What If the Jewish Diaspora was a Lie?
بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
Dr. Shlomo Zand asked “What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically
wrong?” What if the Palestinian
Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are
in fact descended from the very same “Children of Israel” described in the Old
Testament? And what if most modern
Israelis are not descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually
a mix of Europeans, North Africans, and others who did not “return” to the
scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the
attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully
displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia? What if the entire tale of the Jewish
Diaspora - the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world
every year detailing the ancient Jews’ exile from Judea, the years spent
wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches - is all
wrong?
That is the explosive
thesis of “When and How was the Jewish People Invented?”, a book by Tel Aviv
University scholar, Dr. Shlomo Zand that sent shockwaves across Israeli society
when it was published last year. After
19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a
dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications
that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to
ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and
Palestinians. Each group lays claim to
the same scrap of land - holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic
religions - based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national
identities formed over long periods of time.
There is probably no other place on Earth where the present is as
intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology
of Zionism is the tale - familiar to all Jewish families - of exile,
oppression, redemption, and return.
Booted from their kingdom, the “Jewish people” - sons and daughters of
ancient Judea - wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel
suppression from all corners - from being forced to toil in slavery under the
Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian
pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates
all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -
in the United States as well as Israel - who believe that God bestowed a “Greater
Israel” - one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied
Territories - on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a
Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Dr. Zand’s central
argument is that the Romans did not expel whole nations from their
territories. Dr. Zand estimated that
perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the
remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam, and
assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today’s
Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their
homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist
Tom Segev summarised, in a review of the book in Ha’aretz: “There never was a
Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened -
hence there was no return. Zand rejects
most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the
exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under
Joshua.”
But this begs the
question: if the ancient people of Judea were not expelled en masse, then how
did it come to pass that Jewish people are scattered across the world? According to Dr. Zand, who offered detailed
histories of several groups within what is conventionally known as the Jewish
Diaspora, some were Jews who emigrated of their own volition, and many more
were later converts to Judaism. Contrary
to popular belief, Dr. Zand argued that Judaism was an evangelical religion that
actively sought out new adherents during its formative period. This narrative has huge significance in terms
of Israel’s national identity. If Judaism
is a religion, rather than a people descended from a dispersed nation, then it
brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel
remaining a Jewish state.
And that brings us to Dr.
Zand’s second assertion. He argued that
the story of the Jewish nation - the transformation of the Jewish people from a
group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished people
- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by
Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argued Dr. Zand, an intellectual
conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, “It’s
all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the
State of Israel.”
The ramifications of Dr.
Zand’s argument are far-reaching; “The chances that the Palestinians are
descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that
you or I are its descendants,” he told Ha’aretz. Dr. Zand argued that Israel should be a state
in which all of the inhabitants of what was once British Palestine share the
full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, rather than maintaining it as
a “Jewish and democratic” state, as it is now identified.
Predictably, Dr. Zand
was pilloried according to the time-tested formula. Ami Isseroff, writing on ZioNation, the
Zionism-Israel blog, invoked the customary Holocaust imagery, accusing Dr. Zand
of offering a “final solution to the Jewish problem”, one in which “No auto da fe is required, no charging Cossacks
are needed, no gas chambers, no smelly crematoria”. Another feverish ideologue called Dr. Zand’s
work “another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in
Israel.”
That kind of overheated
rhetoric is a standard straw man in the endless roil of discourse over Israel
and the Palestinians, and is easily dismissed.
But more serious criticism also greeted Dr. Zand’s work. In a widely read critical review of Dr. Zand’s
work, Dr. Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, slammed
the author’s second assertion - that Zionist academics had suppressed the true
history of Judaism’s spread through emigration and conversion in favour of a
history that would give legitimacy to the quest for a Jewish state.
Dr. Bartal raised
important questions about Dr. Zand’s methodology and pointed out what appears
to be some sloppy details in the book.
But, interestingly, in defending Israel’s academic community, Dr. Bartal
supported Dr. Zand’s more consequential thesis, writing, “Although the myth of
an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli
culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions.” Dr. Bartal added, “no historian of the Jewish
national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are
ethnically and biologically pure.” He
noted that “important groups in the [Zionist] movement expressed reservations
regarding this myth or denied it completely.”
“As far as I can
discern,” Dr. Bartal wrote, “the book contains not even one idea that has not
been presented” in previous historical studies.
Segev added that “Zand did not invent [his] thesis; 30 years before the
Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak
Ben-Zvi and others.”
One can reasonably argue
that this ancient myth of a Jewish nation exiled until its 20th
century return is of little consequence; whether the Jewish people share a
common genetic ancestry or are a far-flung collection of people who share the
same faith, a common national identity has in fact developed over the
centuries. But Dr. Zand’s central
contention stands, and has some significant implications for the current
conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The primary reason it is so difficult to discuss the conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job supporters of Israel’s
control of the Occupied Territories – including Gaza, still under de facto
occupation - have done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with
a desire to see the destruction of Israel.
It effectively conflates any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the
specter of Jewish extermination.
That is certainly been
the case with arguments for a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Until recent years, advocating
a single-state solution - a binational state where all residents of what are
today Israel and the Occupied Territories share the full rights and
responsibilities of citizenship - was a relatively mainstream position to
take. In fact, it was one of several
competing plans considered by the United Nations when it created the state of
Israel in the 1940s. But the idea of a
single, binational state has more recently been marginalised - dismissed as an
attempt to destroy Israel literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic
and religious-based political entity with a population of second-class Arab
citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world's longest-standing refugee
population.
A logical conclusion of Dr.
Zand’s work exposing Israel’s founding mythology may be the restoration of the
idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this
contentious region. After all, while it
muddies the waters in one sense - raising ancient, biblical questions about
just who the children of Israel’ really are - in another sense, it hints at the
commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of
earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement, and both hold dear
the idea that they should have a ‘right of return.’
And if both groups in
fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety
of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for
people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are
guaranteed equal protection - equal protection under the laws of a state whose
legitimacy would never again be open to question.
The central question is
the political legitimacy of the State of Israel. From the position of Orthodox Judaism, it
should be noted that “the Jews may not Return to the Holy Land until the
Messiah comes ...” This is one of the
central reasons that anti-Zionist groups such as Neturai Karta reject ‘Aliyah,
The Return. After all, Theodore Herzl and
ilk were atheists in the mould of agnostic humanism from that age where
religion was rejected as superstition. Karl
Heinrich Marx, himself an atheist Jew, asserted that “Religion is the opium of
the masses.”
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for taking the time to share our thoughts. Once approved, your comments will be posted.