Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth

By Morgan Strong
April 12, 2009

The founding narrative of the modern State of Israel was born from the words of Moses in the Old Testament, that God granted the land of Israel to the Jewish people and that it was to be theirs for all time.

Then, there was the story of the Diaspora – that after Jewish uprisings against the Romans in the First and Second centuries A.D., the Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and dispersed throughout the Western world. They often were isolated from European populations, suffered persecution, and ultimately were marked for extermination in the Nazi Holocaust.

Finally after centuries of praying for a return to Israel, the Jews achieved this goal by defeating the Arab armies in Palestine and establishing Israel in 1948. This narrative – spanning more than three millennia – is the singular, elemental and sustaining claim of the State of Israel as a Jewish nation.

But a new book by Israeli scholar Shlomo Sand challenges this narrative, claiming that – beyond the religious question of whether God really spoke to Moses – the Roman-era Diaspora did not happen at all or at least not as commonly understood.

In When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, Dr. Sand, an expert on European history at the University of Tel Aviv, says the Diaspora was largely a myth – that the Jews were never exiled en masse from the Holy Land and that many European Jewish populations converted to the faith centuries later.

Thus, Sand argues, many of today’s Israelis who emigrated from Europe after World War II have little or no genealogical connection to the land. According to Sand’s historical analysis, they are descendents of European converts, principally from the Kingdom of the Khazars in eastern Russia, who embraced Judaism in the Eighth Century, A.D.

The descendants of the Khazars then were driven from their native lands by invasion and conquest and – through migration – created the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, Sands writes. Similarly, he argues that the Jews of Spain came from the conversion of Berber tribes from northern Africa that later migrated into Europe.

The Zionist Narrative

Sand, himself a European Jew born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Austria, argues that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not because they possessed a direct lineage to the ancient tribes of Israel.

However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Sand asserts, Zionist Jews began assembling a national history to justify creation of a Jewish state by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion and that they had primogeniture over the territory that had become known as Palestine.

The Zionists also invented the idea that Jews living in exile were obligated to return to the Promised Land, a concept that had been foreign to Judaism, Sand states.

Like almost everything in the Middle East, this new scholarship is fraught with powerful religious, historical and political implications. If Sand’s thesis is correct, it would suggest that many of the Palestinian Arabs have a far more substantial claim to the lands of Israel than do many European Jews who arrived there asserting a God-given claim.

Indeed, Sand theorizes that many Jews, who remained in Judea after Roman legions crushed the last uprising in 136 A.D., eventually converted to Christianity or Islam, meaning that the Palestinians who have been crowded into Gaza or concentrated in the West Bank might be direct descendants of Jews from the Roman era.

Despite the political implications of Sand’s book, it has not faced what might be expected: a withering assault from right-wing Israelis. The criticism has focused mostly on Sand’s credentials as an expert on European history, not ancient Middle Eastern history, a point that Sand readily acknowledges.

One critic, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, attacked Sand’s credentials and called Sand’s thesis “baseless,” but disagreed mostly over Sand’s assertion that the Diaspora story was created as an intentional myth by Zionists seeking to fabricate a direct genealogical connection between many of the world’s Jews and Israel.

“Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions,” Bartal wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. “Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely. …

"The kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews' exile from their homeland is pure fantasy."

In other words, Bartal, like some other critics, is not so much disputing Sand’s historical claims about the Diaspora or the origins of Eastern European Jews, as he is contesting Sand’s notion that Zionists concocted a false history for a cynical political purpose.

But there can be no doubt that the story of the Diaspora has played a key role in the founding of Israel and that the appeal of this powerful narrative has helped the Jewish state generate sympathy around the world, especially in the United States.

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom," reads the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

Reality from Mythology

In January 2009, as the Israeli army bombarded Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel, the world got an ugly glimpse of what can result when historical myths are allowed to drive wedges between people who otherwise might have a great deal in common.

