Israel deliberately forgets its history
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
by Schlomo Sand
Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.
Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.
At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it...''
http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel
And here is a link to a review, which also has a personal touch of what the issues mean in daily life of one writer:
(If you're more interested in Sand, just go to the articles. The rest of the post are thoughts on Sand, Zionism, philosophy, history, etc)
I am guessing the above seems to sum up the basic material in The Invention, by Sand. I just want to add some points I found and I am not sure people in the US have any idea happened. First there was no single Zionism. It had at least three or more factions that roughly corresponded to a socialist-communist wing, a socialist-liberal wing, and a conservative-to-right wing during 1920s in Germany. In addition there was a battle between all of these political factions and an over lay of geopolitical power between Germany and England going on. The English Zionist wings won because they had connections with the British military and government who controlled Palestine, while most of the political and theoretical battles were going on in Germany. The German Zionists were in trouble with German Jews who, judging from voting and immigration to Palestine statistics. mostly wanted nothing to do with Zionism. Most were assimilationists----which was a dirty word for the Zionist movements.
Strauss was involved in a lot of these battles, but took a remarkably strange position that fell exactly between everybody as far as I can tell. I think I can now see what was going with Strauss. He wanted to be a Jewish studies scholar from the German idealist school. Part of that field involved the neo-Kantian philosopher Herman Cohen, and the rational theology of Julius Guttmann. Strauss though they both had stripped Judaism of any meaning.
It was probably Spinoza who started this kind of political secularization of the Old Testament, re-interpreting the story of Moses as a form of political philosophy. The result was a theory of how a Republic should work. Spinoza's scheme comes out looking very much like the Dutch Republic under the de Witt brothers. Since Spinoza was ex-communicated for his materalist theories, this brings up the separation between church and state. Which in turn gets back the relationship between Zionism and religion.
Many of the Zionist theory crowd were atheists or secular Jews, or who considered themselves Jewish by heritage, custom or culture. There is something ridiculous going on here. How can you found a state on a religion, when you don't believe in that religion? The solution was to turn some parts of the religion, customs and culture into a political philosophy, at least that was the way Strauss went about it. This move alienated some part of the theological crowd (like Guttmann?). There was another dimension. Most of the Jewish religious officials disliked (loathed?) and disagreed with the Zionist movement (at least in Germany). The English wings didn't trust each other either. The British were using an Orthodox Dutch mission to make secret deals with some Arab factions in Palestine (not sure who). On one of these trips (1926?) the lead Dutch(?) rabbi was assassinated by underground Jewish security forces (terrorists?). The Zionists officially denied Jews had anything to do with the murder and blamed it on the Arabs.
What's the point? There is a history in Weimar going on where you can find out a lot of what Shlomo Sand (finally spelled his name right) writes about.
Even so I'll get his book because I need to know some of the history he writes about in late 19thC Germany. He mentions Hegel, but the real issue for me is the position of German idealism in general and its battle with the French positvist and British empirical schools of historiography. These different philosophies are intimately tied to the development of the geopolitical struggle between empires and nationalism. The basic questions are over the methods of verification of evidence. The idealists (Hegelians) use textual and rational argument as evidence, while the positivist and empiricists use a combination of documentary and artifactual records and statistics to support their narratives. (Part of Strauss's project was to re-invent or re-inscribe rational idealism without Hegel, Kant, or Spinoza, and take it back to medieval Jewish theologians and then back to Plato and Aristotle,)
These apparently abstract struggles have concrete consequences in political and academic life, which it sounds like Sand hints at here:
``This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism's abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.
But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to "the history of the Jewish people", as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.
Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the "new historians" from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.
Founding myths shaken
Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a "national" vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham's journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical "truths" into the basis of national education.
But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the "new archaeology" discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.''