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Subject: Jewish Scholar Says PALESTINIANS, Not Khazars, Descendants of Original
Jews
Shattering a 'national
mythology'
?
By Ofri Ilani
Haaretz (Jerusalem), March 21, 2008
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?4th Century
C.E.) and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (refugees from the Kingdom
of the Khazars, who converted in the 8th Century
C.E.).
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 "retroactively," 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 [Jews like] 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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