Archive for the ‘judaism’ Category
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
2500 years of this BS? Time for a change
So now we come to the writings on the god we’ve come to call God, and his supposed activities, nature and purpose.
I’m no biblical scholar, and this is a daunting prospect, but here are some questions I need to ask myself. When? What language? Who? How many authors? Is ‘the Torah’ the same as ‘the Pentateuch’? Don’t look for too many answers here.
The first five books of the Bible, and presumably all of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was written in Biblical Hebrew, and this is important to always keep in mind for English readers, who so often fail to realise they’re reading translations of translations. The first traces of Biblical texts discovered, the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, date back about 2600 years. They are fragments from Numbers, the fourth book. Of course we may never know if these are the oldest texts, but it’s unlikely they’ll find anything too much older. They date, therefore, from a little before the Babylonian exile, written up in various books (Jeremiah, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Daniel). According to Wikipedia and its sources:
The final redaction of the Pentateuch took place in the Persian period following the exile, and the Priestly source, one of its main sources, is primarily a product of the post-exilic period when the former Kingdom of Judah had become the Persian province of Yehud.
There were multiple authors, it seems. Famously, there were two origin stories, written presumably by separate persons. They’re designated as Gen 1 and Gen 2, and they each use a different name for the creator. The first, starting at Genesis 1:1, uses the Hebrew word Elohim, whereas the second, starting at Genesis 2:4, uses a tetragrammaton, YHWH, for Yahweh. Stylistically, they’re also very different. The first is fairly tightly organised and brief. Importantly from my perspective, the god, though male, is described as creating ‘man’ in its two forms, male and female, together. Here’s the the King James English version:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepers upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (Genesis 1:26-27).
The second story begins immediately after the first story ends, and it is more detailed and lyrical, describing the garden of Eden, the river out of it, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the lands fed by the rivers, divided from the original, flowing from the garden. God spends a lot of time chatting with Adam (the name suddenly pops up), getting him to name all the beasts of the fields and the fowl of the air that he, the god, conjures up. He also tells him that he will create a help-meet for him, but Adam has to remind him of this later. So, the great moment arrives:
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:21-23).
So the male has the naming rights, and the woman provides unspecified help, and they quickly notice that they’re both ‘naked’ – though what might that mean? – but it didn’t apparently bother them – because, it seems, they hadn’t eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE), a useful tree for any garden. Clearly, none of this makes sense from a modern perspective, but the story goes on, with a talking serpent, who addresses the as-yet unnamed woman, convincing her that she should eat from the TKGE, to become wise. This sounds like good advice, and the woman judges the fruit of the tree to be good, and so she eats, and gets the man to eat, and they’re ashamed, and they hide from the god, who, being omniscient, eventually finds them. He asks why they’re hiding and Adam explains that they’re naked – sophisticated language already! – to which the god asks the very interesting question, Who told you you were naked? There’s no answer, and the god assumes that they’ve eaten from the TKGE. But he doesn’t appear to be sure, he has to ask them. So Adam blames the woman, who blames the serpent, though of course there’s no explanation as to why ignorance is bliss and devouring knowledge is bad.
Most important for my purposes here is the god’s treatment of the woman:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16)
So that sets the pattern of male-female inequality in Judaism. Pretty flimsy, needless to say.
Now to turn to the warrior god, who is also a jealous god (which is certainly not the same thing). The god of the Israelites, essentially YHWH, is deliberately mysterious, and amorphous. He must not be represented (this is called aniconism, against icons), to make a graven image is toto forbidden. The religious historian Christophe Lemardelé, in an essay of great complexity, finds that the tension between a jealous god, who seems in some kind of marital relation with his people, and a warrior-god seeking to save his people and fight for them, as in the books of Exodus and Judges, can best be resolved by examining the anthropology of the peoples who created this god:
The figure of the patriarch Abraham echoes a pastoral population located in Hebron and therefore leads to suggesting that the patriarchal ideology of Genesis—a book of Judean and rather late origin (Persian period, around the 5th century)—would have its background in the family and kinship structures of these nomadic groups. It seems difficult to us to envisage, without any migration, a late Iron age diffusion, however slow, of the Yahweh’s religion from south to north through these groups. The divine covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not at the origin of God’s privileged relationship with Israel but rather one of its final elaborations.
