By Ofri Ilani
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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