Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry

Conversion, Purim, Easter, Ramadan, Yiddishism

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

On March 21, 2008 Haaretz published analysis of the book entitled Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi? (When and How was the Jewish People Invented?) in combination with excerpts from an interview with the author Shlomo Sand, who is an historian working at Tel Aviv University.

Shattering a National Mythology by Ofri Ilani (see below) is the second article on the book to appear in Haaretz. (For the first see Followup: Origins of Modern Jewry.) The content of the book is not particularly new but has been excluded from the discussion about Israel in the USA.

[See Les origines des juifs actuels, and The Origins of Modern Jewry for more up-to-date analysis of Jewish origins. An Earlier ADL/Foxman Debacle points out that the Roman expulsion never happened. Why Study Yiddish Culture? recommends Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, by Paul Kriwaczek as an introduction to ethnic Ashkenazi origins, culture, history and politics.]

The new Haaretz article is somewhat circumspect in its language when it states:

So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? 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. 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, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

A more correct assessment would have used the phrase völkisch character instead of folk character. The German word völkisch means racist in the Central and Eastern European ethnic sense instead of the American color sense.

Völkisch racism is a key ideological principle that both German Nazism and Zionism share, but Sand goes further when he argues:

From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel, even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a nation.
...

In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation - I will have done my bit.

If American political discourse were not blocked by a web of Zionist and Jewish communal thought control, there were be an open debate whether the State of Israel is based in a form of ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism comparable to German Nazism and whether the USA should be supporting the existence of a Jewish Nazi state in the Middle East.

In the Israeli political context, Sand is attacking the concept of a Jewish ethno-nationality in order to make a case for transforming the State of Israel from an extremist organic nationalist state that belongs to world Jewry into a civil or voluntary nationalist state that belongs to its citizens.

According to the Haaretz reporter Ofri Ilani, among Israeli Jews "[there] is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist" as a result of Sand's efforts.

He responds:

I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens.
...


I don't recognize an international people. I recognize 'the Yiddish people' that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this 'Yiddish people.' I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.

Sand's definition of an Israeli people is not clear. Baruch Kimmerling argues in The Invention and Decline of Israeliness, State, Society, and the Military, that a specific labor Zionist definition of the concept dominated Israeli society for a time but has lost significance. Today, "Israeli" serves either as a tag associated with more significant forms of self-definition or identification or as a means to confer rights and legal status. While Sand's ideas may provide the beginning of a solution to the conflict over Palestine, he will have to provide more clarification before anyone can make an assessment of the value of his idea of an "Israeli people."

Yet, as interesting as Sand's work is, he neglects the two other Zionist legitimization narratives that have been used so effectively by Zionists since 1947 to justify domination, persecution and humiliation of the native population of Palestine.

[Note that the covenantal dispensationalist or apocalyptic narrative belongs to Christian heresy and not to any genuine Zionist intellectual current. Religious Jewish Non-Zionists or even Anti-Zionists like the Lubovitchers, who support the State of Israel and continued oppression of Palestinians, generally do so out of racist anti-Gentilism (anti-Goyism, Yiddish: antigoyizm, German: Antigojismus). While he never committed his position to writing, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook probably believed that Herzl was the Messiah (as informants, who knew him, told me). He probably justified himself on the basis of esoteric Jewish mystical texts. Because the operation of the Covenant with Israel requires that the Israelite Kingdom can never be restored, the establishment of the Persian province of Yehud and the Hasmonean Judean Kingdom was possible only with the direct intervention of God's mercy as was established by clear miracles. See Connecting Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha. Theologically sound Christianity, Islam and Modern Judaism continue to take this position.]

Redemptive Narrative: From Powerlessness and Near Destruction to Rebirth

According to the Redemptive Narrative Jews -- whether or not they originate in Greco-Roman Palestine -- have been subject to two millennia of oppression, persecution and poverty that steadily increased in the nineteenth century Russian Empire. Many Russian Jews supported the overthrow of Czarism, but the Soviet Revolution turned on its supporters, and Russian Jews once again became a persecuted population until the German Nazis almost obliterated the entire Jewish population of Europe. Only the Zionists truly understood the danger that European Jewry faced. Zionism made it possible for the surviving remnant of the Jewish people to come together and build a country where Jews could be safe and free after so many centuries of unrelenting suffering. In this narrative the German Nazis act as the Great Satan, but Palestinians serve as the Little Satan for resisting the flight of European Jews to Palestine.

In actuality the Yiddish population of Russian Poland had higher education, more disposable income and longer life spans that the people among whom they lived.