It seems the god evolved with an increasing patriarchy – the origin stories were by no means the first written, and their misogyny, such as it is, is partial witness to an increasingly endogamous patrilineal society. This god, through the stories of Judges, Deuteronomy and Exodus, becomes more tightly bound to his chosen people, increasingly jealous of other gods, and increasingly demanding and unforgiving. Such is the legacy of the Abrahamic religions, if you want it.
There is of course a great deal more to say and learn, but the WEIRD world continues to move away from these tales and life examples, into hopefully something more bonoboesque, something more in keeping with our actual and potential human nature. The religion that reinforced over a millennium of misogyny is failing, all too slowly, in its Western European heartland, and it would be nice if we could speed that up. We understand our world now well enough to know that keeping women out of positions of power, demeaning them, pretending that they are inferior, or that their roles should be circumscribed, has been disastrous. Nothing short of disastrous. I want to argue for a worldwide release of female power, and a promotion of female dominance. It’s happening slowly, but I’m impatient. I want to present the evidence and I want to continue to see changes bearing fruit. There are parts of the world that are going backwards, certainly – in Afghanistan, in Burma, in China and many other regions. We need to show them by example how good it can be. We need to work to reduce the macho thugocracies (the majority of the world’s nations), and find ourselves in a less brutal, more collaborative, more caring, inclusive and thoughtful world. The rise of female power, I believe, is absolutely central to that transition. Without which not.
References
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/two-creations-in-genesis
Reading matters 5
Eichmann and the holocaust, by Hannah Arendt
content hints – the bureaucratic mind, ideological muddles, the replacing of slaughtered sub-groups with museums, the Nuremberg laws, the corralling and subjugation of the Jews, the brown shirts and the black shirts, zionist optimism, Eichmann as zionist, Eichmann as idealist, Eichmann’s gormlessness and petty pride, protecting the ‘best Jews’, an environment of death, the final solution, everyone on the same page, conspiracies of silence, Jewish denial of reality, control of deportations, policing of ghettoes, the impossibility of open dissent, failures of prosecution, failures of defence, reflections on an international criminal court, Eichmann’s final clichés, the banality of evil.
The Israeli horrorshow that our governments pretend isn’t happening
Canto: We just have to talk about Israel. It’s doing my head in.
Jacinta: I know. So let’s start with the slogan – don’t know if its like some official government position – ‘Jewish and Democratic’ – do you see the problem with that?
Canto: You know I do. Democracy is, at least theoretically, inclusive, while Jewishness is, most practically, exclusive. The two are as immiscible as lipids in water.
Jacinta: Well put. And on that basis, I mean considering the putative inclusiveness of democracy, much-touted Athenian democracy, which never lasted long anyway, was never really democratic, because women weren’t regarded as citizens, in fact they were virtually non-persons.
Canto: Right, not to mention slaves, who would’ve been a substantial proportion of the population, and non-citizens like Aristotle, who could never become citizen-voters, despite their contributions to the state. But turning to modern democracies, we’re far more sensitive to the need for inclusiveness if we’re to legitimately describe ourselves as democratic – think of the national shame we feel in Australia about not allowing our indigenous people the right to vote until the early sixties. And of course anyone from overseas who becomes an Australian citizen not only can but must vote here.
Jacinta: But we don’t think of our country as ‘Australian and democratic’, in spite of some pollies and others trying – unsuccessfully in my view – to characterise typical Australians. And the same with Brits and Americans.
Canto: So that takes us back to Israel and the Jewish obsession with cultural identity, and its association with a particular piece of land, which some Jewish people seem to think is exclusively and eternally theirs. We’ve read a number of texts on the Palestine-Israeli tragedy, or disaster, or whatever you choose to call it, the first one being The case for Palestine, by Australian lawyer Paul Heywood-Smith, which focuses particularly on the legal issues re the creation of the Israeli state, as well as all the hard-headed lobbying of western politicians by Zionist ideologues in the early twentieth century. It was most educational, but what has most haunted me since reading the book is a less characteristic passage:
What is a secular American Jew? 22% of American Jews now describe themselves as having no religion. That figure rises to 32% for those born after 1980. Is this secular American Jew an American? Is he/she a Jew? Is he/she an Israeli living in the US? Why do Jewish American Organisations regard assimilation as the greatest danger? Religious Jews no doubt have a reason to call themselves Jews. But non-religious American Jews no longer suffer discrimination….. Why can’t they just be American? The answer is – Israel
Paul Heywood-Smith, The case for Palestine, p83.
