Читать книгу The Invention of the Jewish People - Shlomo Sand - Страница 10

Undoubtedly, personal experience can sway a historian’s choice of research topic, probably more so than for a mathematician or a physicist. But it would be wrong to assume that personal experience dominates the process and method of the historian’s work. Sometimes a generous grant directs a researcher to a particular field. At other times, if less oft en, findings rise up and compel a scholar to take a new direction. Meanwhile, everything that originally alerted the scholar to the central issues with which he or she is preoccupied continues to engage the mind. Other factors, too, of course, help shape any intellectual endeavor.

Over and above all these components is the fact that the historian, like other members of society, accumulates layers of collective memory well before becoming a researcher. Each of us has assimilated multiple narratives shaped by past ideological struggles. History lessons, civics classes, the educational system, national holidays, memorial days and anniversaries, state ceremonies—various spheres of memory coalesce into an imagined universe representing the past, and it coalesces well before a person has acquired the tools for thinking critically about it. By the time a historian has taken the first steps in his career, and begun to understand the unfolding of time, this huge universe of culturally constructed “truth” has taken up residence in the scholar’s mind, and thoughts cannot but pass through it. Thus, the historian is the psychological and cultural product not only of personal experiences but also of instilled memories.

When, as a young child in nursery school, the author stamped his feet during Hanukkah festivities and sang enthusiastically, “Here we come with fire and light / darkness to expel!” the primary images of “us” and “them” began to take shape in his mind. We, the Jewish Maccabees, became associated with the light; they, the Greeks and their followers, with the dark. Later, in primary school, Bible lessons informed him that the biblical heroes had conquered the land that had been promised him. Coming from an atheistic background, he doubted the promise, yet in a natural sort of way he justified Joshua’s warriors, whom he regarded as his ancestors. (He belonged to a generation for whom history followed a path directly from the Bible to national revival, unlike the elision made in later years from the exile to the Holocaust.) The rest is known—the sense of being a descendant of the ancient Jewish people became not merely a certainty but a central component of his self-identity. Neither studying history at university nor becoming a professional historian could dissolve those crystallized historical “memories.” Although historically the nation-state arose in the world before compulsory mass education, only through this system could it consolidate its position. Culturally constructed memories were firmly entrenched at the upper levels of state education; at their core was national historiography.

To promote a homogeneous collective in modern times, it was necessary to provide, among other things, a long narrative suggesting a connection in time and space between the fathers and the “forefathers” of all the members of the present community. Since such a close connection, supposedly pulsing within the body of the nation, has never actually existed in any society, the agents of memory worked hard to invent it. With the help of archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, a variety of findings were collected. These were subjected to major cosmetic improvements carried out by essayists, journalists, and the authors of historical novels. From this surgically improved past emerged the proud and handsome portrait of the nation.¹

Every history contains myths, but those that lurk within national historiography are especially brazen. The histories of peoples and nations have been designed like the statues in city squares—they must be grand, towering, heroic. Until the final quarter of the twentieth century, reading a national history was like reading the sports page in the local paper: “Us” and “All the Others” was the usual, almost the natural, division. For more than a century, the production of Us was the life’s work of the national historians and archaeologists, the authoritative priesthood of memory.

Prior to the national branching-out in Europe, many people believed they were descended from the ancient Trojans. This mythology was scientifically adjusted at the end of the eighteenth century. Influenced by the imaginative work of professional students of the past—both Greeks and other Europeans—the inhabitants of modern Greece saw themselves as the biological descendants of Socrates and Alexander the Great or, alternatively, as the direct heirs of the Byzantine Empire. Since the end of the nineteenth century, influential textbooks have transformed the ancient Romans into typical Italians. In the schools of the French Third Republic, Gallic tribes who rebelled against Rome in the time of Julius Caesar were described as true Frenchmen (though of a not-quite-Latin temperament). Other historians chose King Clovis’s conversion to Christianity in the fifth century as the true birth of the almost eternal French nation.

