Why single out the Jews?

Celsus thinks that many nations share a kinship in this same doctrine, and he names all these nations as having originated such a teaching. Yet I do not know how it is that he slanders the Jews alone, not counting their nation with the rest, as one that either shared their studies and was of one mind with them, or taught much the same on many points. It is fair, then, to ask him why he has believed the histories of barbarians and Greeks about the antiquity of the nations he named, while he makes out the histories of this one nation alone to be false. For if each people set down its own affairs out of love for the truth, why should we distrust the prophets of the Jews alone? But if Moses and the prophets wrote many things about their own affairs to favour their own cause, why shall we not say the same about the writers of the other nations too? Or are the Egyptians to be trusted about the Jews when they speak ill of them in their histories, while the Jews are lying when they say the same things about the Egyptians, recording that they themselves suffered much unjustly and saying that for this reason the Egyptians were punished by God?

Nor is this to be said of the Egyptians alone. For we shall find conflict between the Assyrians and the Jews, and this is recorded in the ancient histories of the Assyrians. In the same way the Jewish writers (so as not to seem to beg the question by saying “the prophets”) recorded that the Assyrians were their enemies. See at once, then, the partiality of a man who believes some nations as wise and condemns others as utterly foolish. For listen to Celsus saying: “There is an ancient doctrine that goes back to the beginning, with which the wisest nations and cities and wise men have always been occupied.” Yet he would not call the Jews one of the wisest nations, not even on a level with the Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians, Persians, Odrysians, Samothracians and Eleusinians.