The reference here is to American Jews but of course it equally applies to Australia, Britain or any other country. It’s strange that Jewishness, which began as a religious rather than a national signifier, should continue to have such significance for non-religious Jews. I think there are two answers rather than one: first, the land of Israel, which was propagandised in Jewish religious writings as ‘the promised land’, upon which was built a magnificent but totally mythical kingdom under David and Solomon, and second, the history of Jewish oppression, throughout Europe in particular, culminating in the holocaust. This has combined to create a heavy sense of culture, associated with a particular stretch of land – which, to be factual, never belonged wholly to the Jews during Old Testament times.
Jacinta: Yet it’s still strange. It does seem, though, that heavy culture – in which one’s culture almost seems to take precedence over one’s humanity – is generally forged in opposition to oppressors. Members of indigenous cultures, for example, who probably took that culture for granted when left to themselves, often develop a fierce pride in it, when it comes under threat from ‘whities’.
Canto: Yes, they dig in and get quite conservative about it. They become preservationists. But returning to Israel – is there any nation now existing on this planet that’s more racist than Israel?
Jacinta: That’s interesting. You might say that because there’s actually no such thing as ‘race’, and I think science backs me up on this, there can be no such thing as racism, but that’s not true. Race is about fact and science, whereas racism is about perception and belief. I’d roughly define racism as a belief in superiority based on a perception of skin colour and/or cultural identity. That saying, I’m inclined to agree with you about Israel, though I haven’t visited that many nations, even in my cyberworld travels…
Canto: No matter, it’s clearly a racist country, by your definition. Add to that sense of superiority the nonsensical idea that the piece of land modern Israel has been built upon (whatever its rather flexible boundaries) has ‘always’ been theirs, and the promotion of a peculiar ‘everyone hates us so we must be super-strong to defend ourselves’ paranoia, and you have a most peculiar and unique form of racism, which is no less vicious for being so.
Jacinta: So clearly Israel is no more a democracy than South Africa was under apartheid. Now, over the past months we’ve been educating ourselves about the situation there via reading – notably four texts. First, The case for Palestine, which is useful for, inter alia, recording the indefensible attitude of successive Australian governments towards Israel’s brutality, of which more later. Second, Tears for Tarshiha, a memoir by Olfat Mahmoud, who was born in Burj Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, after her family were driven out of their native town, Tarshiha, in what is now the north-west of Israel, as part of the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, which saw some 700,000 Palestinians fleeing or being forced out of the region. Mahmoud is a Palestinian peace activist and director of an international NGO, who represents the resilience of Palestinians amid horrendous suffering. Her story is simply told but sometimes painful to read. Third is The last earth, by Ramzy Baroud, which tells multiple stories from the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian diaspora, as part of a people’s history of individual voices and perspectives, a rejection of the ‘terrorist’ stereotype. Fourth is Goliath: life and loathing in greater Israel, an enormous piece of on-the-ground reportage by the Jewish-American journalist Max Blumenthal, which identifies some of the main figures in Israeli right-wing politics and presents a stark picture of the cultivated racism of the Israeli military and its education system, and a multi-faceted picture of the resistance movement. Honestly, no words of mine could do justice to this valuable work.
Canto: Yes, so let’s take some choice quotes from these books to discuss. From The case for Palestine:
In the days preceding the September 2013 election, the [Australian] Foreign Minister and deputy leader of the party Julie Bishop, attacked the Greens over its supposed ‘support’ of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement. Bishop demanded that the Greens leader, Senator Milne clarify her party’s stand on ‘the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign’. To so describe the BDS campaign demonstrates a remarkable lack of understanding by an incoming foreign minister.
