>Leo, As I have said before, it would have made sense for a Jewish state to
>have been created in Europe. As for Jews having 'originated' in Palestine,
>first of all, as I am sure you know, they considered Uganda among other
>places. Second, a couple hundred year old state a couple thousand years
>ago is a stretch. I'm Jewish (or my parents are,
>anyway), and I have a hard time imagining that I actually descend from
>inhabitants of ancient Israel.
First, what Jew is his or her right mind would have agreed to a small Jewish state sandwiched somewhere between Germany, Poland, Austria and Romania in 1945? This talk of a Jewish state in the heart of Europe is stripped of all historical context.
That Uganda was considered by a few -- for a very short time and not at all seriously -- as a place for a Zionist nation is a non sequitur. If Uganda had been actually settled by Zionist Jews, then there would be some point in discussing it in this context, and one would be correct in pointing out that such a state would be much more of a classical European settler state, notwithstanding Ethiopian and Middle Eastern Jews. But there was never even an effort to establish such a settlement, and it tells us nothing about the state was founded.
While some considerable time elapsed since the Jewish Diaspora began, and Jewish people left their land of origin, a number of centuries have also elapsed since Africans were kidnapped and enslaved, and brought to the Americas. That does not mean that African-Americans do not have their origins in Africa. While both the settlement of Liberia by emancipated African-Americans and the settlement of Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa by Europeans did violence to the self-determination of the people living in the settled land, they are not equivalent actions, and the violence was far greater in the latter cases than in the former case. If one wants to make an appropriate analogy here with the settlement of Israel by Jews from Europe, it would be with Liberia, and not with Kenya. Not only were the Jews, like the African-Americans, people returning to a land of historic origins, but what is more, like the African-Americans, they were seeking to escape an experience of incredible oppression.
Your imagination is not the only imagination at work here, and a great many Jewish people do imagine themselves descendents of the historical Jews of Palestine. And nationalism being an "imagined community" of a sort, in Benedict Anderson's formula, those imaginations count for a great deal.
>More likely some people converted way back when.
Well, it is extraordinarily interesting to look at the results of genetic analysis of populations. It appears that not only Ethiopian Jews, but also the Lemba people of South Africa [who have a fascinating oral tradition concerning their origins in Jews migrating from the Arabian peninsula], have genetic markers that are closely related to Ashkenazi [roughly, European] Jews. It is also worth noting that the form of Judaism practiced by Ethiopian Jews is that which existed prior to the establishment of Christianity.
>As for the Jewish treatment in Arab states, how carefully and objectively
>have you studied this? I have seen strong evidence that Jewish treatment
>in the Arab world was far better than in the Christian world, and that
>Jews were treated very well prior to the creation of Israel. There is also
>evidence that Zionists actually promoted ill
>treatment of Jews (and propaganda pertaining to same) to promote
>emigration. "Expulsion of tens of thousands" is off in any case.
There is little doubt, I think, that over the long arc of history, Jews were better treated in Arabic, as opposed to European, nations. This also appears to be the case with respect to Ethiopia, where the majority religion was and is a form of Coptic Christianity. But Europeans, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the pogroms to the Holocaust, from the blood libels to the Dreyfus affair to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, do not exactly set a standard that is very difficult to surpass. With the first world war and then the establishment of the state of Israel, the treatment of Jews in Arab countries took a rather dramatic and ugly turn for the worse. There is ample evidence of this. The notion that the Shepherdic Jews living throughout the Arab world were convinced by Zionist propaganda to leave their lives and homes where they were so well treated to start life anew in a land new to them suggests that were bunch a fools.
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