The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (14 page)

Comic Relief

Jewish Telegram: ‘Begin Worrying, Details to Follow.’ -
Old Joke

The joke above – older than Israel, and probably as old as the telegraph itself – refers to the dialectic of fear that dominates the Jewish political and ideological mindset. Fear has been exploited politically by Jewish leaders since the early days of emancipation. However, it is possible that during the process of Jewish secular-isation and emancipation initiated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, fear of imaginary doom replaced the fear of Almighty God, the God of Sodom and Gomorrah who kills without mercy. If this is indeed the case, ‘fear’ might be recognised as one of the many modern Jewish Gods, and Pre-TSS as modern Jewish practice.

Chapter 17

The Wandering Who?

Tel Aviv University historian Professor Shlomo Sand opens his remarkable study of Jewish nationalism,
The Invention of the Jewish People
, by quoting Karl Deutsch: ‘A nation … is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbours.’
⁷⁶

As simple or even as simplistic as it may seem, this quote eloquently summarises modern Jewish nationalism and especially the concept of Jewish identity. It points the finger at the collective mistake Jews tend to make whenever referring to their illusory ‘collective past’ or ‘collective origin’.

In his book, Sand posits a serious doubt that the Jewish people ever existed as a nation or race, ever shared a common origin. Instead, they are a colourful mix of groups that, at various stages throughout history, adopted the Jewish religion. So when were the Jewish people ‘invented’? Sand’s answer: ‘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.’
⁷⁷

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a made-up notion, consisting of an imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand, who elaborated on early sources from antiquity, comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current, predominantly Khazarian-origin, Ashkenazi crowd, which he admits he belongs to himself.

Hitler Won After All

Supposedly secular, cosmopolitan Jews often retort, when asked what it is that makes them Jewish, that ‘Hitler made me a Jew.’ Though ‘cosmopolitans’ tend to dismiss other people’s national inclinations, Jewish cosmopolitans, for some reason, insist on maintaining their own right to ‘self-determination’. It is not really they themselves who stand at the core of this unique demand for national orientation, but the Devil, the master-monster anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler. Apparently, cosmopolitan Jews can celebrate their nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be blamed. Hitler won, then, after all.

Shlomo Sand illuminates this paradox. Insightfully, he suggests that ‘there were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belong to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-Semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that the people known in the world as Jews (as distinct from today’s Israelis) have never been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew hater.’
⁷⁸
In Israel, Jews celebrate their unique differentiation from other peoples. In fact, even the Jewish anti-Zionists enhance their distinct characteristics in comparison to other peace activists.

Nationalism and Jewish Nationalism

Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote that during the Middle Ages, between the major wars, knights would charge a very high price for their readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms; in the twentieth century, however, youngsters rushed to die
en masse
without demanding a thing in return. Understanding this shift in mass consciousness requires an eloquent, methodical model that allows us to understand what nationalism
is
.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a phantasmal narrative. Anthropological and historical studies of the origins of different so-called ‘peoples’ and ‘nations’ lead, embarrassingly, to the crumbling of every ethnicity and ethnic identity. It is therefore rather interesting to discover that many Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very seriously. I can think of two possible explanations for this insistence. One was offered by Israeli academic Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi years ago. Zionism, he said, was there to transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land registry’. The second explanation is psychoanalytical: it is actually the lack of factuality or coherent historical narrative that leads to the emergence of such a phantasmic tale, strong will and a pragmatic agenda to follow.

The lack of ethnic origin doesn’t stop people from feeling ethnic or national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from being what one can label a ‘people’, and that the Bible has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop generations of Israelis and/or Jews from identifying themselves as the sons and daughters of King David or Samson.

In the 1970s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer destined to become Israel’s all-time greatest rock star, released
‘Pitom Kam Adam’
(‘Suddenly a Man Wakes Up’), a song that became a smash hit in a matter of hours. Here is a translation of the first few lines:

Suddenly a man wakes up in the morning/

He feels he is a nation, and begins to walk/

And to everyone he meets along the way/

He calls out, ‘Shalom.’

To a certain extent, in his lyrics, Artzi innocently expresses the suddenness of the transformation of the Jews into ‘a people’. However, at the same time, Artzi contributes to the illusory national myth of the peace-seeking nation. The Israeli singer should have known by then that Jewish nationalism was a violent, expansionist act at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people. It didn’t really say
shalom
to anyone except superpowers.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that virtually no Jewish history texts were written between the first and early-nineteenth centuries. That Judaism is based on a religious historical myth may have something to do with this. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a primary concern in the rabbinical tradition – the absence of any need for such a methodical effort probably accounts for this. For Jews during ancient times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As Sand puts it: ‘A chronological sequence of events was alien to the (Jewish) exilic time – a condition of constant alertness, attuned to the longed-for moment when the Messiah would appear.’
⁷⁹
This apparent lack of Jewish interest in history, historicity and chronology is crucial for the understanding of Jewish political identity.

In light of German secularisation, urbanisation and emancipation, and given the decreasing authority of rabbinical leaders, the need for an alternative cause emerged amongst awakening Jewish intellectuals: emancipated Jews wondered who they were and where they came from. They also began to speculate on the role of Jews within the rapidly-opening European society.

