PALESTINIANS ARE THE REAL HEBREWS: Dr. Sands (Israeli Historian) main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion. Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added. Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era. I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD. But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends. Similarly with the exile. In fact, you cant explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldnt find any. Not one. That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands. Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God. So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to return? Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytising religion, desperate for converts. This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time. Jews travelled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and Eastern Europe. Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea . Ynet, the website of Israels most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital. And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history. One further question is prompted by Dr. Sands account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them? It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israels first prime minister], believed that the PALESTINIANS were the descendants of the areas original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam. Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of Jewish history taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards. The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr. Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 23:21:05 +0000