Yet, Yiddish Jews in the Russian Empire constituted an elite that lost its status after the collapse of Commonwealth Poland, for Russian Germans essentially already filled the economic niche to which Polish Jews were accustomed. As the severely troubled Russian Empire tried to reform itself, a subset of Russian Jews tried to bring reform to the whole Russian Jewish population (see Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation) while at the same time the Russian government attempted to impose its own form of reform on its Jewish population generally on the basis of some severe misconceptions..

According to Michael Stanislawski in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855, (pp. 108-109),

By the beginning of the 1850s, therefore, the new power of the maskilim [Jewish reformers/enlighteners] was matched, for the first time, with the security of numbers. From a handful of disjointed individuals clustered in tiny enclaves on the borders of the Pale or in insulated anonymity in the largest cities, the maskilim grew to a well-coordinated movement of several hundred adherents, preaching their gospel to thousands of committed students throughout the [Jewish] Pale [of settlement].

From this new coherence and potency there emerged a new self-consciousness, or rather, a manifest reaffirmation of self-perception. As one of their most articulate spokesmen explained, even the youngest maskilim now sensed their mission. Every student in the state schools

regarded himself as no less than a future reformer, a new Mendelssohn, and therefore, in the quiet worked out a plan of action which he jealously guarded from his friends. [They] were thoroughly convinced that they were going to bring about a complete revolution in the world view of the Jewish people, and they impatiently awaited their moment of action. They were like military commanders standing at the ready for the approaching enemy attack, waiting only for the moment when they will be able to display the wonders of their courage and to distinguish themselves for their fatherland [i.e., the Russian Empire].

This new sense of mission and power, this rejection of traditional society combined with a dedication to its restructuring on a new basis, transformed the maskilim from an amorphous set of intellectuals into a full-fledged intelligentsia. As Isaiah Berlin has taught, there is a fundamental difference between the concept of an intelligentsia and the notion of intellectuals. The former

thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived of themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel.

Thus, we can date the emergence of a coherent Russian-Jewish intelligentsia to the latter part of the rule of Nicholas I, in large part as a response to the stimulus provided by the Russian government itself.

Despite the claims about the severity of Czarist pogroms, the conscription crisis of 1850-4 probably represented the worst period for Russian Jewry.

Not only did the Russian government incorrectly conclude that the Jewish communities could supply more recruits, but it levied fines well beyond the resources of communities to pay.

In 1854 when Czar Nicholas I finally realized that the situation was intolerable, he abated both the fines and the levies of conscripts.

While conditions for Russian Jewry came nowhere near the persecution and oppression that Palestinians have suffered since the creation of the State of Israel, by the death of Nicholas in 1855, traditional Russian Jewish communal structures had shattered.

Stanislawski summarizes the situation on p. 186.

Although the autonomous Jewish community persisted in fact as well as in law, it lost much of its former elan as the traditionalists and the enlightened, the rich and the poor, all increasingly looked to new sources of allegiance, organization, and power.

Fairly quickly, Russian Jewish thinking divides into assimilationist, orthodox, Yiddishist, radical revolutionary, and Zionist intellectual currents. While there were some hybrid groups, the Jewish tendency to bind together in the face of common threats was severely weakened by the end of Nicholas' reign and has really only reestablished itself in the 1990s after wealthy Ashkenazi American Jabotinskian Zionists created a thorough indoctrination program under the cover of a new Jewish educational system to discourage intermarriage. (Some observers see this beginnings of the New Jewish Solidarity in the aftermath of the 1967 War or after the 1973 War.)

After the police investigating the assassination of Czar Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya (Popular Will) arrested the Russian Jewish revolutionary Gessya Gelfman (Hessya Helfman) as one of the plotters, awareness of increasing Jewish radicalism in the Russian Empire created a reaction of hostility and violence.

The 1883 capture, arrest and trial of Narodnaya Volya leader Vera Figner, who was perceived as Jewish (her father and probably her mother were of Jewish cantonist background), exacerbated the situation, which led both to increasing Jewish radicalism and emigration.

Because the Czarist government viewed disorder and unorganized violence as a threat to itself, its reaction to the pogroms tended toward excessive brutality and probably caused more anti-Jewish hostility, which in turn created more Jewish radicalism.

The Czarist government became even more suspicious of non-Russians including (or sometimes especially) the most Russianized, who were often Jewish. Exclusion of Russianized Czarist subjects from positions of authority within the government increased revolutionary tendencies among all non-Russians within the empire. In some sense the October Revolution of 1917 represented the revenge of the Russianized populations of the Czarist Empire.

In overthrowing the Czar and consolidating the Soviet Union, Russian Jews probably played the most important role because of their numbers, their greater education, their greater incomes, and their geographical distribution. (See Why Study Yiddish Culture? for more information on the importance of the Yiddish ethnic group in Eastern Europe.)