The pioneers of Romanian nationalism drew their modern identity from the ancient Roman colony of Dacia; given this exalted origin, they called their new language Romanian. During the nineteenth century, many Britons began to view Queen Boudicca, leader of the Celtic tribe of Iceni, who fiercely resisted the Roman conquerors, as the first Englishwoman; a glorified statue of her stands in London. German authors seized eagerly on Tacitus’s account of Arminius leading the ancient tribe of the Cherusci, and depicted him as the father of their nation. Even Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and owner of many black slaves, insisted that the state seal of the United States bear the images of Hengist and Horsa, who led the first Saxon invaders of Britain during the century in which Clovis was baptised. The reason he gave was that it was they “from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”²

Much the same went on in the twentieth century. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the inhabitants of the new Turkey found that they were white Aryans, the descendants of the Sumerians and the Hittites. Arbitrarily mapping the boundaries of Iraq, a lazy British officer drew a dead straight line; those who had overnight become Iraqis soon learned from their authorized historians that they were the descendants of the ancient Babylonians as well as of the Arabs, descendants of Saladin’s heroic warriors. Many Egyptian citizens had no doubt that their first national state had been the ancient pagan pharaonic kingdom, which did not stop them from being devout Muslims. Indians, Algerians, Indonesians, Vietnamese and Iranians still believe that their nations always existed, and from an early age their schoolchildren memorize long historical narratives.

For Israelis, specifically those of Jewish origin, such mythologies are farfetched, whereas their own history rests on firm and precise truths. They know for a certainty that a Jewish nation has been in existence since Moses received the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai, and that they are its direct and exclusive descendants (except for the ten tribes, who are yet to be located). They are convinced that this nation “came out” of Egypt; conquered and settled “the Land of Israel,” which had been famously promised it by the deity; created the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon, which then split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They are also convinced that this nation was exiled, not once but twice, after its periods of glory—after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE, and again after the fall of the Second Temple, in 70 CE. Yet even before that second exile, this unique nation had created the Hebrew Hasmonean kingdom, which revolted against the wicked influence of Hellenization.

They believe that these people—their “nation,” which must be the most ancient—wandered in exile for nearly two thousand years and yet, despite this prolonged stay among the gentiles, managed to avoid integration with, or assimilation into, them. The nation scattered widely, its bitter wanderings taking it to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland, and distant Russia, but it always managed to maintain close blood relations among the far-flung communities and to preserve its distinctiveness.

Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, they contend, rare circumstances combined to wake the ancient people from its long slumber and to prepare it for rejuvenation and for the return to its ancient homeland. And so the nation began to return, joyfully, in vast numbers. Many Israelis still believe that, but for Hitler’s horrible massacre, “Eretz Israel” would soon have been filled with millions of Jews making “aliyah” by their own free will, because they had dreamed of it for thousands of years.

And while the wandering people needed a territory of its own, the empty, virgin land longed for a nation to come and make it bloom. Some uninvited guests had, it is true, settled in this homeland, but since “the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion” for two millennia, the land belonged only to that people, and not to that handful without history who had merely stumbled upon it. Therefore the wars waged by the wandering nation in its conquest of the country were justified; the violent resistance of the local population was criminal; and it was only the (highly unbiblical) charity of the Jews that permitted these strangers to remain and dwell among and beside the nation, which had returned to its biblical language and its wondrous land.

Even in Israel these burdens of memory did not appear spontaneously but rather were piled layer upon layer by gifted reconstructors of the past, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. They primarily collected fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memories, out of which they imaginatively constructed a long, unbroken genealogy for “the Jewish people.” Before then, there had been no organized public “remembering,” and remarkably enough, it has not changed much since then. Despite the academization of Jewish history studies—with the founding of universities in British-ruled Jerusalem and later in Israel, and the opening of Jewish studies courses throughout the West—the idea of the Jewish past has remained generally unchanged, retaining its unified, ethnonational character to this day.

Different approaches have, of course, been employed in the extensive historiography of Judaism and Jews. There has been no shortage of polemic and disagreement in the highly productive field of the “national past.” But, so far, hardly anyone has challenged the fundamental concepts that were formed and adopted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neither the important processes that profoundly changed the study of history in the Western world in the late twentieth century, nor the significant paradigm changes in the study of nations and nationalism, have affected the departments of the “History of the People of Israel” (aka Jewish history) in Israeli universities. Nor, amazingly, have they have left their imprint on the ample output of Jewish studies departments in American or European universities.

When occasional findings threatened the picture of an unbroken, linear Jewish history, they were rarely cited; when they did surface, they were quickly forgotten, buried in oblivion. National exigencies created an iron-jawed vise that prevented any deviation from the dominant narratives. The distinctive frameworks within which data about the Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli past is produced—namely, those exclusive departments of Jewish history that are completely isolated from the departments of general and Middle Eastern history—have also contributed much to the astonishing paralysis and stubborn refusal to open up to new historiography that would soberly investigate the origin and identity of the Jews. From time to time the question “Who is a Jew?” has stirred up the public in Israel, chiefly because of the legal issues it entails. But it has not perturbed the Israeli historians. They have always known the answer: a Jew is a descendant of the nation that was exiled two thousand years ago.

