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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Is the Boston Globe preparing for an attack on Columbia professor Nadia Abu el Haj? Publishing an article ("Raiders of the Faux ark", Boston Globe, September 30, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2h67q7) that purports to distinguish good Biblical Archaeology from bad Biblical Archaeology looks like preparations for a defamation campaign.
Letter to the Boston Globe
Dear Editor:
Biblical Archaeology is as much a serious scientific and academic field as Arthurian archaeology based on the legends of King Arthur would be.
Eric H. Cline, who is chair of the department of classical and Semitic languages and literature at the George Washington University, writes the following in "Raiders of the faux ark" (Boston Globe, September 30, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/2h67q7):
During the past century or so, archeologists have found the first mention of Israel outside the Bible, in an Egyptian inscription carved by the Pharaoh Merneptah in the year 1207 BC. They have found mentions of Israelite kings, including Omri, Ahab, and Jehu, in neo-Assyrian inscriptions from the early first millennium BC. And they have found, most recently, a mention of the House of David in an inscription from northern Israel dating to the ninth century BC. These are conclusive pieces of evidence that these people and places once existed and that at least parts of the Bible are historically accurate.
The use of old names in a compendium of legendary material proves neither the historicity of Biblical Israel nor of Arthur's Camelot.
Cline later asks the following question.
If so, who was there first and to whom does the land [of Canaan] really belong today? Does it matter? It does to many Palestinians, who exert a (dubious) claim as descendants of the Canaanites and Jebusites, and to many Israelis, who exert a similar claim based on their own understanding of their ancestors' history.
The absence of the "dubious" qualifier with regard to Israeli claims is striking. Non-biblical archeology, diachronic linguistics, historical texts, and onomastics are completely clear on the issue. Modern Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian populations that included Judeans, Galileans, Idumeans, Nabateans, Philistines et. al. just as modern Syrians and Egyptians are descendants of ancient Syrians and Egyptians.
Likewise, the archeological, linguistic, historical textual and onomastic evidence is crystal clear on the origin of the modern Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish population. It descends from Eastern European and Southern Russian populations that started to practice various forms of Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Israeli archaeologists that want to learn about their own origins should dig in Europe.
Cline's article focuses on trivialities. The misuse of "academic" Biblical Archaeology by European settler colonists and their American supporters to justify the theft of Palestine from the native population has far less connection to genuine scholarship and has resulted in far more evil than the mildly ridiculous claims of "pop" Biblical Archaeologists, whom Cline criticizes.
Joachim Martillo
Boston, MA 02126-2813
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2 comments:
Can you give me some references for this statement of yours?:
“Likewise, the archeological, linguistic, historical textual and onomastic evidence is crystal clear on the origin of the modern Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish population. It descends from Eastern European and Southern Russian populations that started to practice various forms of Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Israeli archaeologists that want to learn about their own origins should dig in Europe.”
I’m curious about my own lineage of course, but also about how it came to be that the population of Ashkenazim in Poland and Ukraine burgeoned so much in the 19C.
I have read also (& forget where) that significant amounts of Christian to Jewish conversion occurred in the wake of the 30 Years War. Don’t know how to evaluate that.
When I speak on this subject, I make it very clear that the the ancestors of the vast majority of Zionists never set foot in Pallestine/Canaan, etc, in historical time—of course, even if they had, the claims would still be spurious, but this sharpens the point. I had my (paternal) DNA checked through the National Geographic Society. Yes, my dad to the 800th power had traipsed through the Eastern Mediterranean lands, but that was 20,000 years ago, on the way to Macedonia, Bulgaria, and presumably Ukraine.
The growth of the Jewish population in Poland and the Ukraine during the 19C is actually the easiest question.
Under sufficiently friendly environment conditions, human populations will follow an exponential growth curve. If you remember the shape of an exponentional graph it has a segment that rises slowly and is almost horizontal then it makes a fairly sharp turn and rises very fast. Eastern European populations began to grow very fast in general during the 19th century. We see many developing world populations entering the exponential growth phase in this century.
I posted the rest of the discussion at http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html.
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