Every nation cherishes its own myths and legends. Most
Americans believe themselves to be anti-imperialists, though their ancestors
colonised a continent, almost annihilating its native inhabitants. The French
fancy themselves descended from ancient Gauls, though like the rest of us they
are mongrels.
But Israel’s favoured historical narrative possesses special significance, because it defines the state’s proclaimed right to
existence. It holds that the world’s Jews are descended from the ancient tribes
of Israel, evicted by the Romans following the fall of the temple in AD70, and
today permitted to return to their rightful homeland after almost 2,000 years
of foreign persecution.
Shlomo Sand, who teaches contemporary history at Tel Aviv
University, rejects most of this as myth. He argues that the alleged history of
the Jewish people has been distorted, reshaped or invented in modern times to
fit the political requirements of Zionism.
His book, first published in Hebrew, has caused widespread
outrage in his native land. But it represents, at the very least, a formidable
polemic against claims that Israel has a moral right to define itself as an
explicitly and exclusively Jewish society, in which non-Jews, such as
Palestino-Israelis, are culturally and politically marginalised.
He disputes the claim that Israel existed for thousands of
years as a nation. This, he says, relies chiefly on a willingness to suppose
that the Old Testament story is broadly valid, in defiance of archeological and
other historical evidence. He refuses to believe that a unified Jewish nation
occupied Canaan in the era of David and Solomon, or that the flight from Egypt
occurred as described. The Old Testament “is not a narrative that can instruct
us about the time it describes” — centuries before it was written — “but is
instead an impressive didactic theological discourse”.
He rejects the assertion, dependent on the testimony of the
1st-century Hellenised Jewish historian Josephus, that Jews were forcibly
deported from Jerusalem after the fall of the Temple. Rome behaved savagely to
defeated rebels, but never expelled whole populations, not least because it
required their services.
Historical evidence, says Sand, shows large Jewish
communities living all over the Mediterranean, including Rome, before AD70.
Cicero complained in 59BC: “You know how numerous that crowd is, how great is
its unanimity, and of what weight it is in popular assemblies.”
The author suggests that there was steady economic migration
from Palestine after the fall of the Temple, but most Jews remained, eventually
to be converted to Islam following the Muslim conquest in the 7th century and
afterwards. Some modern Palestinians are more likely to be descended from the
ancient Israelites than are modern Israelis who have migrated from Russia.
Acknowledging uncertainty about much that happened in the
last millennium before Christ and the first thereafter, Sand dismisses the
proposition of Zionist historians that the Jewish communities that grew up all
over Europe were descended from Jews driven out of Israel. Many, he says, were indigenous peoples converted to Judaism by small numbers of wandering,
literate Jews.
He focuses special attention on the Khazar empire, the
Jewish society that flourished around the Volga and Caucasus between the 4th
and 13th centuries, and provided seed for the large Jewish communities of
eastern Europe. Zionists assert that those Jews had migrated east from Germany.
Sand says there is no evidence for this, save that they spoke Yiddish.
He believes, instead, that these were locals who adopted the
Jewish religion. He claims that modern Israeli historians refuse to study the
Khazar empire honestly, lest they find themselves confronted by evidence that
might seem to delegitimise Israel. He writes scornfully of Zionists “entirely
caught up in the mythology of an eternal ‘ethnic’ time”.
Sand launches a further broadside at Israeli geneticists who
have devoted much energy to identifying a common “Jewish gene” among diaspora
communities around the world. He is scornful of such research, perhaps not
least because of the ghastly memory of Nazi scientists who pursued alleged
Aryan identity.
Sand’s fundamental thesis is that the Jewish people are
joined by bonds of religion, not race or ancient nationhood. He deplores the
explicitly racial basis of the Israeli state, in which the Arab minority are
second-class citizens. “No Jew who lives today in a western democracy would
tolerate the discrimination and exclusion experienced by the Palestino-Israelis…
The state’s ethnocentric foundation remains an obstacle to [its liberal
democratic] development.”
It is easy to see why Sand’s book has attracted fierce
controversy. The legend of the ancient exile and modern return stands at the
heart of Israel’s self-belief. It is no more surprising that its people enjoy
supposing that Joshua’s trumpets blew down the walls of Jericho — at a time
when, Sand says, Jericho was a small town with no walls — than that we cherish
tales of King Alfred and his cakes.
The author rightly deplores the eagerness of fanatics to
insist upon the historical truth of events convenient to modern politics, in
defiance of evidence or probability. No modern British historian’s reputation
could survive, for instance, claiming the factual accuracy of all the charming
medieval stories in Froissart’s Chronicles, which nonetheless bear a closer
relationship to events than does the Old Testament.
Yet Sand, whose title is foolishly provocative, displays a
lack of compassion for the Jewish predicament. It is possible to accept his
view that there is no common genetic link either between the world’s Jews or to
the ancient tribes of Israel, while also trusting the evidence of one’s own
senses that there are remarkable common Jewish characteristics — indeed, a
Jewish genius — that cannot be explained merely by religion.
Jewish faith is visibly declining, in Israel as much as
anywhere else. There is much dismay among diaspora communities about the steady
increase in the frequency of their members “marrying out”. Yet who can doubt
that Jews possess a social identity that transcends any narrow issue of
belief? Sand produces some formidable arguments about what Jews may not be, but
he fails to explain what it is they are.
His book serves notice on Zionist traditionalists: if an
Israeli historian can display such plausible doubts about important aspects of
the Israeli legend, any Arabs hostile to the state of Israel can exploit a
fertile field indeed.
Yet whatever the rights and wrong of the past, Israel has
established its existence. If the Middle East is to advance beyond perpetual
conflict, all parties must abandon both claims and grievances rooted in history, and address the now and the future.