Paul Heywood-Smith, The case for Palestine, p111
Jacinta: Yes, and the author goes on to quote from the movement’s website, which makes clear its human rights agenda, its opposition to racism, anti-Semitism, etc. This ‘anti-Semitic’ slur is commonplace from the defenders of the indefensible, but I’m not sure about Bishop’s lack of understanding – I suspect she knew exactly what she was saying re defending Israel at all costs, which is habitual with right-wing politicians (and many left-wing politicians) in Australia. We’ve long been all the way with the Americans on the topic of Israel, as witnessed by our shameful unwillingness to censure Israeli practices at the UN, putting us always in the outlying position along with our Great Ally.
Canto: I have nothing to add. From Tears for Tarshiha I will quote something in the preface, from a speech made by the author Olfat Mahmoud at the UN, to mark the formation of UNRWA:
As a Palestine refugee in Lebanon, I have very limited rights, I am stateless, and I exist but am not recognised… My father and mother and my grandmothers and grandfathers and my children will remain refugees even if they marry Lebanese. For us the phrases ‘human rights’ and ‘the right to be free from statelessness’, and the right to live in safety and dignity’ have lost all their meaning.
Olfat Mahmoud, Tears for Tarshiha, p4
Jacinta: Well, this speaks to so much, it’s hard to know where to start. The beginning of the end came for non-Jewish Palestinians at the turn of the 20th century, in a rather quiet way, when wealthy European Zionists began buying up land in the region, setting up the Jewish National Fund in 1901 and making it a rule that all land that it acquired was ‘to remain inalienable Jewish property that could not be sold or leased to others’ (Heywood-Smith, p25). This dubious ‘law’ still exists, and reflects the exclusivity that has led to today’s horrorshow in Israel.
Canto: Yes and speaking of horrorshows, the horrific treatment of the Jews under nazism meant that, post-war, the Jewish people benefited from a surge of goodwill, more or less worldwide, which helps explain the rush to create the Israeli state and the bowing to Zionist pressure to ‘simplify’ the massively complex politics of the region in order to bring that state about. And so, the Nakba and all that followed, as some of the world’s most powerful nations turned a blind eye.
Jacinta: All of which cemented thinking in the neighbourhood of the region, which didn’t have to be the case. Israel, due to its behaviour, will have to make itself a fortress against all its neighbours, when it isn’t attacking them. It’s astonishing, when reading Olfat’s book, how little bitterness she shows for the tough upbringing she was forced to endure, but it shouldn’t be at all astonishing that many Palestinians, and their supporters, do feel bitter, and vengeful.
Canto: Now to Ramzy Baroud’s The last earth. I won’t quote from it, I’ll briefly mention some of the stories (there are nine in all), to give some semblance of their variety. Marco’s story – a Palestine refugee born in Yarmouk, Syria, he couldn’t help but be caught up in the conflict there, identifying himself with any one of the competing forces he needed to in order to survive, until he realised that flight was the only option. In his struggle to get to Europe he meets with many demoralising setbacks and the story ends with him still trying to reach a destination with some modicum of security. Ahmad al-Haaj’s story tells of his escape, as a teenager, from the siege of Al-Faluja in 1948, where many family members died. The siege itself is described in detail – the hope followed by despair and the sense of betrayal, the sense of being eternally out-gunned and harrassed, the ruthlessness of Moshe Dayan and the Israeli military. The disruption of families is a major feature throughout. Another story tells of life in a Gaza refugee camp – the disappearances, the frustrations, the constant Israeli intrusions, the quasi-mythic heroes and the legends used to maintain morale amid the desolation. Other stories tell of imprisonment, torture, ritual humiliation, martyrdom, starvation, as well as love and humour.
Jacinta: Yes, these are the stories of ‘ordinary’ people in intolerable situations, people who are as smart, thoughtful, hard-working and ambitious as the rest of us to our varying degrees, but who find themselves thrown into a hellhole by an unlucky throw of the dice.
Canto: Finally, Goliath, which we can no more do justice to here than to any of the other works. For his reportage, Blumenthal mixed with the new right-wing high-fliers as well as the Palestian-Jewish protest movement, the religious zealots and their trapped victims. This overheard piece of conversation from one Jeremy Gimpel, described as ‘a thirty-two year old Israeli transplant from Atlanta who lived in the settlement of Efrat’ and was an electoral candidate, caught my attention:
‘When was Palestine called Palestine? We’re from Judea… we are the indigenous people of the land of Israel!’ I heard him proclaim in a suburban American accent. ‘How dare they try to kick us out of our homeland!’