In general throughout the 20s and 30s, despite an apparently conscious cover-up of the disproportionate role of Jews in the Soviet leadership, there was widespread popular identification of Jews with Soviet Communism and the threat that it represented to Eastern and Central Europe.

The Great Depression and the Soviet threat strengthened the German Nazi party, which took power in 1933 and then systematically began to drive out the German Jewish population. In response, the English-language news media, in which Jews were disproportionately represented, demonized Nazi Germany vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, whose rulers were almost certainly far more murderous during the 1930s than were the German Nazi leaders.

The German leadership hoped that the UK would eventually join an alliance against the Soviet Union.

The media demonization of Germany may have thwarted that expectation, but the eventual alliance of the UK with the Soviet Union probably resulted more from long-standing British policy of preventing unification of continental Europe under a single government of any sort than from any genuine belief that the German Nazis represented a new and unprecedented form of evil. It is an open question how German Nazism would have developed if the UK had allied with Germany against the Soviet Union and had been in a position to influence Germany before Nazi policy toward the Jews turned to destruction instead of expulsion.

Despite common Jewish belief to the contrary, the allied policy of non-negotiation on material exchanges potentially of interest to the German government guaranteed the doom of European Jewry. Palestinian resistance was completely irrelevant.

William D. Rubinstein takes the opposite position that the German Nazis were committed to genocide of the Jews and not serious about negotiations in his book entitled The Myth of Rescue, Why the democracies could not have saved more Jews from the Nazis, [chapter 6, pp. 198-205]. Yet, he concludes that Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz is naive (p. 216) to believe: "A Jewish state would have ensured a safe have. A Jewish state would have made the difference."

The complete irrelevance of Palestinian resistance to the theft of Palestine by Zionists is also the immediate corollary of Rubinstein's analysis.

In any case, the Zionist movement generally opposed any rescue effort that did not bring Jews to Palestine under the assumption that the killing of Jews in Europe would benefit Zionism more by increasing sympathy than resettling Jews in a new Diaspora would, or as Yael Zerubavel puts it in Recovered Roots, Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, p. 19:

"The highly negative perception of Exile often turned from shelilat hagalut (the repudiation of the state of living in exile) to shelilat hagolah (the condemnation of the people who live in exile), the product of its demeaning and regressive lifestyle.

Instead of blaming Palestinians for the magnitude of Jewish losses during the Holocaust, Jews should look a lot more critically at Jewish political leaders and Jewish behavior during the last half of the nineteenth and during the first half of the twentieth century. The official Jewish and Zionist leadership today hardly acts any better or more rationally as the ongoing effort to demonize over a billion Muslims shows.

Scare-Mongering Narrative: The Clash of Civilizations or the Islamofascist Threat

The Zionist scare-mongering narrative grows out of European Orientalism. Even though Orientalism by Edward Said focused on British and French orientalist thinking, most scare-mongering today originates with Ashkenazi American or Israeli Jewish scholars trained in Zionist Orientalist propaganda, which is for the most part a direct descendant of Czarist Orientalist scholarship.

The scare-mongering approach to justifying Jewish dominance over Palestinians has several variants that include the "dangerous neighborhood" excuse for brutality, civilizing the savages, saving the West from Islam, or neutralizing Arabism in order to open Arab countries to global capital investment.

The minimalist form of the narrative demonized the Ottoman State and its social political culture in order to justify carving up the Empire, creating the Palestine Mandate, and treating Palestine as terra nullius. More elaborate versions of scare-mongering extend the demonization at least to all Arabs and nowadays to Islam.

In point of fact, with British and German help, the Ottoman Empire had somewhat successfully worked to modernize itself after the Russo-Turkish war. The Ottoman social system may have been arguably more just than that of late nineteenth century Britain or Germany. (See What is the Islamic Caliphate?, and "Little House" Big Role 2008.) And the Ottoman Imperial Court Martial on its own convicted the architects of the massacre of Armenians and sentenced them to death in 1919. (See The Unrepentant Genocidaires.)

Even though from the standpoint of blocking future Russian or Soviet expansionism, the British government had an interest in keeping the Ottoman Empire intact, British policy probably yielded to the influence of wealthy British Zionists among the Cousinhood of the wealthiest Jews of the UK just as today US government policy in the ME generally follows the desires of wealthy Ashkenazi American Zionists.

In the aftermath of WWI, the British government officially adopted the minimalist position that the Ottoman Empire had left subject populations unready for independence without a period of guidance in the League of Nations mandatory system.

