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La società siamo noi

noi la storia e la nostra cultura

una cultura senza comparti né livelli

che o c'è o non c'è

Annotazioni storiche e sociali

"Da qui gli Etruschi..."

 שלמה זנד  Shlomo Sand

Donald Hounam

"Come fu inventato il popolo

ebreo - Lo smantellamento di

un mito"

"Comment fut inventé le

peuple juif - Déconstruction

d'une histoire mythique"

"Israel deliberately forgets its

history - Zionist nationalist

myth of enforced exile"

Are the Jews

a "nation"?

"To this old question an Israeli historian, Schlomo Sand, Professor

of History at Tel Aviv University, gives a new answer.

He suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the

expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising

across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East.

This is indeed something that will shaken one of Zionism's

founding myths, which likes to see the Jews as the direct and only

descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than - [God

forbid!] - of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen."

La traduzione inglese dell'originale "Comment fut inventé le

peuple juif - Déconstruction d'une histoire mythique" è a cura

di Donald Hounam.

Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and

exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has

existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai.

According to this myth, the Jews escaped from

Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they

built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon,

which subsequently split into the kingdoms of

Judah and Israel.

They experienced two exiles:

after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th

century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.

Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews

to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and

deep into Russia.

But, the story goes, they always managed to

preserve blood links between their scattered

communities.

Their uniqueness was never compromised.

At the end of the 19th century conditions began to

favour their return to their ancient homeland.

If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of

Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries

and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of

Israel.

Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its

original inhabitants to return and awaken it.

It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab

minority that had no history and had arrived there

by chance.

The wars in which the wandering people

reconquered their land were just;

the violent opposition of the local population was

criminal.

Where does this

"interpretation" of Jewish history

come from?

It was developed as talented, imaginative historians

built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian

religious memory to construct a continuous

genealogy for the Jewish people.

Judaism's abundant historiography encompasses

many different approaches.

But none have ever questioned the basic concepts

developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a

linear past were marginalised.

The national imperative rejected any contradiction

of or deviation from the dominant story.

University departments exclusively devoted to "the

history of the Jewish people", as distinct from those

teaching what is known in Israel as general history,

made a significant contribution to this selective

vision.

The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has

obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it:

as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the

people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.

Nor did these "official" investigators of the past join

the controversy provoked by the "new historians"

from the late 1980s.

Most of the limited number of participants in this

public debate were from other disciplines or non-

academic circles:

sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers,

political scientists, literary academics and

archaeologists developed new perspectives on the

Jewish and Zionist past.

Departments of Jewish history remained defensive

and conservative, basing themselves on received

ideas.

Judaism

a proselytising religion

While there have been few significant developments

in national history over the past 60 years (a situation

unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that

have emerged face any honest historian with

fundamental questions.

Is the Bible

a historical text?

Writing during the early half of the 19th century,

the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak

Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-

1886), did not think so.

They regarded the Old Testament as a theological

work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious

communities after the destruction of the first temple.

It was not until the second half of the century that

Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a

"national" vision of the Bible and transformed

Abraham's journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt

and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into

an authentic national past.

By constant repetition, Zionist historians have

subsequently turned these Biblical "truths" into the

basis of national education.

But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these

founding myths.

The discoveries made by the "new archaeology"

discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC.

Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt

into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the

latter was Egyptian territory at the time.

And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against

the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of

Canaan by outsiders.

Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent

kingdom of David and Solomon.

Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the

time, of two small kingdoms:

Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future

Judea.

The general population of Judah did not go into 6th

century BC exile:

only its political and intellectual elite were forced to

settle in Babylon.

This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave

birth to Jewish monotheism.

Then there is

the question of the exile

 of 70 AD

There has been no real research into this turning

point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora.

And for a simple reason:

the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere

on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean.

Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of

Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the

destruction of the second temple.

Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century,

while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th

century Arab conquest. 

Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this:

Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David

Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as

late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt.

Both stated on several occasions that the peasants

of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants

of ancient Judea (2).

But if there was

no exile after 70 AD

where did all the "Jews"

who have populated

the Mediterranean

since antiquity come from?

The smokescreen of national historiography hides

an astonishing reality.

From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century

BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD,

Judaism was the most actively proselytising

religion.

The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted

the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of

Galilee and incorporated them into the people of

Israel.

Judaism spread across the Middle East and round

the Mediterranean.

The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern

Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just

one of many that converted.

The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only

evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews.

Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among

the Roman writers who feared it.

The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised

conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic

tradition expressed reservations in the face of the

mounting pressure from Christianity.

Although the early 4th century triumph of

Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish

expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the

margins of the Christian cultural world.

During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a

vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar,

whose descendants preserved their faith through

the Islamic conquest and down to the present day.

Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th

century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of

the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya

contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa.

Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the

Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique

symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that

characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.

The most significant mass conversion occurred

in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom

between the Black and Caspian seas.

The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus

into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of

communities, many of which retreated from the 13th

century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe.

There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south

and from what is now modern Germany, they formed

the basis of Yiddish culture (4).

Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish

people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged

by Zionist historiography.

But thereafter they were marginalised and finally

erased from Israeli public memory.

The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967

believed themselves to be the direct descendents of

the mythic kingdom of David rather than - God

forbid - of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen.

The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic

group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital,

from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.

This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be

supported by biology as well as history.

Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research,

carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to

demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are

closely genetically related.

Research into the origins of populations now

constitutes a legitimate and popular field in

molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has

been accorded honoured status in the frenzied

search for the unique origin of the "chosen people".

The problem is that this historical fantasy has come

to underpin the politics of identity of the state of

Israel.

By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition

of Judaism it encourages a segregation that

separates Jews from non-Jews - whether Arabs,

Russian immigrants or foreign workers.

Sixty years after its foundation

Israel* refuses to accept

that it should exist

for the sake of its citizens 

For almost a quarter of the population, who are not

regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally.

At the same time, Israel presents itself as the

homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if

these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full

and equal citizens of other countries.

A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal

nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to

justify internal discrimination against its own

citizens.

It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish

history while the prism of Zionism continues to

fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum.

But Jews worldwide have always tended to form

religious communities, usually by conversion;

they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived

from a unique origin and displaced over 20

centuries of wandering.

The development of historiography and the

evolution of modernity were consequences of the

invention of the nation state, which preoccupied

millions during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to

shatter.

And more and more academics are analysing,

dissecting and deconstructing the great national

stories, especially the myths of common origin so

dear to chroniclers of the past.