In 1820, the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793–1860) published the first serious historical work on Jews for almost two millennia, namely
The History of the Israelites
. Jost avoided the Biblical era, preferring to begin his journey with the Kingdom of Judea, and also compiled a historical narrative of different Jewish communities around the world. He realised that the Jews of his time did not form an ethnic continuum, and grasped that Israelites from place to place were rather different. Hence, he believed, there was nothing to stop Jews from total assimilation, and that in the spirit of the Enlightenment both the Germans and the Jews would turn their backs on oppressive religious institutions and form a healthy nation, based on a
growing, geographically-orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolution of European nationalism, his Jewish contemporaries were rather unhappy with his liberal, optimistic reading of the Jewish future. ‘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”, expelled into “exile”, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.’
⁸⁰

For the German Jewish socialist philosopher Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather than a class struggle that would define the shape of Europe. Accordingly, he suggested, Jews should reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin. For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the product of racial differentiation, and was thus unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo-scientific racist orientation to Zionist historicism is clear. If Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess, Jabotinsky and others believed), they had better seek to return to their natural homeland –
Eretz Yitzrael
. But Hess’s assumed racial continuum wasn’t scientifically endorsed. In order to maintain the emerging fictional narrative, a mechanism for orchestrated denial had to be devised to prevent certain embarrassing facts from interfering.

The New Israelite, the Bible and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were determined to recruit the Old Testament and transform it into the unifying code of the future Jewish people. The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible would plant in the minds of young Jews the idea that they were the direct descendants of their great, ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning. Instead, it was viewed as a historical text describing a ‘real’ chain of events in the past.

Through their heroic ancestors, the new nationalist Jews
learned to love themselves and hate others, except this time they would possess the military might to inflict real pain on their neighbours. More worrying was the fact that instead of a supernatural entity (namely, God) to command them to invade and commit genocide against the ‘Promised Land’s’ indigenous inhabitants, in the Jewish national revival project it was they themselves – Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Sharon, Peres, Barak, Netanyahu, Liebermann, etc – who would decide to expel and kill. God no longer killed in the name of the Jewish people, the Jews did. They did it with Jewish symbols decorating their planes and tanks, and followed commands issued in Hebrew, the newly restored language of their ancestors.

The Zionist hijacking of the Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German Early Romanticism. However, as much as 19
^th
century German philosophers, poets, architects and artists were ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not Hellenism’s (biological) sons and daughters. The Jewish nationalists took their project one step further, binding themselves into a blood chain with their mythical forefathers; Hebrew, formerly a sacred tongue, became an everyday spoken language. German Early Romantics never went that far.

German intellectuals during the nineteenth century were also fully aware of the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for the universal, an epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem, on the contrary, was a grand chapter of tribal barbarism, a representation of the banal, non-universal, monotheistic, merciless God, the killer of elder and infant alike. The German Early Romantic era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte, Heidegger and just a few Jewish self-haters, chief amongst them Weininger. No master ideological thinkers were to be found amongst the Jerusalemites. Some second-rate German Jewish scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the Germanic exedra, amongst them Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig and Ernst
Bloch, but they apparently failed to notice that their efforts bore the traces of Jerusalem in Christianity, which German Early Romantics despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem’, archaeology was recruited to provide the Zionist epic with its necessary ‘scientific’ grounding, to unify the Biblical age with the moment of revival. Arguably the most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend occurred in 1982, with the ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon Bar Kochba, a Jewish rebel who had died 2,000 years earlier. Overseen by the chief military rabbi, a televised military burial was given to a sporadic assortment of bones found in a cave near the Dead Sea. In effect, the suspected remains of a first-century figure were treated as an IDF casualty – archaeology’s national role cemented the past and present, while leaving the
Galut
out.

It didn’t take long before things turned the other way around. As archaeological research became more and more independent of Zionist dogma, inconvenient truths trickled out. It became impossible to ground the authenticity of Biblical tales in forensic facts. If anything, archaeology
refutes
the historicity of the Bible: the Book, according to non-Jewish scholars such as Thomas Thompson, is a ‘late collection of innovative literature written by a gifted theologian’.

As Sand points out, early Biblical narrative is soaked in Philistines, Aramaic and camels. As far as excavations can enlighten us, Philistines didn’t appear in the region before the twelfth century
BC
, Aramaic appears a century later and camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the eighth century BC. Nor has much been found in the Sinai Desert to prove the story of the legendary Egyptian exodus – apparently 3 million Hebrew men, women and children marched there for forty years without leaving a single
Mazza Ball
behind. The Biblical story of the Hebrews’ resettlement in Canaan, moreover, and the genocide of the
goyim
inhabiting the Promised Land (which contemporary
Israelites imitate to such success) looks like yet another myth: Jericho, the guarded city flattened by the sound of Hebrew horns and almighty supernatural intervention, was just a tiny village during the thirteenth century
BC
.

Above all, Israel regards itself as the resurrection of the monumental Kingdom of David and Solomon. Yet excavation in the Old City of Jerusalem in the 1970s revealed that David’s kingdom was no more than a tiny enclave. Evidence that, according to the archaeologist (and second IDF Chief of Staff) Yigal Yadin, could be traced back to King Solomon, was later refuted by forensic tests made using Carbon-14 dating.