Jacinta: Yeah, right, note again the paranoia – who is this ‘they’? But the absurdity here needs to be highlighted. The idea (coming from an American!) seems to be that, assuming that Palestine was never an ‘official’ name, the people of Palestine, apart from the Jews, aren’t ‘official’ human beings. It’s like saying that Australia’s indigenous people (or those of the US) aren’t really people because the land then didn’t have an official name – so the white people who arrived and bestowed a name on the place are the indigenous inhabitants!
Canto: Yes, it’s all very logical. Of course, Judea, a small section of Palestine, is only as old as Judaism – a mere 4000 years, and the region had human inhabitants long before that….
Jacinta: Yes but they were all wiped out by the Israelites coming out of Egypt, remember?
Canto: Haha, oh yes, ethnic cleansing….
References
The case for Palestine: the perspective of an Australian observer, by Paul Heywood-Smith, 2014
Tears for Tarshiha: a Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, by Olfat Mahmoud, 2018
The last earth: a Palestinian story, by Ramzy Baroud, 2018
Goliath: life and loathing in greater Israel, by Max Blumenthal, 2014
Palestine 2: more recent ancient history
Jacinta: So the so-called Kingdom of Judah, from archaeological evidence, was not a particularly developed region, from a modern perspective. Jerusalem, always regarded as its most significant city, and central to all Zionist aspirations, came into being as a small village between 5000 and 4500 years ago. From about 4000 years ago, it seems to have been a vassal state of the Egyptian empire, but there’s scant archaeological evidence from the period, though there was clearly an increase of building construction under Ramesses II a little over 3200 years ago. Some 2700 years ago, the region became a part of the Assyrian empire, and then the Babylonians conquered the region only a century or so after that, largely destroying Jerusalem.
Canto: Right, and the Babylonians brought about a diaspora of sorts, which was soon reversed when Cyrus the Great of Persia defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return and rebuild their temple. Now this temple was a symbol of Judaism, and its destruction by the Babylonians struck at the heart of their religion, suggesting that it was well established 2600 years ago…
Jacinta: Yes, we’ll get back to the actual population of the region and their religion shortly. Persia remained in control of Judea until the time of Alexander the Great 2350 years ago (we’re avoiding the BC/AD designations) and remained under the control of his Seleucid successors until a local revolt led by Judas Maccabeus gave it semi-independence for a time under the Hasmonean and Herodian dynasties. The Romans by this time were the great power, and Judea became a client state, but when the population rose in revolt 1950 years ago, Jerusalem was sacked, and, after another revolt 70 years later, the troublesome province became an increasing target of Roman authorities, leading to a major diaspora that wasn’t reversed until the 20th century.
Canto: And that’s when our story really hots up, but getting back to that temple – you know it was built on this supposedly triple-holy site called the Temple Mount, current home of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, both of which are very holy of holy to Islam. Of course it’s no accident that Moslems built this dome about 1320 years ago just where the second Jewish Temple had stood…
Jacinta: Which, by the way, is the very place where, so says fundamentalist Judaism, their god created Adam, haha.
Canto: Yes yes and where he created the World as well, for old Adam to stretch his legs in. I mean it’s typical for a new religion to set its base camp on the ruins of an older one – just as the Christians did at ‘pagan’ sites when the Roman Empire turned Christian. But let’s look briefly at the history of the temple itself, since its first construction might be said to mark the beginning of Judaism as an organised religion. It has been called Solomon’s Temple, and there’s much bullshit in the Old Testament about Solomon being the ruler of a mighty empire, but absolutely no evidence has been found of his existence outside of those texts. My uneducated guess was that he was a local chieftain grossly exaggerated in his power by Old Testament propaganda. He supposedly lived around 2900 years ago, so believers assume the temple was built around that time. It’s noteworthy that the Israelis haven’t allowed any archaeological research to be done at the site for decades. But let’s be generous and assume from their own stories that Judaism is about 3000 years old.