Not only does the anti-Arab content of the scare-mongering narrative follow traditional European imperalist discourse in accusing Arabs of irrational violence, mistreating women, and misusing their resources, but it also slanders them as deceitful and inclined to Nazism. The standard Arabophobic litany also falsely analogizes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine with the destruction of Jewish Arab communities or simply lies about the conditions under which Jewish Arabs left Arab countries (See Refugee Speaks on History of Jewish Displacement, Middle East's Jewish Refugees, Salata Baladi or Afrangi?, and USHMM: National Thought Control.)

The anti-Islam content is generally modeled on classic anti-Semitism (see Updating "The AJC attacks") and depicts Islam as fundamentally different from Judeo-Christian religion (see Alain Besançon's "What Kind of Religion is Islam?," which appeared the May 2004 issue of Commentary). The Islamophobic narrative depicts the Muslim as Judeo-Christianity's fundamental and absolute Other possibly beyond any hope of reform or redemption. Thus, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and their ilk have transformed an older Christian anti-Jewish prejudice into a new anti-Muslim bigotry even though the modern Abrahamic faiths being closely intertwined, evolved currents of Second Temple Judaism differ for the most part in only minor matters of doctrine and practice. (See Islamic Marcionism in Malaysia.)

Just as Hanukkah, Christmas, and Eidu-l-Adha are linked together by symbolism associated with the ancient Sacred Calendar and the winter Festival of Lights, Ramadan and the spring to Summer holidays of Purim, Easter, and Passover and Pentecost show even more connections between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. (See Connecting Hanukkah, Christmas and `Idu-l-Adha.) In fact, carefully reading Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures together invariably shows the common themes. (See Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes.)

When the Hasmoneans needed to reshape Second Temple Judaism for their political purposes, they created Hanukkah at approximately the winter solstice to legitimize their temporal power, and they created Purim or Lots as a second spring festival to legitimize their ascension to spiritual leadership. Purim takes place near to the vernal equinox almost as a sort of preparation for Passover, and its protagonists Mordechai and Esther are thinly veiled substitutes for Marduk and Astarte, who is often connected with the Germanic fertility Goddess Ostara, from whose name Easter is derived.


Collectively the new Hasmonean holidays in combination with Passover represented a declaration of independence from Egypt, the Persian Empire, and the Greco-Syrians in a sort of New Covenant with God.


The Hasmonean-specific content of Purim seems to have consisted of attempt to elevate a native Palestinian priesthood over the Zadokite Priests of Mesopotamian origin by depicting the Persians as villains and by challenging the lineage of Mesopotamians practicing Second Temple Judaism. At the same time the Book of Esther explains why there were so many more so-called Judeans in Mesopotamia than in Judea:

And in every province, and in every city, wherever the king's commandment and his decree came, the Judeans had joy and gladness, a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land became Judeans; for the fear of the Judeans fell on them. (Esther 8:17).

κατὰ πόλιν καὶ χώραν οὗ ἂν ἐξετέθη τὸ πρόσταγμα οὗ ἂν ἐξετέθη τὸ ἔκθεμα χαρὰ καὶ εὐφροσύνη τοῖς ιουδαίοις κώθων καὶ εὐφροσύνη καὶ πολλοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν περιετέμοντο καὶ ιουδάιζον διὰ τὸν φόβον τῶν ιουδαίων

וּבְכָל־מְדִינָה וּמְדִינָה וּבְכָל־עִיר וָעִיר מְקֹום אֲשֶׁר דְּבַר־הַמֶּלֶךְ וְדָתֹו מַגִּיעַ שִׂמְחָה וְשָׂשֹׂון לַיְּהוּדִים מִשְׁתֶּה וְיֹום טֹוב וְרַבִּים מֵעַמֵּי הָאָרֶץ מִתְיַהֲדִים כִּי־נָפַל פַּחַד־הַיְּהוּדִים עֲלֵיהֶם׃

The Hasmoneans may have used this text as implicit justification for the compulsory Judaization policy that they applied to pagan populations under their rule.

Except for the specific Hasmonean political content, Purim, Passover, and Easter are all practically the same spring festival of the Sacred Calendar, and they all celebrate rejuvenation in the context of liberation from oppression and death.

Islam rejects the Sacred Calendar but the traces are still there. Before the Muslim calendar became exclusively lunar, the first months of the calendars of Islam and Judaism corresponded exactly, and the tenth day of Muharram, which is `Ashura is an optional fast day that has little connection conceptually to Yom Kippur except that originally it took place on the same day.

Passover goes from the fifteenth to the twenty-first or twenty-second day of Nisan, which is the seventh month of the calendar. From Passover seven weeks (the Khamsin or 50 days of hot winds) are counted to Pentecost (Shavuot or Weeks), which marks first giving of the Tablets of the Law. This holiday takes place in the nineth month, which corresponds to Islamic month of Ramadan, whose root has a root meaning of parched, scorched or consumed by grief.

