Post by h***@yahoo.comPost by HHWShlomo Sand, "The Invention of the Jewish
People" (ISBN-13:978-1-84467-623-1)
"Sand bases his arguments on the most esoteric and
controversial interpretations, while seeking to undermine
the credibility of important scholars by dismissing their
conclusions without bringing any evidence to bear."
(Shapira will never be as famous as Sand, but she is
a much better historian. She is very good in quoting
primary sources to support her conclusions.)
To go on from there, Shapira addresses Sand's (and H's) notion that
the "exile was a myth!" Simon Schama, Hillel Halkin, and Sir Max
Hastings also take Sand to task for his shoddy scholarship.
The excerpts are long, but worth it.
Anita Shapira, from "The Jewish people deniers":
[...]
"Another topic Sand likes to punch holes in is the myth of exile: the
Jews (were there any or weren’t there any?) were not expelled from the
land of Israel, not exiled from it; most of them remained there and in
the end adopted Islam, and they were the forefathers of today’s
Palestinians. On the other hand, the Jewish diaspora in the Second
Temple period and later originated mainly with Jewish converts who had
no ties to the land of Israel. This is the obverse of the conversion
claim: not only were the Jews not forced out of the land of Israel,
not only were Jews in the diaspora unconnected to the land of Israel,
not only do diaspora Jews not belong to the land of Israel, but those
who do belong to the land of Israel are, rather, the Palestinians, the
land’s inhabitants since antiquity. Again, he uses the words of Dinur
and his colleagues, who questioned the concept of expulsion: they
often stressed that a significant Jewish community had remained in the
country until the seventh century, remnants of whom, according to
current research, lingered on until the conquest by the crusaders of
the eleventh century. The Zionist movement sought to show that Jews
cleaved to the country; from its point of view, the question of
expulsion was less important than showing that Jews had stayed in the
land. Again, Sand erects a phantom – exile – and “proves” that it
never happened, something historians do not deny. On the other hand,
he ignores the fact that even if Jews were not exile from their land,
and many of them did scatter all over the Roman Empire of their own
free will, the very loss of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel,
the Romans’ change of its name to Palestine out of a desire to erase
all trace of Jews from it, and the establishment of an idolatrous
Roman colony on the ruins of Jerusalem after the Bar-Kokhba Revolt was
crushed, went down in Jewish collective memory as traumatic. This is
true even if the Jewish community in the land of Israel, particularly
in Galilee, did continue to flourish, at least until Christianity
became predominant in the Roman Empire in the fourth century.
"The awareness of exile was deeply ingrained in Jews, and their sense
of humiliation at having lost sovereignty over the land of Israel only
heightened with the rise of Christianity and Islam – unrelated to the
question of whether or not they had been forced into exile. Sand
flaunts the assumption of one historian that the myth of the
“wandering Jew,” which interprets the sojourn of Jews in the diaspora
as retribution rather than free choice, came down to the Jews via
Christian sources. Even if we take this assumption to be true, it does
not detract from the importance of the self-image of Jews as a
suffering collective pushed from pillar to post in exile. In this
matter as in others Sand presents, there is also another
interpretation for the founding of the myth of exile: the expression
“because we sinned we were exiled from our land” appears in Hebrew
prayer and was documented in writing as early as the ninth century and
apparently dated back much further: it is not necessarily a Christian
concept, but a Jewish one, that sees the distancing from the land of
Israel as divine retribution, a wretched state in quest of tikkun –
repair. Since there were no Zionist historians for the first thousand
years AD it appears that the “implanted memory” Sand speaks of was not
created by them, but has belonged to the self-image of Jews since the
Temple’s destruction. Ideas about the end of days were connected to
dominion over the land of Israel. “There is no difference between this
world and the days of the Messiah except [that in the latter there
will be no] bondage of foreign powers,” said the Babylonian Amora
Shmuel.4 Maimonides explains that in the messianic era, “Except for
the fact that sovereignty will revert to Israel, nothing will be
essentially different from what it is now.”5 The messianic belief
certainly contained universal elements, but the Messiah was also meant
to be a particularistic Jewish Messiah. In other words, the concept of
exile is not necessarily related to expulsion but to the self-
awareness of a people that had lost control over itself and its land.
