Shattering a 'national mythology'

Shattering a 'national mythology'
By Ofri Ilani
Ha'aretz,
March 21/08
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html

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."

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