Jewish history revisited

So much of the history of the Jews and the Jewish diaspora is tied to the rebellion of the Jews against the Roman occupation culminating in the expulsion of them and the destruction of the temple in 70CE, and a further rebellion and expulsion around 160CE.

The Zionist claims to Israel/Palestine rest in large part on the understanding that all the Jews in the Holy Land were expelled, but as stated in his books ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ (2009) and ‘The Invention of the Land of Israel’ (2012), Shlomo Sand clearly states that was not the case, the rationale he uses is that Israel was a population of farmers and fishermen, and the Romans, being an occupying force with an army to feed needed the agrarian population to farm and to fish and to raise animals for meat to feed the occupying forces. The religious leaders were the trouble makers, objecting to the lands being occupied, claiming their right as God given, and hence were expelled and the most visible structures of their religion destroyed.

According to Sand, who is a respected historian, the diaspora was of the intelligensia, of the religious leaders, and as they were expelled, took with them their scriptures and moved into what is now Europe and North Africa and proselytised their religion, seeking converts and promising to return at some later time… Next year in Jerusalem.

For various reasons, Jews have been set apart from the mainstream of the places they have lived, forming seperate communities close to their synagogues, tied together, if you will, through religion and culture. The impression formed is one of a semi-closed, cultural enclave within cities and suburban areas, adding to the culture of the cities but somehow not quite being settled within it. The sense is that Jewish-ness is a strong identity, a homogenous society. Attempts have been made to find specific Jewish identity markers, whether it be through DNA, eugenics or other historically used differentiations, but there has been no defining characteristic found, in fact Jewishness is as broad as any other marker of human identities, whether it be definitively Middle Eastern or Arabic, North African, East European, or West European. No distinctive marker has been identified.

The expulsion from Jerusalem in 70CE and subsequent emigrations created a diaspora which spread throughout the Mediterranean and Eurasian region which blended in in all human characteristics except religion, which especially in Christian Europe, caused some problems.

The Jewish religion uses circumcision as a defining element. Boys are circumcised on their eighth day, marking them for life. Christians were baptised in a church setting and their baptism recorded by the clerics who also kept the records of the population, births were not recorded, but baptisms were, and so Jews were not officially registered as being born and so had no legal definition of their existence. That created problems, since without proving that a person actually existed in a legal sense, they could not purchase land and in essentially agrarian settings were unable to earn an income, or to be a permanent resident. This is so well portrayed in the play Fiddler on the Roof, where a pogrom is forcing the Jews out of Ukraine early in the twentieth century.

Many of the people displaced by those pogroms settled in Poland which had become a safe haven, and at the start of WWII had the largest Jewish population in Europe, hence the largest concentration camps of the holocaust were in or bordering on Poland.

In 1917, the Balfour Declaration given to Lord Rothschild, ceded the yet to be proclaimed British protectorate of Palestine to Zionists, to Jews, not as a magnanimous gift, but a means for Britain to refuse to accept Jews wanting to settle in Britain. As Shlomo Sands points out, Balfour could well have suggested that Jews settle in his homeland of Scotland, but no, as a politician, Balfour saw the problems that Jews brought with them, their ‘seperate-ness’, their business acumen which portrayed them as greedy, money hungry, a reputation, ill-earned, which had grown through the long history of discrimination throughout Europe. So ‘giving’ Palestine to the Jews solved several problems, essentially shoving them aside as the Zionist claims to Eretz Israel, the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, grew.

But what happened to those Jews who were not expelled in the expulsion of 70CE and subsequent emigrations?

In The Times of Israel, 15 March, there is a report headlined “Could 1,600-year-old Galilee synagogue rewrite history of Jewish life under the Romans?”

In brief, the report writes about the carbon dating of an ancient synagogue which was erected in the fourth or early fifth century CE, so Judaism was practiced well after the expulsion of 70CE. The article goes on about the cultural significance, that the synagogue was used throughout history, it was apparently restored in the 14th century, and there is evidence of Judaism being practiced until very recent times in the region.

The article does not cover what that really means for the population of Palestine between 70CE and the current day. There is the supposition that Jewish life and Judaism continued through the ages.

Could it be that the people being persecuted, whose lands are being stolen, who have farmed and grazed on that land for generations are actually Jews who have survived through those two thousand years, and have as strong not stronger, claim to the land as do the Zionists who claim it through their ‘historical’ links to Abraham? What if there were a scientific test to prove the link back to Abraham, if some element of his DNA could be found, and there by draw a direct lineage back to the time of the Biblical book of Genesis?

There is a further matter which warrants a close look at, and that is the immigration and emigration of Jewish people during the times of the Russian pogroms of the 1907 till 1917 and the destinations they chose as they faces expulsion and the emigration from post holocaust Europe.

Quoting Shlomo Sand:

“(W)hen Jewish groups were expelled from their places of residence during acts of religious persecution, they did not seek refuge in their sacred land but made every effort to relocate to other, more hospitable locations.” (The Invention of the Land Of Israel, page 20), but then, in the following paragraph, “In fact it was the United Sates’ refusal, between the ant-immigration legislation of 1924 and the year 1948, to accept victims of European Judeophobic persecution that enabled decision makers to channel somewhat more significant numbers of Jews toward the Middle East.”

In other words, Jews were not made welcome in places they would rather have migrated to.

Sand concludes that section with:

“… the Jews were not forcibly exiled from the land of Judea in the first century CE, and they did not ‘return’ to twentieth-century Palestine, and subsequently to Israel, of their own free will.”

That leads to another important question. Where would Jews prefer to live if not in Eretz Israel?

In a population of about 10 million living in Israel/Palestine, there are about 7.7 million Jews, but in recent years according to a report in today’s Guardian, there are “about 630,000 Jewish people born in Israel… now living elsewhere in the world”, additionally about 330,000 “Israel-connected” living elsewhere in the world, making about 10% of the Jewish population, have emigrated from Israel/Palestine, making their new homes in the very European countries their parents and grand parents left to find refuge in Eretz Israel.

While most choose to settle in the USA, thevnumber settling in Germany, infamous for the holocaust of 1939-1944, is around 24,000, but others communities have settled in Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark.

The factors driving the emigration, according to the Guardian, include political polarisation, the high cost of living, the impact of wars in Gaza and Lebanon and security concerns.

All this reflection points to the way the Israeli/Palestinian situation has been manipulated. The history of, and I so like this term, Judeophobia, (as distinct from anti-semitism) as used by Shlomo Sand, the fear and marginalisation of Jews through history, has been sold to us, legitimising the ethnic cleansing of Israel of Palestinians who may well be the real Israelis, with an uninterrupted lineage to the land of Eretz Israel, or Palestine, West Bank and Golan Heights (Samaria and Galilee).

As mentioned in an earlier article, the term anti-semitism directed at Israelis, is actually wrong. The definition of semite people is far broader than a term to define Jews or Israelis. It refers to the descendants of Noah’s son Shem. The term Judeo defines those adhering to the Judaic faith, Judeophobia is as significant as Islamophobia describing the rise in fear and hatred of Muslims.

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