"The Jews were no less “a people” than the Romans or Greeks, which is
how their contemporaries saw them. The sense of exile and yearning for
messianic redemption lent the sojourn in the diaspora a sense of
transience that has nationalist connotations. Indeed, these are found
in the letter of Khazar King Joseph to Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, asking for
the latest news about the coming of the Messiah in advent of the
return to Jerusalem. The “implanted memory,” it transpires, was
already very firmly lodged by the end of the first millennium, and
even Jews by conversion, like the Khazars, felt a sense of exile
though they lived in independence on their own soil. On the other
hand, for Hasdai Ibn Shaprut and everyone else who wrote about the
Khazars, the very fact of a Jewish kingdom even outside of the
boundaries of the land of Israel was a source of encouragement and
pride against all the humiliation and degradation heaped on Jews
stripped of power and sovereignty. These are not religious emotions.
They are an expression of collective memory bound up with national
heritage, ancient memories, a culture of life, and day-to-day customs
that foster a consciousness of religious and national
separateness....These were not “implanted” by Zionism. They were
integral to the consciousness of the Jewish collective up to the Jews’
encounter with the various forms of modernism, which unraveled the
fabric of Jewish identity."
Full essay review:
http://www.isracampus.org.il/Extra%20Files/Anita%20Shapira%20-%20Shlomo%20Sand%20book%20review.pdf.
From Simon Schama,
[...]
"Sand’s point is that a version of Jewish national identity was
written in the 19th and early 20th centuries – by historians such as
Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow – which took as its central premise a
forced dispersion of the Jews from Israel. But, he argues, there
actually was no mass forced “exile” so there can be no legitimate
“return”. This is the take-away headline that makes this book so
contentious. It is undoubtedly right to say that a popular version of
this idea of the exile survives in most fundamentalist accounts of
Jewish history. It may well be the image that many Jewish children
still have. But it is a long time since any serious historian argued
that following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans
emptied Judea. But what the Romans did do, following the Jewish revolt
of AD66-70 and even more exhaustively after a second rebellion in
AD135, was every bit as traumatic: an act of cultural and social
annihilation – mass slaughter and widespread enslavement. But there
was also the mass extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish
religion and culture; the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina,
the obliteration of the Temple, the prohibition on rituals and
prayers. Sand asserts, correctly, that an unknowable number of Jews
remained in what the Romans called Palestina. The multitudes of Jews
in Rome had already gone there, not as a response to disaster but
because they wanted to and were busy proselytising.
"All this is true and has been acknowledged. But Sand appears not to
notice that it undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews
with the land of Palestine rather than supporting it. Put together,
the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life outside Palestine,
with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you
have the makings of that group yearning – the Israel-fixation, which
Sand dismisses as imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews
was dispossession, the severity of which was enough to account for the
homeland-longing by both the population still there and those abroad.
That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the
writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.
"There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions
of modern research in this book. To list them all would try your
patience. Scholarly consensus now places the creation of the earliest
books of the Old Testament not in the 6th or 5th centuries BC, but in
the 9th century BC, home-grown in a Judah which had been transformed,
as Israel Finkelstein has written “into a developed nation state”. The
post-David kingdom of the 10th century BC may have been a pastoral
warrior citadel, but the most recent excavations by Amihai Mazar have
revealed it capable of building monumental structures. And the Judah
in which the bible was first forged, its population swollen with
refugees from the hard-pressed northern kingdom of Israel, was a
culture that needed a text to bring together territory, polity and
religion. It was a moment of profound cultural genesis. And don’t get
me started again on the Khazars. No one doubts the significance of
their conversion, but to argue that the entirety of Ashkenazi Jewry
must necessarily descend from them is to make precisely the uncritical
claim of uninterrupted genealogy Sand is eager to dispute in the wider
context of Jewish history."
[...]
Full review from the Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b74fdfd2-cfe1-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ONYt1qSc
Hillel Halkin's Indecent Proposal in The National Review:
[...]
..."The notion that Jews share a lineage going back to biblical times
is, he [Sand] claims, a false one. Not only was much of ancient Jewry
never exiled from Palestine, in which it remained and converted to
Christianity and Islam in antiquity or the early Middle Ages, but
large numbers of non-Jews in the Diaspora entered the Jewish fold in
the same period--in at least some cases, it would seem, without
undergoing the formal conversion process required by rabbinic Judaism.
Sand dwells at length on the better known of these episodes, all
partially or wholly ignored by rabbinic literature: the Edomites of
southern Palestine, forced to convert by the Hasmonean King John
Hyrcanus in 125 B.C.E.; the numerous “God-fearers” of the Roman
Empire, gentiles attracted to Judaism who often slipped unobtrusively
into its ranks; the inhabitants of Yemen who became Jews under the
Judaizing Himyarite kings of the fourth and fifth centuries; the
Jewish Berber tribes of North Africa before its seventh-century Muslim
conquest; the Khazars, a Turkic people living between the Caspian and
Black seas, whose royal house embraced Judaism in the eighth century;
and so on. Far from having common biblical ancestors, he argues, most
contemporary Jews would discover, if they could go far back enough in
time, that they have diverse non-Jewish ones.