Judaism grieves in the lead up to Pentecost for Ribbi Akiva's students (talmidim, see يا تلاميذ غزة ) or perhaps for the hopes destroyed with the defeat of Bar Kokhba.

Jibril (Gabriel) began to bring down the Quran during the month an Ramadan, and this act is analogous to the second giving of the Tablets of the Law at Yom Kippur. Altogether Ramadan telescopes all the festivals and observances of Judaism from the end of Passover through the Celebration of the Law (Simhat Torah).

Sometimes Christians and Jews mock or denigrate each other in their spring holiday celebrations. In recent times modern Purimshpils (Purim plays) have often depicted the execution of Haman as a crucifixion while ignorant and prejudiced Christians sometimes misinterpret the Passion of Christ to put all the guilt for the betrayal of Christ on modern Jews even through a theologically correct understanding of the Gospels equates the Judeans, who abandoned Jesus, as metaphorically representing all of humanity mired in sin before the sacrifice of Jesus redeems them.

This type of faith-based misbehavior is a measure of the closeness of Judaism and Christianity. In contrast, not only are the faithful of both religions usually too ignorant about Buddhism to disrespect Buddhists, but the religious rituals of Judaism and Christianity do not afford an easy means to mock Buddhist ideas.

In reality Christianity, Islam, and Judaism fit together like puzzle pieces to form the whole image of Abrahamic religion. A modern society only hosting one or two of these faiths is incomplete both in terms of religion and also in terms of its heritage from the ancient world.

The Real Issue: A Powerful Transnational Elite

Even though undermining all three Zionist dominance narrative is fairly straightforward, it is not sufficient to counteract the power of Zionism either in the Middle East or in the USA, for the transnational Zionist and Friedmanite political elites benefit from an earlier Conquest of the Imagination and the originally pre-Zionist but still ongoing Conquest of the Economies.

Conquering Imagination

Because they were sensitive to the desire of ethnic Ashkenazim for a heroic narrative to build up communal self-esteem in response to increasing anti-Jewish hostility after the assassination of Czar Alexander II, Yiddish writers mined classic Jewish sources like the Bible and Talmud for edifying stories that could be adapted to modern times and new media.

Abraham Goldfaden's operetta BAR KOKHBA, oder Di zun fun dem shtern ('The Son of the Star') [Words and music: Abraham Goldfaden; Arrangement: Henry Russotto] is an early and probably the most important work based in Judaism's classical sources, with which Yiddish Jews were familiar from elementary heder, secondary yeshivah or modern Jewish schooling in the same way that European Christians knew classical Christian and ancient Roman or Greek texts.

Bar Kokhba "...is based upon historical events in 132-135 C.E., during the revolt in Judea against the rule of the Roman Empire. It was hailed at the time in the Yiddish press as a great dramatic Jewish achievement. In February 1883, the government of tsarist Russia banned Yiddish theatre. Perhaps the popularity of a drama about Bar Kokhba's historic rebellion against the oppressive Romans was considered too politically dangerous by the Russian officials." (Irene Heskes, The Music of Abraham Goldfaden; Father of the Yiddish Theater, compiled and edited by Irene Heskes, Cederhurst, N.Y.: Tara Publications, 1990, [ISBN 093 3676220], p. vi-vii).

While the audience might have been inspired by the depiction of a struggle against oppression, its members did not learn from the performance that they belonged to Palestine or that Palestine belonged to them any more than Romans hearing the recitation of Virgil learned that they were really Trojans, who should relocate to Asia Minor. Probably Yiddish audiences reacted then more or less as American audiences reacted to movies like Spartacus, Ben-Hur, or Quo Vadis?

Goldfaden's later classical-themed more romantic less political operatta Shulamis may have been even more popular than Bar Kokhba. The strictly anti-Zionist Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund (the Bund) even found its anthem in this work. It was the song "Di shvue" or "The Oath," which is sung here by the wildly popular Regina Prager, who according to Robert Goldenberg "is considered to be one of the two great female voices of the Yiddish Theatre." S. An-Ski composed special revolutionary lyrics for use by the Bund. (See Di Shvue.)

[Gilad Atzmon discusses the revolutionary version of "The Oath" in Swindler's List.]

From the standpoint of Yiddishists works like Bar Kokhbe and Shulamis helped to create a Yiddish ethno-cultural consciousness.

In contrast, in the 1880s, the situation for Zionists was quite bleak. In 1881 Peretz Smolenskin described the feelings of most Russian Jews toward Palestine in "Let Us Search Our Ways" in the first sentence of Section IV:

Eretz Israel! Just a few short years ago this word was derided by almost all Jews except those who wished to be buried there.

