soc.culture.pakistan

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and
self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents,
reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made
a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but
"national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought
out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for
example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have
existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish
nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its
source in the mythical Kingdom of David."

So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? At a
certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in
Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon
themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst
to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish
historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation
that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned
around and went back to its birthplace.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html


03/21/2008

Shattering a 'national mythology'

By Ofri Ilani


Of all the national heroes who have arisen from among the Jewish people over
the generations, fate has not been kind to Dahia al-Kahina, a leader of the
Berbers in the Aures Mountains. Although she was a proud Jewess, few
Israelis have ever heard the name of this warrior-queen who, in the seventh
century C.E., united a number of Berber tribes and pushed back the Muslim
army that invaded North Africa. It is possible that the reason for this is
that al-Kahina was the daughter of a Berber tribe that had converted to
Judaism, apparently several generations before she was born, sometime around
the 6th century C.E.

According to the Tel Aviv University historian, Prof. Shlomo Sand, author of
"Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi?" ("When and How the Jewish People Was
Invented?"; Resling, in Hebrew), the queen's tribe and other local tribes
that converted to Judaism are the main sources from which Spanish Jewry
sprang. This claim that the Jews of North Africa originated in indigenous
tribes that became Jewish - and not in communities exiled from Jerusalem -
is just one element of the far- reaching argument set forth in Sand's new
book.

In this work, the author attempts to prove that the Jews now living in
Israel and other places in the world are not at all descendants of the
ancient people who inhabited the Kingdom of Judea during the First and
Second Temple period. Their origins, according to him, are in varied peoples
that converted to Judaism during the course of history, in different corners
of the Mediterranean Basin and the adjacent regions. Not only are the North
African Jews for the most part descendants of pagans who converted to
Judaism, but so are the Jews of Yemen (remnants of the Himyar Kingdom in the
Arab Peninsula, who converted to Judaism in the fourth century) and the
Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (refugees from the Kingdom of the Khazars,
who converted in the eighth century).


Unlike other "new historians" who have tried to undermine the assumptions of
Zionist historiography, Sand does not content himself with going back to
1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of
years. He tries to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a
"nation-race" with a common origin, but rather is a colorful mix of groups
that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. He argues
that for a number of Zionist ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews
as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking: "There were times when if
anyone argued that the Jews belong to a people that has gentile origins, he
would be classified as an anti-Semite on the spot. Today, if anyone dares to
suggest that those who are considered Jews in the world ... have never
constituted and still do not constitute a people or a nation - he is
immediately condemned as a hater of Israel."

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and
self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents,
reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made
a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but
"national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought
out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for
example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have
existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish
nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its
source in the mythical Kingdom of David."

So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? At a
certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in
Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon
themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst
to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish
historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation
that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned
around and went back to its birthplace.

Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish
people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where
the Jews come from.

Sand: "My initial intention was to take certain kinds of modern
historiographic materials and examine how they invented the 'figment' of the
Jewish people. But when I began to confront the historiographic sources, I
suddenly found contradictions. And then that urged me on: I started to work,
without knowing where I would end up. I took primary sources and I tried to
examine authors' references in the ancient period - what they wrote about
conversion."

Sand, an expert on 20th-century history, has until now researched the
intellectual history of modern France (in "Ha'intelektual, ha'emet vehakoah:
miparashat dreyfus ve'ad milhemet hamifrats" - "Intellectuals, Truth and
Power, From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War"; Am Oved, in Hebrew).
Unusually, for a professional historian, in his new book he deals with
periods that he had never researched before, usually relying on studies that
present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews.

Experts on the history of the Jewish people say you are dealing with
subjects about which you have no understanding and are basing yourself on
works that you can't read in the original.

"It is true that I am an historian of France and Europe, and not of the
ancient period. I knew that the moment I would start dealing with early
periods like these, I would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians
who specialize in those areas. But I said to myself that I can't stay just
with modern historiographic material without examining the facts it
describes. Had I not done this myself, it would have been necessary to have
waited for an entire generation. Had I continued to deal with France,
perhaps I would have been given chairs at the university and provincial
glory. But I decided to relinquish the glory."

Inventing the Diaspora

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful
to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for
their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political
freedom" - thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of
Independence. This is also the quotation that opens the third chapter of
Sand's book, entitled "The Invention of the Diaspora." Sand argues that the
Jewish people's exile from its land never happened.

"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range
memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct
continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains.
Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue
in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally
a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on
the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land - a
constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my
astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no
one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and
they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have
trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did
not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was
born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not
exiled."

If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real
descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the
chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people
are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The
first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been
no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of
the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929
that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in
the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were
numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

And how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea?

"The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a
converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was
a great thirst to convert others. The Hasmoneans were the first to begin to
produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence
of Hellenism. The conversions between the Hasmonean Revolt and Bar Kochba's
rebellion are what prepared the ground for the subsequent, wide-spread
dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the
fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian
world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of
the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then
Judaism started to permeate other regions - pagan regions, for example, such
as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that
stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we
would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all."

How did you come to the conclusion that the Jews of North Africa were
originally Berbers who converted?

"I asked myself how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And
then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who
conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia
al-Kahina's Jewish Berber kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier.
And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of
the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the
large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to
Judaism."

Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish
population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of
Khazaria - a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along
the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from
the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the
Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of
the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century
is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish
inhabitants remains unclear.

Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in
the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars
constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

"At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of
Jews in Eastern Europe - three million Jews in Poland alone," he says. "The
Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish
community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small
number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish
people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of
Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."

'Degree of perversion'

If the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak
Yiddish, which is a Germanic language?

"The Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the
East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research
of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that
there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of
the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber
Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even
Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about
describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and
describes Khazaria as 'the mother of the diasporas' in Eastern Europe. But
more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors
of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck."

Why do you think the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?

"It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the
land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock
the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of
the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say
simply: 'We came, we won and now we are here' the way the Americans, the
whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear
that doubt will be cast on our right to exist."

Is there no justification for this fear?

"No. I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings
is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't
mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the
undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the
State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would
constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical
right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here
of all Israeli citizens."

In effect you are saying that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.

"I don't recognize an international people. I recognize 'the Yiddish people'
that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen
as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that
Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this 'Yiddish people.' I also
recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to
sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not
prepared to recognize it.

"From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its
citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a
nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But
most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel,
even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot
be seen as a nation."

What is so dangerous about Jews imagining that they belong to one people?
Why is this bad?

"In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This
is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no
existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open,
multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The
consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and
varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and
my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a
more egalitarian situation - I will have done my bit.

"We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic
where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of
the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab
community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that
declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a
state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it."

The question is whether for those conclusions you had to go as far as the
Kingdom of the Khazars.

"I am not hiding the fact that it is very distressing for me to live in a
society in which the nationalist principles that guide it are dangerous, and
that this distress has served as a motive in my work. I am a citizen of this
country, but I am also a historian and as a historian it is my duty to write
history and examine texts. This is what I have done."

If the myth of Zionism is one of the Jewish people that returned to its land
from exile, what will be the myth of the country you envision?

"To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted mythologies
of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what
justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open,
progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it
is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the
number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the
future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba
[literally, the "catastrophe" - the Palestinian term for what happened when
Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day."