Re: What have I learned in this NG?

Inabón Yunes wrote:
A lot in short...
...

And all legitimate questions for which there are no answers. There is an insistence by most that they do not believe any of the stories or that it contains any history but they insist upon something they refuse to define. Were they to define it then it expose their motivation.

There was one post which let the cat out of the bag. I have waited three days to see if anyone else noticed it but nothing. Allow me to expose it.

Paraphrased it referred to the people living in bibleland who 'developed the jewish religion and jewish culture.' Fact is until around 1900 AD as in early in the last century there was only one definition of a Jew. That definition is, a Jew is a follower of Judaism. It is the same as defining a Christian as a follower of Christianity.

Back around 1900, in imitation of the political philosophy of German nationalism and therefore a German people the zionists copied the idea and invented out of whole cloth the idea of a jewish people independent of the religion. This invented the idea of a Jewish culture independent of the religion. It allowed atheists (most all Zionists at that time were atheists) to make the absurd claim to be Jews.

So is there a Jewish culture independent of the religion? Of course not. Despite all the izziehuggers who will insist there is such a thing not a single one of them will be able to name a single thing independent of religion which is common to ALL Jews. This has to be something that is shared by and unique to all Jews. This means Jews from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the US, Russia, North Africa, Union of South Africa, Iran, Iraq and the middle east including Israel. It must also include those identified as Jews by Israel such as those found in South America, India and central Africa.

There is nothing but religion which is common to all Jews. Atheists cannot be Jews any more than atheists can be Christians. It is all a zionist creation. I identified this nearly a decade ago when I was ridiculing the idea of Jews being a race by asking which race was Sammy Davis Jr. The stupid kept insisting like good Nazis that Jews were a race. Several even elevated Hitler to the final authority on who is a Jew by citing the Nazi definition -- which incidentally is the same definition used by Israel.

Of course it descended to a pitiful flame war with the zionists screaming antisemite because of their inability to name a single jewish characteristic unrelated to religion.

But recently a Jewish, Israeli historian who is a professor of history at Tel Aviv University published a book saying the same thing. You can't get more impeccable or authoritative than that. The book is also a bestseller in Israel and there are no book burnings. The following article is by the author of the book.

For the record, just so some *** does not breathlessly report it as though they have discovered a secret. All zionists are murderers and thieves by definition. The only good zionist is a dead zionist.

=====

Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

September 2008

Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile
Israel deliberately forgets its history

An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the
expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north
Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East

By Schlomo Sand

Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of
a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah ([25]1) in
Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in
the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.

Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain,
Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always
managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their
uniqueness was never compromised.

At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to
their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions
of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz
Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been
waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to
the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had
arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered
their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was
criminal.

This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative
historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.

But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a
linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any
contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University
departments exclusively devoted to “the history of the Jewish people”, as
distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history,
made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what
constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians
ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people
forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.

Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy
provoked by the “new historians” from the late 1980s. Most of the limited
number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or
non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers,
political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new
perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history
remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas.
While there have been few significant developments in national history over
the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the
facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental
questions.

Founding myths shaken

Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the
19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost
(1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded
the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish
religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not
until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and
others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s
journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and
Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist
historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis
of national education.

But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The
discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the
13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the
Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at
the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the
pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.

Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and
Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two
small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The
general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This
decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.

Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real
research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the
diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from
anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved
prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even
after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity
in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century
Arab conquest.

Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president
of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as
late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on
several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the
inhabitants of ancient Judea ([26]2).

Proselytising zeal

But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have
populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of
national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean
revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century
AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic
Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the
Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism
spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century
AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene,
just one of many that converted.

The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the
proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were
among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud ([27]3)
authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition
expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from
Christianity.

Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end
of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the
Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a
vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their
faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab
chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber
tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya
contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers
participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish
the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised
Hispano-Arabic culture.

The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the
massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of
Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of
communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions
into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and
from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish
culture ([28]4).

Prism of Zionism

Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less
reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were
marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli
forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct
descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of
Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a
specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from
2,000 years of exile and wandering.

This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as
well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out
in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the
world are closely genetically related.

Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and
popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been
accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the
“chosen people”. The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to
underpin the politics of identity of the state 
of Israel. By validating an
essentialist, 
ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a
segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian
immigrants or foreign workers.

Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should
exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population,
who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same
time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world,
even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal
citizens of other countries.

A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on
the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its
own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while
the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric
spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious
communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an
ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of
wandering.

The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were
consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied
millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen
these dreams begin to shatter.

And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the
great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to
chroniclers of the past.

Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of
Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)

Translated by Donald Hounam

([30]1) The Torah, from the Hebrew root yara (to teach) is the founding text
of Judaism. It consists of the first five books of the Old Testament (the
Pentateuch): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

([31]2) See David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Eretz Israel in the past
and present, 1918 (in Yiddish), and Jerusalem, 1980 (in Hebrew); Yitzhak Ben
Zvi, Our population in the country, Executive Committee of the Union for
Youth and the Jewish National Fund, Warsaw, 1929 (in Hebrew).

([32]3) The Mishnah, regarded as the first work of rabbinic literature, was
drawn up around 200 AD. The Talmud is a synthesis of rabbinic discussions on
the law, customs and history of the Jews. The Palestinian Talmud was written
between the 3rd and 5th centuries; the Babylonian Talmud was compiled at the
end of the 5th century.

([33]4) Yiddish, spoken by the Jews of eastern Europe, was a Germano-Slavic
language incorporating Hebrew words.

--
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