of them went to Germans or scientists working in Germany. Of these Laureates, about a quarter were Jewish — though the proportion of Jews in the general population was far lower, a mere one-hundredth.

Jews outperformed the national average at the highest stratum of science by about 25 to 1. But when Hitler seized power in 1933 and turned his murderous wrath upon the Jews, the high-profile scientists were among the first to be victimised.

‘‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science,’’ promised Hitler, ‘‘then we shall do without science for a few years.’’

Within months, about 20 per cent of all the country’s mathematicians and physicists had fled.

The great mathematician David Hilbert was asked by a Nazi minister: ‘‘And how is mathematics in Gottingen now that it is free of Jews?’’

Hilbert answered: ‘‘Mathematics in Gottingen? There is really none any more.’’

The best known of all the refugees — and the man whose counsel helped persuade Roosevelt to back the atom project — was Albert Einstein.

His treatment at the hands of the Nazi press almost broke his spirit —Einstein was an unworldly man who took both the praise and the contempt of the media too seriously.

When he spoke out in New York in 1933 about the danger of letting Hitler rise unresisted, one Berlin newspaper retorted with the headline: ‘Good news from Einstein — he is not coming back!’ Weeks later, the man who formulated the Theory of Relativity arrived at Christ Church, Oxford. One undergraduate described him as ‘‘a poor, forlorn figure . . . he was greeted by a thunderous outburst of applause from us all.

‘‘Never in my life will I forget the wonderful change which took place in Einstein’s face at that moment. The light came back into his eyes, and his whole face seemed transfigured with joy and delight when it came home to him in this way that, no matter how badly he had been treated by the Nazis, both he himself and his undoubted genius were at any rate greatly appreciated in Oxford.’’

Medawar and Pyke ask how the Allies could have won without Hitler’s Gift, the cream of Germany’s scientists. But a deeper question remains unanswered — how was it that so many of Europe’s greatest intellects came from such a small community?

The answer is in Israel today. One small and beleaguered nation leads the world in a branch of modern mathematics which will have as devastating an effect on global culture as atomic physics — Israel leads the world in computer science.

The Jewish predominance in the Thirties was not by chance. Neither is Jewish trailblazing today.

Though I have argued in these pages that the essence of Jewish physiology will, one day soon, be identified as the consequence of a unique series of genetic properties —that is, that a Jew is a Jew from the DNA up — I don’t believe that our genes make us better scientists.

A great scientist possesses a mind like any other human mind, but one which has been trained to perform extraordinary feats. Anyone can tap into the infinite potential of the mind; it is easier to do this with support from loving parents and siblings, and with training from patient, dedicated teachers.

Jewish culture has always emphasised the importance of close family and talented teachers. These are the factors that have made so many good scientists.

And these are the factors which saved the world.