Jacinta: And it seems that one of the tenets of Zionism is return to an ancient homeland. But a homeland isn’t a nation, quite. Australia’s Aborigines have had a homeland here for up to 60,000 years, but they didn’t have a nation in the modern sense of a state with institutions of government etc. Some Zionists, especially the religious ones, would use their holy books to argue for having an ancient nation-state under David and Solomon etc but that doesn’t sort with any evidence. Other Zionists though would argue that the region was overwhelmingly Jewish before the diaspora caused by Roman repression. That would be the basis of their demand for the creation of Israel as a nation, right?
Canto: That and their claim to be a uniquely oppressed people in their adopted countries, which was made more cogent after the Holocaust. The problem of course is that the region, one of the oldest humanly inhabited regions in the world, has never been exclusively Jewish, or Israelite or whatever you want to call it. Was it overwhelmingly Jewish during early Roman times? Perhaps so – I’m certainly willing to concede that, but I’m not sure what that counts for. The British Isles 2000 years ago, when Romanisation began there, was predominantly made up of Celtic tribes, migrants from Europe. The USA at that time was settled by a number of highly developed regional cultures, that tend now to be grouped under the heading ‘native American culture’. The Celts don’t have a nation, nor do the native Americans, or the Kurds, the Catalans, the Rohingyas…
Jacinta: But some of them have put forward cogent arguments for their own nation-state.
Canto: Yes, but the Zionist movement and its arguments were different – not necessarily more cogent – for a number of reasons. Zionism had a more international feel, due to the diaspora. It was locally active and felt in many parts of the world, unlike say, the Catalan movement. Also, It was a call to ‘return’ of a profoundly oppressed people – and this was before the rise of Nazism, after which it was able to take advantage of western guilt big-time. And for the religious Jews there was the whole thing about Jerusalem and the temple…
Jacinta: Okay, so we’re going to switch to the modern situation, but before that let’s look to the distinction made between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewishness. Ashkenazi Jews currently represent around three quarters of the Jewish population. The Sephardim are descended from those who settled in the Iberian Peninsula from the time of the diaspora – Roman times – but were then infamously expelled from the region under the Alhambra Decree of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, and a similar decree by the Portuguese monarchy in 1496.
Canto: Not to mention the 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England under Eddie I. They all appeared to say ‘Go East, young Jew, or we’ll have your guts for garters’, or words to that effect.
Jacinta: The Jews descended from those who remained in the Levant and the Middle East during the diaspora are called Mizrahi Jews. The Ashkenazim’s descent is complicated. Actually the whole story is really effing complicated. For example the Ashkenazim were also pushed eastward during the late Middle Ages due to persecution. By the early Middle Ages they had settled in Northern and Central Europe, for example in settlements along the Rhine, where they developed the Yiddish language, from German mixed with Aramaic, Hebrew and other Eastern elements.
Canto: Yes, and they were pushed eastward, but also pushed into being more integrated into local cultures. This led to a kind of modernising movement, a Jewish Enlightenment known as the Haskalah, which revived Hebrew as a literary language.
Jacinta: But the point is that the Ashkenazim were, according to some observers, at the greatest remove from the Jews of the old spiritual homeland, due to their European integration and their Enlightenment values. On the other hand, it was above all the Ashkenazim who suffered under the Holocaust. So there was this post-Holocaust tension in the west between relieving itself of its guilt by acceding to the, largely Ashkenazi, push for occupation of the Southern Levant, there to recreate the nation of Israel, and questioning the bona-fides of their claim to this land.
Canto: Yes, and as a sidebar to all that, Paul Heywood-Smith claims in The Case for Palestine that there’s ‘considerable evidence’ that the Ashkenazim are ‘substantially derived from the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in or about 805 CE’. He goes on:
The Khazars were Turkish nomads who occupied that land between the Black and Caspian seas (called the Caucasus today), including parts of eastern Turkey, north-west Iran and Georgia. Khazaria seems the likely source of the Jewish influx into Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and Eastern Europe – and from there, into Western Europe.