Except for a tiny minority of Jews this situation remained fairly stable until the 1930s, and a genuine Zionist ethnic fundamentalist consciousness probably did not take hold of a majority of ethnic Ashkenazim until the late 1960s or perhaps even later.

Yet, Goldfaden's type of theater created a sort of fictional consciousness that Zionists could use to cannibalize the growing sense of Yiddish ethnicity to fabricate a Jewish People that could claim Palestine as its homeland.

Film supplanted theater and proved a much more powerful medium for the creation of an imagined sense of community. In the 1940s, building on existent cinematic repertoire of films like Ben Hur (1926), Zionists started a campaign to take over the medium for Zionist indoctrination. The extremely popular screenwriter Dalton Trumbo even escaped the Hollywood Communist Blacklist by writing the screenplay for Exodus (see Zionist Film: Exodus - Terrorism is Good). By Schindler's List (see Subliminal Zionist Propaganda and Genocide Incitement in Schindler's List) Hollywood Zionists had captured the imagination of the vast majority of Jews as well as the most non-Jews in Western Europe and N. America while it constructed a tremendous corpus of highly profitable anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda. (See Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Sheehan.)

Whatever scholars like Sand write or say about the origins of the Jewish people, Zionists have a much larger pulpit on the silverscreen.

Because the audience pays to watch, Zionist propaganda cinema makes the hyperwealthy Zionist leaders even richer and more powerful. They can plow their profits back into Zionist propaganda films, or they can put it to other uses in their continual effort to control the US government. Counteracting the Zionist conquest of the imagination will be difficult.

Conquering the Economies

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Hollywood profits only constitute a small part of the equation that defines the power of the transnational Zionist elite in the USA and throughout the world.

Early Zionist writers like Leo Pinsker in "Auto-Emancipation" make it fairly clear albeit not completely directly that desire for wealth, status and power more than anything else is the driving principle of Zionism. Few of the early Zionist leaders had any intention of resettling. They would rise in their societies by leading the Zionist movement (a point that Jewish supreme court justice Brandeis also made in the USA, see Judonia Rising Working Paper Part 1).

The early Zionist leaders realized that Western Jewish communities had more than enough wealth to finance a colonial movement.

Eastern European Zionist leaders had the problem of getting their hands on Western Jewish money. Eventually they realized the usefulness of the Dreyfus Affair. Professor Michael Stanislawski writes in Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, p. 13-14.

In the face of the seeming dissolution of the cosmopolitan dream, Herzl began to obsess over the future of the jews. Typically, of course, he is said to have come to Zionism as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, a claim he himself made repeatedly in later years. But in an important 1993 study, the historian Jacques Kornberg carefully analyzed Herzl's reportage on the Dreyfus Affair from the beginning of the case to its end and demonstrated that Herzl's reactions to the first stages of the Affair, well into 1897, were entirely typical of those of other writers in Die Neue Freie Presse or other liberal (and often Jewish-owned) newspapers, and indeed of most Jews in France and else where. It was only after Herzl was a convinced Zionist, and the case itself was transformed in the late 1890s into a cause célèbre that he began to interpret it through Zionist lenses. Nordau also went through exactly the same stages in Dreyfusardism, to the extent that he, too, would later counterfactually insist that it was the Dreyfus Affair that made him a Zionist.

Early Zionist marketing among Western Jews employed the Dreyfus Affair to create fear that they would soon be subject to pogroms. By the 1920s the situation had changed. Not only had the largest backers of Zionism realized that the Yishuv (Jewish settlement) could provide a channel by which money could flow from the British government back to them, but they could hardly fail to realize -- as the Zionist leadership frequently reiterated -- that creating a compliant "Zionist-patriotic" population both in Palestine and in the Diaspora could provide the Zionist financial elite with a new source of political and economic power.

This logic was even stronger once statehood was achieved

• because American and British law ended where Israeli sovereignty began and
• because the Zionist financial elite took front row seats on the gravy train of German and US aid to Israel.

The recipients of such largess than plowed the money back into American politics and the German guilt industry to make sure the largess continued and grew.

James Petras argues that liberal Jews empower the most reactionary Jewish political elements, who protect and expand this system that increases the economic and political might of the transnational nowadays hyper-wealthy Zionist elite.

Naomi Klein is herself part of this liberal Jewish system of directing American political discussion away from the pernicious role that Zionism plays in the USA.