The dispute of the “new historians,” which began in the 1980s and for a short while looked set to shake the structure of Israeli memory, involved almost none of the “authorized” historians. Of the small number of individuals who took part in the public debate, most came from other disciplines or from outside the academy. Sociologists, political scientists, Orientalists, philologists, geographers, scholars of literature, archaeologists, even a few independent essayists, voiced new reservations about Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli history. Some had doctorates in history from outside Israel but had not yet found positions in the country. Departments of Jewish history, however, which should have been the main sources of breakthrough research, contributed only uneasy, conservative responses framed in apologetic, conventional rhetoric.³

In the 1990s, the counterhistory dealt mainly with the stages and outcomes of the 1948 war, focusing especially on its moral implications. This debate was certainly of great significance in the morphology of memory in Israeli society. What one might call the 1948 syndrome, which troubles the Israeli conscience, is important for the future politics of the State of Israel but perhaps even essential for its future existence. Any meaningful compromise with the Palestinians, if it ever materializes, would have to take into account not only the history of the Jews, but the recent history of the “others.”

Yet this significant debate has yielded limited achievements in the area of research, and its presence in the public mind has been marginal. The older, established generation has utterly rejected all the new findings and evaluations, unable to reconcile them with the strict morality it believes guided its historical path. A younger generation of intellectuals might have been willing to concede that sins were committed on the road to statehood, but many among that group possessed a relative and flexible morality that was willing to allow for exceptions: How bad was the Nakba compared with the Holocaust? How can anyone liken the short and limited Palestinian refugee situation to the agonies of a two-thousand-year exile?

Sociohistorical studies that concentrated less on “political sins” and more on the long-term processes of the Zionist enterprise received less attention. And though written by Israelis, they were never published in Hebrew.⁴ The few Hebrew works that tried to question the paradigms that underpin the national history were met with general indifference. These include Boas Evron’s bold Jewish State or Israeli Nation? and Uri Ram’s intriguing essay “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood.” Both issued a radical challenge to the professional historiography of the Jewish past, but such challenges scarcely disturbed the authorized producers of this past.

The present work was written after the breakthroughs of the 1980s and early 1990s. Without the challenging writings of Evron, Ram and other Israelis,⁵ and above all the contributions of non-Israeli scholars of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson,⁶ it is doubtful if it would have occurred to this author to question anew the roots of his identity and to extricate himself from the many layers of memory that, since childhood, had been heaped upon his own sense of the past.

Where national history is concerned, it is not merely hard to see the wood for the trees. A momentary glance at the encompassing woodland reveals a forest canopy of intimidating size. Professional specialization sequesters scholars in specific portions of the past. Narratives grow toward inclusiveness, but for a heretical metanarrative to take shape, it is necessary that historical research be conducted in a pluralistic culture, free from the tension of armed national conflict and from chronic anxiety about its identity and sources.

In light of Israel reality in 2008, such a statement may justifiably be called pessimistic. In the sixty years of Israel’s existence, its national history has hardly developed, and there is no reason to expect it to attain maturity anytime soon. The author has few illusions about the reception of this book. He does, nevertheless, hope that a small number of readers will be willing to risk a more radical re-evaluation of the past, and thus help to erode the essentialist identity that permeates the thoughts and actions of almost all Jewish Israelis.

Though the present work was composed by a professional historian, it takes risks not usually permitted or authorized in this field of endeavor. The accepted rules of academe demand that the scholar follow prescribed pathways and stick to the field in which he is supposedly qualified. A glance at the chapter headings of this book, however, will show that the spectrum of issues discussed herein exceeds the boundaries of a single scientific field. Teachers of Bible studies, historians of the ancient period, archaeologists, medievalists and, above all, experts on the Jewish People will protest that the author has encroached on fields of research not his own.

There is some truth in this argument, as the author is well aware. It would have been better had the book been written by a team of scholars rather than by a lone historian. Unfortunately, this was not possible, as the author could find no accomplices. Some inaccuracies may therefore be found in this book, for which the author apologizes, and he invites critics to do their best to correct them. He does not see himself as an Israeli Prometheus, stealing the fire of historical truth for the Israelis. So he does not fear an omnipotent Zeus, in the shape of the professional corporation of Jewish historiography. He seeks only to draw attention to a wellknown phenomenon—that venturing outside a specific field, or walking on the fences between several of them, may occasionally yield unexpected insights and uncover surprising connections. At times, thinking beside, rather than thinking within, can fertilize historical thought, despite the drawbacks of being a nonspecialist and of exercising a high degree of speculation.