But the authors of the Wikipedia article ‘Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry’ claim there is ‘meagre evidence’ for the hypothesis. In any case, the controversy is an indication of how fraught the Zionist issue is. You could say the Jewish claim to the Palestinian lands is stronger than the British claim to Australia ever was, but then the eighteenth century was a lot more lawless about such things than the twentieth, and a lot more contemptuous of native claims to their own land, insofar as they ever even considered the matter. In today’s more human rights oriented world, the fact that there were non-Jewish Palestinian people living in Palestine for centuries before the Zionists started making their claims in the late nineteenth century makes what has happened in recent history to create and maintain the state of Israel a source of concern to many of us. After all, we could have been one of those Palestinian people.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Judah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews
Paul-Heywood-Smith, The Case for Palestine, 2014
Palestine, an introductory dialogue, trying to sort out some ancient history
Canto: Currently I’m reading stuff about Palestine, and wondering why it is that the Palestinian people and their plight appears to be so ignored in the west, at least by governments, and certainly by the Australian government, whether conservative or liberal. We seem to follow the USA rather religiously on this matter.
Jacinta: Yes, I believe the USA is nowadays firmly captured by the Jewish lobby, a far cry from the days when anti-semites like Henry Ford and Charles Coughlin were feted as American heroes.
Canto: Well I think you mean a certain kind of Jewish lobby – maybe better to say the Zionist lobby. But we’ll explore such terms as zionism and anti-semitism in the course of these dialogues, which given the complexity of this issue, and its rich but sad history, will probably cover several if not scores of blog posts…
Jacinta: My god.
Canto: Well I don’t know about your god but certainly the Jewish god will play his role, along with the Arabic god, but hopefully not too big a role since they’re arguably the same person, which would just confuse everyone.
Jacinta: So is Palestine considered a nation? I believe Australia is playing Palestine in the Asian Cup tonight, so doesn’t that prove that Palestine is a nation?
Canto: Maybe it proves that FIFA thinks Palestine’s a nation, so good on them for that, but certainly Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine’s nationhood. The fact is that a clear majority of UN member countries recognise Palestine as an independent state – essentially, a nation – but the situation on the ground is that this ‘state’ is broken into two unequal bits, the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coast to the south, and the much larger West Bank region, which sort of includes the highly contested city of Jerusalem. The West Bank is more or less completely occupied by Israel, apparently against international law, and Jewish settlements are continually being built there, again illegally, but with the clear consent of the Israeli government. The Gaza Strip is under Israeli blockade, so the people there don’t seem to be regular members of any kind of independent state that’s worthy of the name.
Jacinta: Yes, and, looking at a map of the nations that recognise Palestine, Sweden and Iceland appear to be the only Western European nations that do so. Western Europe, along with other nations with a European history such as Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada, are siding with Israel in opposing Palestinian nationhood. Interesting, because those are the nations that seemed most invested in setting up Israel after WW2, the nations with sizeable Jewish populations, right?
Canto: Yes, though the case of Russia is interesting. It has, or had, a large Jewish population, but anti-semitism, or anti-Jewish sentiment, to be euphemistic, has long been a feature of Russia (now officially known as Putinland). So it’s hardly surprising that Putinland supports Palestine.
Jacinta: Of course Putinland’s official policy would simply be ‘take the opposite side from the USA in all foreign affairs issues’.
Canto: That’s true too. But we need to understand the history of the Levantine region, and something of the history of the Jews, and the history of European colonialism – the tendency of powerful and ambitious nations, some of them not so ancient themselves, to draw up the boundaries of new nations – Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel etc – for more or less self-serving reasons, in order to understand what’s at stake in this conflict.
Jacinta: So the Jews go back a long way and are traditionally associated with this region, right?
Canto: Yes, but you have to try and dissociate the story the Jewish people tell about themselves, specifically in the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, and what we know of history, objectively speaking. After all, this is all about land, and who it belongs to.
Jacinta: Well, we’re both evidence junkies, so it’ll be interesting to see where the evidence takes us. But I must say that my own possibly naive take on land questions is that land in general, constantly changing over the millions of years that tectonics have operated on it, belongs to nobody but itself. We’re nowadays obsessed with private property, and land first and foremost. But in a million years who will own the land that people spill their guts over today?