Chapters 14 and 15 of her book entitled The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, discuss the homeland security investment bubble and corporatist profiteering. Yet, she somehow misses the obvious role of Israeli and Israel connected venture capital in the investment bubble and neglects to mention that a tremendous number of the startups are Israeli or Israeli connected. When she discusses the role of Richard Perle in disaster capitalism, she fails to mention that he is a Jabotinskian Zionist and therefore represents Jewish special interest (see My Country Needs Jewish Liberals to Expose Neocons as a Jewish 'Special Interest' ) especially as understood by hyper-wealthy Zionists like Sheldon Adelson.

Paul Wolfowitz' desire to head the World Bank so closely corresponded to the long-standing Zionist goal of directing Arab economies and positioning the Zionist Jewish state as a middleman between the developed West and the developing Arab or Islamic East that Klein's silence on Wolfowitz' Zionist motivations is stunning.

The total assets of the transnational Zionist elite in the USA is probably about half the GDP of the State of Israel. The "GDP" of the assets that the US Zionist elite owns or controls is probably an order of magnitude larger. Despite Klein's complete silence on the matter, disaster capitalism is only a small part of the threat that this stealth Zionist economic system represents to the whole world.


The Book That Needs to be Written

Sand's book is useful in demonstrating the degree to which modern Jews lie to themselves and to others.

Klein's book is useful in identifying a threat to Americans and to the whole human race even if she does not fully explain or contextualize the danger.

And Mearsheimer and Walt's book does a service in opening up a discussion of the effect of the 'Israel Lobby" on US foreign policy -- unfortunately without even mentioning the effect of Zionist power on American society.

Yet, none of these books are particularly useful for undermining this power because the transnational Zionist elite, which will fight tooth and nail to keep its revenue streams, has put American national politicians in a state of dependency and intimidation.


Not only are US politicians totally uninterested in the real origins of modern Jewry, but it will be practically impossible to address the Zionist involvement with Friedmanism if liberal Jews like Naomi Klein cannot even bring themselves to discuss the connection.


An effective book addressing the clear, present, and immediate danger to the USA, the West, Arab countries, Muslim countries and the world must emphasize before everything else Zionist exploitation of Americans. It has been going on for a long time, and US support of Israel has cost every US taxpayer at least $10,000. Because the Neocon-Friedmanite goal of looting Iraq and Lebanon has failed, to keep control of the US financial system in hands of the Zionist elite, Zionist controlled politicians will have to squeeze the American public to cover the shortfall. If voters begin complaining, national politicians may begin to notice.


Zionists are engaged in criminal conspiracy against rights (18 USC 241) of Americans in order to control American public, political, and academic discourse. At time of war such a crime easily crosses over into seditious conspiracy.


The US civil and criminal code is more than adequate to deal with the infractions of American Zionists if the US government can be compelled to enforces its laws in the same manner for both Jews and non-Jews. Unfortunately, a lot of US government officials are not carrying out their responsibilities. They are either derelict in their duties or engaging in obstruction of justice. They must be removed from their positions and possibly charged with criminal malfeasance.


Zionists have conditioned the American public to respond reflexively to accusations of genocide, terrorism and Nazism or fascism.


An effective book would have to address Zionist genocidalism, the Zionist use of terrorism in achieving genocidal goals, and the hypocrisy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (See USHMM: National Thought Control.)


From there the book must make explicit what Sand could only state indirectly. Zionism is ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism in every way comparable to German Nazism of the 30s and through 1940. Zionist Israel is heading from the Holoexaleipsis (or Nakba) to a Holocaust that could cover the whole Middle East and a good part of the larger world.


The USA has a lot of laws on the books to deal with securities fraud, elections violations, genocide, terrorism, and Nazism. If they were enforced when Zionist Jews break them, the hyperwealthy Zionist elite and all Zionist organizations would be stripped of assets while the leaders would be incarcerated and minor players like the Harvard hate-monger Ruth Wisse would be subjected to other fines and punishments like expulsion to other countries where they could be tried under local laws against racial incitement. (See Wisse Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz!)

Turnabout is fair play. Israel advocates, American Zionists and their fellow travelers have been subverting the legal system against loyal Arab Americans, Muslims Americans and Arab or Muslim businesses or charities for years in order to distract from Zionist depletion and depredation of America. Patriotic Americans must take action now against Zionists on behalf of the United States legal system and Constitution before American freedom and democracy is lost forever.

Shattering a National Mythology

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

_{Last update - 12:06 21/03/2008}

Shattering a 'national mythology'

_{By Ofri Ilani}

Of all the national heroes who have arisen from among the Jewish people over the generations, fate has not been kind to Dahia al-Kahina, a leader of the Berbers in the Aures Mountains. Although she was a proud Jewess, few Israelis have ever heard the name of this warrior-queen who, in the seventh century C.E., united a number of Berber tribes and pushed back the Muslim army that invaded North Africa. It is possible that the reason for this is that al-Kahina was the daughter of a Berber tribe that had converted to Judaism, apparently several generations before she was born, sometime around the 6th century C.E.