"But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical
DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the
most disgraceful pages in Sand’s book are those in which he displays
an ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by
serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how
historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of
its most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva Bonné-Tamir of
Tel Aviv University, Karl Skorecki of the Haifa Technion, and Doron
Behar of the Rappaport Institute, for “internalizing the Zionist myth”
and “seeking at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity” in
order to create a “new discipline” designed to confirm “the Zionist
idea of the Jewish nation-race.” Having myself worked for many years
on a research project with Skorecki and Behar, I can testify that this
impugning of their scientific integrity is libelous.
"The irony is that the genetic studies that Sand dismisses lend him a
measure of support. Overall, they show that while there is a high Y-
chromosome correlation with an eastern Mediterranean profile among
Jewish men from most parts of the world, indicating that many of them
do have common Palestinian ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA
correlation of Jewish women is much lower. Or, in less technical
terms: while male gentiles have on the average entered Diaspora Jewish
communities in only small percentages per generation over time, female
gentiles --presumably because they were local inhabitants taken for
wives by Jewish men in places like Yemen or North Africa--have done so
more significantly.
"But again: so what? There is nothing explosive about this. Judaism
has always made it clear that the Jewish people is not biologically
exclusive and can be joined by outsiders. And taking Sand on his own
terms, what does any of this have to do with Jewish peoplehood, or
with Zionism? ...Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in
Paris and has written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively
if told that Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some
of their progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic
or Roman invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a
similar proposition seriously."
[...]
"...A revival of historical interest in how, in certain times and
places in the past, non-Jews have been successfully integrated into
the Jewish people in large numbers, and without too many questions
asked, might be a contribution to such a process. Shlomo Sand’s call
for it is commendable. This is the best that can be said for an
otherwise deplorable book."
Full review:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/indecent-proposal
Evan R Goldstein in the Wall Street Journal:
"What should we make of Mr. Sand's radical revisionist history? There
is reason to be very skeptical. After all, we have been here before.
In 1976, Arthur Koestler published "The Thirteenth Tribe," which
argued that Diaspora Jews were a "pseudo-nation" bound by "a system of
traditional beliefs based on racial and historical premises which turn
out to be illusory." The genetic influence of the Khazars on modern
Jews is, he wrote, "substantial, and in all likelihood dominant."
Koestler's speculations were not novel. The connection between the
Khazars and the Jews of Eastern Europe had been debated by both
scholars and conspiracists (the two are not mutually exclusive) for
centuries.
""The Thirteenth Tribe" was savaged by critics, and Mr. Sand's
repackaging of its central argument has not fared much better. "A few
Jews in Eastern Europe presumably came from the Khazar kingdom, but
nobody can responsibly claim that most of them are the descendents of
Khazars," says Israel Bartal, a professor of history at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. We simply don't know enough about the
demographics of Eastern European Jews before the 13th century to make
such an assertion, Mr. Bartal says, adding, "Sand has not proven
anything." According to Peter B. Golden, a professor of history at
Rutgers University, the Khazars are likely one of a number of strains
that shaped the Jewish population in Eastern Europe. But, he stresses,
DNA studies have confirmed that the Middle Eastern strain is
predominant.
"In "The Invention of the Jewish People," Mr. Sand suggests that those
who attacked Koestler's book did so not because it lacked merit, but
because the critics were cowards and ideologues. "No one wants to go
looking under stones when venomous scorpions might be lurking beneath
them, waiting to attack the self-image of the existing ethnos and its
territorial ambitions." But Koestler was himself uneasy about
scorpions. The Khazar theory, he knew, was an article of faith among
anti-Semites and anti-Israel Arab politicians. Just a few months
before "The Thirteenth Tribe" was published, the Saudi Arabian
delegation to the United Nations declared Zionism illegitimate because
it was conceived by "non-Semitic Jews" rather than "our own Arab Jews
who are the real Semites." (An Israeli ambassador, wrongly, countered
that Koestler's book had been secretly subsidized by the
Palestinians.) Perhaps more disconcerting, the neo-Nazi National
States Rights Party in the U.S. declared "The Thirteenth Tribe" to be
"the political bombshell of the century" because "it destroys all
claims of the present-day Jew-Khazars to any historic right to occupy
Palestine." Members of Stormfront, a self-described "white
nationalist" Internet community, have predictably reacted to Mr.
Sand's book with glee."
[...]
Full review
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574464023091024180.html?
HTH
Deborah