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 Posted: Sat 06 Dec 2008 04:20 Post subject: Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian |
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http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=13569
Israeli Bestseller Breaks National Taboo
Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian
by Jonathan Cook
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work
has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list – and that success has come
to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel's biggest
taboo.
Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe
haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel –
is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on
extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this
claim but several more – all equally controversial.
In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land,
that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the land called
Israel and that the only political solution to the country's conflict with
the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely
to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is
selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.
Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and
English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the
book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States
next year.
In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at
least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country's leading
journalists, has called the book "fascinating and challenging."
Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel
have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel
Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr. Bartal made little
effort to rebut Dr. Sand's claims. He dedicated much of his article
instead to defending his profession, suggesting that Israeli historians
were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr.
Sand contends.
The idea for the book came to him many years ago, Dr. Sand said, but he
waited until recently to start working on it. "I cannot claim to be
particularly courageous in publishing the book now," he said. "I waited
until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli
academia for expressing views of this sort."
Dr. Sand's main argument is that until little more than a century ago,
Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common
religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews
challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing
the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.
Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from
exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added.
"Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen
as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed
away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their
religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came."
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at
the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.
"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for
granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were
exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the
kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without
exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events
of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.
"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in
Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they
stayed on their lands."
Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile
was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith.
"Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their
ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."
So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered
around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them
to "return"?
Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following
the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for
converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."
Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and
among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of
the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse
to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and
eastern Europe.
Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis
live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the
discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.
Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth,
headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish
capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the
significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.
One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself
notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?
"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist
leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister],
believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original
Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."
Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues' reticence to engage with him to an
implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of "Jewish
history" taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards.
The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr. Sand said, dates
to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines:
general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its
own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
"There's no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the
universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed
specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative
world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical
research.
"I've been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when
European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian
who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by
academia in the rest of the world."
This article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi. |
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