Canto: Yes, but that’s taking a rather long view of things, and we humans aren’t much into that. So let’s take a slightly shorter view and go back a few thousand years. The region currently in dispute was then known as Canaan. Now of course there were no defined boundaries to this region, and it wasn’t anything like an organised state, so the term Canaanites referred to an agglomeration of peoples with a variety of gods, beliefs and practices. Generally, though, they spoke a Semitic language…
Jacinta: Right, and this is interesting, in relation to the term ‘anti-semitism’. Hebrew is a Semitic language, but so is Arabic, which is much more widely spoken today, so to call Arabic people ‘anti-semitic’ doesn’t make much sense in the proper understanding of the term, though of course many Arabic people are anti-Jewish. But the term semitic is quite recent, first coined by German historians in the late 18th century, based on the Koine Greek pronunciation of Noah’s son Shem. It’s based on the proto-alphabetic scripts used by these languages – among the oldest written languages in the world.
Canto: So the Canaanites were polytheistic, and only a few of their gods are remembered today – Baal, Moloch and El, for example. The latter was a supreme god and might have been the model for Judaic monotheism, but I don’t want to get into that. The real point is that a diverse lot of people lived in the region of the southern Levant, or ancient Canaan. So let’s start the story some 3,400 years ago when various powerful empires or civilisations converged in terms of their interest in this region – the Egyptians of north Africa, the Hittites of Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and the Mittani of the northern Levant and southern Anatolia. Now, we can get bogged down for ages in exploring the cultures, lifestyles and languages of these Canaanites…
Jacinta: Yes, let’s do so – I want to be thorough.
Canto: Well, however intrinsically interesting it all is, I’m not sure if it helps us to understand the current disaster in the region.
Jacinta: I’m sure it will – it’s just that understanding might not solve the situation. The people with the power today don’t much care about understanding. Anyway, you’ve started at 3400 years ago, and of course the land had been inhabited for thousands of years before that. Judaism presumably didn’t exist at that time?
Canto: No, it’s generally believed to have emerged later. The Torah, the first-written of its essential texts, was written between 2600 and 2400 years ago according to most scholars, presumably based on stories handed down about Jewish history – but many of those stories, such as that the Jews were once the captives of the Egyptians and escaped to the ‘promised land’ where they proceeded to slaughter its inhabitants, aren’t backed up by much in the way of archaeological evidence.
Jacinta: I suppose what I’m trying to get at is – when, if ever, did the region known as Canaan become something like ancient Israel, or Judaea, with a population that professed Judaism, predominantly?
Canto: Well, it’s very confusing. The land of Canaan, which we might call the Levant, was more or less the same as the region called Phoenicia by the Greeks, as far back as Homer, and we’re not sure when, or whether, Homer existed. But the Greeks also used the term ‘Palestine’, at least from the time of Herodotus 2500 years ago. These different names probably derived from different local languages. The Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – doesn’t mention Phoenicia, which appears to be more a reference to the northern Levant – perhaps modern-day Lebanon. However, it has to be remembered that the Old Testament may be a guide but can’t be relied upon as serious history.
Jacinta: So how can we test the Zionist claim that this region is their natural homeland?
Canto: Well I’m trying to get to that, but the difficulty is that Zionism tends to be an exclusivist, nationalist movement, sometimes with religious overtones, and we’re inclusivist, transnational humanist types, so I’m struggling against my biases to give a fair rendering of the history. So let’s look at Judea, or Judah – and even that is confusing because Judea is a modern or revived term for a part of southern Palestine, and Judea is a Graeco-Roman adaptation of the term Judah, which refers to a territory of one of the Israelite tribes, later called the Kingdom of Judah, associated with such names as David and Solomon. However, insofar as the Kingdom of Judah existed, it was a small, sparsely populated mountain region of the southern Levant between Samaria in the north, the Dead Sea in the east, and the ‘Phillistine States’ in the west. I should point out that the Samaritans, a tiny ethnic group still in existence today, have their own religion distinct from Judaism, though they like to think it’s the true Judaism, as is the way with religious disputes between neighbouring tribes. The Phillistines were supposedly an Aegean people who settled in the region now more or less covered by the Gaza strip a little over 3000 years ago. According to the Hebrew Bible they were constantly doing battle with the Israelites, so you could say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a continuation of a tradition.
Jacinta: Haha that’s not funny. I can’t wait to hear more next time…