According to the Tel Aviv University historian, Prof. Shlomo Sand, author of "Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi?" ("When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?"; Resling, in Hebrew), the queen's tribe and other local tribes that converted to Judaism are the main sources from which Spanish Jewry sprang. This claim that the Jews of North Africa originated in indigenous tribes that became Jewish - and not in communities exiled from Jerusalem - is just one element of the far- reaching argument set forth in Sand's new book.

In this work, the author attempts to prove that the Jews now living in Israel and other places in the world are not at all descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the Kingdom of Judea during the First and Second Temple period. Their origins, according to him, are in varied peoples that converted to Judaism during the course of history, in different corners of the Mediterranean Basin and the adjacent regions. Not only are the North African Jews for the most part descendants of pagans who converted to Judaism, but so are the Jews of Yemen (remnants of the Himyar Kingdom in the Arab Peninsula, who converted to Judaism in the fourth century) and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (refugees from the Kingdom of the Khazars, who converted in the eighth century).

Unlike other "new historians" who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years. He tries to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin, but rather is a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. He argues that for a number of Zionist ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking: "There were times when if anyone argued that the Jews belong to a people that has gentile origins, he would be classified as an anti-Semite on the spot. Today, if anyone dares to suggest that those who are considered Jews in the world ... have never constituted and still do not constitute a people or a nation - he is immediately condemned as a hater of Israel."

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."

So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? 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. 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, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where the Jews come from.

Sand: "My initial intention was to take certain kinds of modern historiographic materials and examine how they invented the 'figment' of the Jewish people. But when I began to confront the historiographic sources, I suddenly found contradictions. And then that urged me on: I started to work, without knowing where I would end up. I took primary sources and I tried to examine authors' references in the ancient period - what they wrote about conversion."

Sand, an expert on 20th-century history, has until now researched the intellectual history of modern France (in "Ha'intelektual, ha'emet vehakoah: miparashat dreyfus ve'ad milhemet hamifrats" - "Intellectuals, Truth and Power, From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War"; Am Oved, in Hebrew). Unusually, for a professional historian, in his new book he deals with periods that he had never researched before, usually relying on studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews.

Experts on the history of the Jewish people say you are dealing with subjects about which you have no understanding and are basing yourself on works that you can't read in the original.

"It is true that I am an historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. I knew that the moment I would start dealing with early periods like these, I would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians who specialize in those areas. But I said to myself that I can't stay just with modern historiographic material without examining the facts it describes. Had I not done this myself, it would have been necessary to have waited for an entire generation. Had I continued to deal with France, perhaps I would have been given chairs at the university and provincial glory. But I decided to relinquish the glory."

Inventing the Diaspora

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom" - thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence. This is also the quotation that opens the third chapter of Sand's book, entitled "The Invention of the Diaspora." Sand argues that the Jewish people's exile from its land never happened.

"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains. Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land - a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled."

If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

And how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea?

"The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others. The Hasmoneans were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. The conversions between the Hasmonean Revolt and Bar Kochba's rebellion are what prepared the ground for the subsequent, wide-spread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions - pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all."

How did you come to the conclusion that the Jews of North Africa were originally Berbers who converted?

"I asked myself how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina's Jewish Berber kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism."

Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria - a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants remains unclear.

Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

"At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe - three million Jews in Poland alone," he says. "The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."

'Degree of perversion'

If the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak Yiddish, which is a Germanic language?

"The Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and describes Khazaria as 'the mother of the diasporas' in Eastern Europe. But more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck."

Why do you think the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?

"It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: 'We came, we won and now we are here' the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist."

Is there no justification for this fear?

"No. I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens."

In effect you are saying that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.

"I don't recognize an international people. I recognize 'the Yiddish people' that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this 'Yiddish people.' I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.

"From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel, even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a nation."

What is so dangerous about Jews imagining that they belong to one people? Why is this bad?

"In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation - I will have done my bit.

"We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it."

The question is whether for those conclusions you had to go as far as the Kingdom of the Khazars.

"I am not hiding the fact that it is very distressing for me to live in a society in which the nationalist principles that guide it are dangerous, and that this distress has served as a motive in my work. I am a citizen of this country, but I am also a historian and as a historian it is my duty to write history and examine texts. This is what I have done."

If the myth of Zionism is one of the Jewish people that returned to its land from exile, what will be the myth of the country you envision?

"To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted mythologies of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open, progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba [literally, the "catastrophe" - the Palestinian term for what happened when Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day."

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