Because the recognized experts in Jewish history are not in the habit of confronting simple questions that at first glance may seem surprising yet are fundamental, it may be worthwhile doing it for them. For instance, has a Jewish nation really existed for thousands of years while other “peoples” faltered and disappeared? How and why did the Bible, an impressive theological library (though no one really knows when its volumes were composed or edited), become a reliable history book chronicling the birth of a nation? To what extent was the Judean Hasmonean kingdom—whose diverse subjects did not all speak one language, and who were for the most part illiterate—a nation-state? Was the population of Judea exiled after the fall of the Second Temple, or is that a Christian myth that not accidentally ended up as part of Jewish tradition? And if not exiled, what happened to the local people, and who are the millions of Jews who appeared on history’s stage in such unexpected, far-flung regions?

If world Jews were indeed a nation, what were the common elements in the ethnographic cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakech, other than religious belief and certain practices of that belief? Perhaps, despite everything we have been told, Judaism was simply an appealing religion that spread widely until the triumphant rise of its rivals, Christianity and Islam, and then, despite humiliation and persecution, succeeded in surviving into the modern age. Does the argument that Judaism has always been an important belief-culture, rather than a uniform nation-culture, detract from its dignity, as the proponents of Jewish nationalism have been proclaiming for the past 130 years?

If there was no common cultural denominator among the communities of the Jewish religion, how could they be connected and set apart by ties of blood? Are the Jews an alien “nation-race,” as the anti-Semites have imagined and sought to persuade us since the nineteenth century? What are the prospects of defeating this doctrine, which assumes and proclaims that Jews have distinctive biological features (in the past it was Jewish blood; today it is a Jewish gene), when so many Israeli citizens are fully persuaded of their racial homogeneity?

Another historical irony: there were times in Europe when anyone who argued that all Jews belong to a nation of alien origin would have been classified at once as an anti-Semite. Nowadays, anyone who dares to suggest that the people known in the world as Jews (as distinct from today’s Jewish Israelis) have never been, and are still not, a people or a nation is immediately denounced as a Jew-hater.

Dominated by Zionism’s particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands)—that is to say, a state that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.

It is difficult to formulate a new Jewish history while looking through the dense prism of Zionism—the light that traverses it keeps breaking into sharply ethnocentric colors. Please note: the present work, which proposes that the Jews have always comprised significant religious communities that appeared and settled in various parts of the world, rather than an ethnos that shared a single origin and wandered in a permanent exile, does not deal directly with history. Given that its main purpose is to criticize a widespread historiographic discourse, it cannot avoid suggesting alternative narratives. The author began with the question posed by the French historian Marcel Detienne—“How can we denationalize national histories?”—echoing in his mind.⁷ How can we stop trudging along roads paved mainly with materials forged in national fantasies?

Imagining the nation was an important stage in the development of historiography, as indeed in the evolution of modernity. It engaged many historians from the nineteenth century onward. But toward the end of the twentieth century the dreams of national identity began to disintegrate. More and more scholars began to dissect and examine the great national stories, especially myths of common origin, that had hitherto clouded the writing of history. It goes without saying that the secularization of history took place under the hammer blows of cultural globalization, which continually takes unexpected forms throughout the Western world.

Yesterday’s nightmares of identity are not tomorrow’s identity dreams. Just as every personality is composed of fluid and diverse identities, so is history, among other things, an identity in motion. This book seeks to illuminate this dimension, both human and social, that is inherent in the passage of time. Though this lengthy plunge into the history of the Jews differs from the usual narratives, it may not be free of subjectivity, nor does the author claim to be free of ideological bias. He intends to present some outlines for a future counterhistory that may promote a different kind of culturally constructed memory—a memory that is aware of the relative truth it contains, and that aspires to help forge emerging local identities and a critical, universal consciousness of the past.

1 For the invention of a fictional past see E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

2 Quoted in Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 7. This brilliant work exposes the fallacy of “ethnic” labeling as applied in most modern, national histories dealing with the Middle Ages.

3 To understand this controversy, see Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture, New York: Routledge, 1999, and also my book Les mots et la terre: Les intellectuels en Israël, Paris: Fayard, 2006, 247–87.

4 Two works mainly: Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

5 See Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; and Uri Ram, “Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur,” History and Memory 7:1 (1995), 91–124. The intellectuals of the “Canaanite” movement were the first Israelis to challenge the classical paradigms of Zionist historiography, but they did so with the aid of highly tenuous mythologies.

6 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991; and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.

7 Marcel Detienne, Comment être autochtone, Paris: Seuil, 2003, 15. It is worth mentioning here that my conversations with the French historian Marc Ferro provided material and inspiration for this book. See his article “Les Juifs: tous des sémites?” in Les Tabous de l’Histoire, Paris: Nil éditions, 2002, 115–35.