After the conflict ended – with some 1,400 Palestinians dead, including many children and other non-combatants – the Israeli government investigated alleged war crimes by its army and heard testimony from Israeli troops that extremist Rabbis had proclaimed the invasion a holy war.

The troops said the Rabbis brought them booklets and articles declaring: “We are the Jewish people. We came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

In his book – and in an interview with Haaretz about his book – Sand challenged this core myth. In the interview, he said:

"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land - a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country.

“The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled."

The True Descendants

Asked if he was saying that the true descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians, Sand responded:

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents.

“The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-1939], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled.

“Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

Sand argues further that the Jewish people never existed as a “nation race” but were rather an ethnic mix of disparate peoples who adopted the Jewish religion over a great period of time. Sand dismisses the Zionist argument that the Jews were an isolated and seminal ethnic group that was targeted for dispersal by the Romans.

Although ruthless in putting down challenges to their rule, the Romans allowed subjects in their occupied territories a great many freedoms, including freedom to practice religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.

Thousands of Jews served in the Roman legions, and there was a sizable Jewish community in Rome itself. Three Jewish descendants of Herod the Great, the Jewish Emperor of Jerusalem, served in the Roman Senate.

Jewish dietary laws were respected under Roman law, as well as the right not to work on the Sabbath. Jewish slaves – 1,000 carried to Italy by Emperor Titus after crushing the first Jewish rebellion in 70 A.D. – were bought and set free by Jewish families already long settled into Roman society.

After the final Jewish rebellion, the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 A.D., historians say the Romans placed restrictions on Jews entering Jerusalem, which caused other areas, such as Galilee in northern Palestine, to become centers of Jewish learning. But there is little or no evidence of a mass forced relocation.

Sand says the Diaspora was originally a Christian myth that depicted the event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

Genetic Evidence

There has been no serious rebuttal to Sand’s book, which has been a bestseller in Israel and Europe – and which is expected to be released in the United States within the year. But there were earlier genetic studies attempting to demonstrate an unbroken line of descent among Ashkenazi Jews in Europe from the Hebrew tribes of Israel.

In a genetic study published by the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews were compared with 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. It found that despite long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level.

Although the study also demonstrated that 20 percent of the Ashkenazim carry Eastern European gene markers consistent with the Khazars, the results seemed to show that the Ashkenazim were descended from a common Mid-Eastern population and suggested that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.

However, a monumental genetic study entitled, “The Journey of Man,” undertaken in 2002 by Dr. Spencer Wells, a geneticist from Stanford University, demonstrated that virtually all Europeans males carry the same genetic markers found within the male population of the Middle East on the Y chromosomes.

That is simply because the migration of human beings began in Africa and coursed its way through the Middle East and onward, stretching over many thousands of years. In short, we are all pretty much the same.

Obsessive Delusion

Despite the lack of conclusive scientific or historical evidence, the Diaspora narrative proved to be a compelling story, much like the Biblical rendition of the Exodus from Egypt, which historians and archeologists also have questioned in recent years.

It is certainly true that all nations use myths and legend for sustenance; some tales are based on fact, others are convenient self-serving contrivances.

However, when myth and legend argue for excess, when they demand a racial, ethnic or religious purity to the exclusion of others – so that some prophecy can be fulfilled or some national goal achieved – reason and justice can give way to extremism and cruelty.

The motive for creating the state of Israel was to provide respite for the Jews of Europe after World War II, but that worthy cause has now been contorted into an obsessive delusion about an Israeli right to mistreat and persecute Palestinians.

When right-wing Israeli Rabbis speak of driving non-Jews out of the land that God supposedly gave to the Israelites and their descendants, these Rabbis may be speaking with full faith, but faith is by definition an unshakable belief in something that taken by itself cannot be proven.

This faith – or delusion – also is drawing in the rest of the world. The bloody war in Iraq is an appendage to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as is the dangerous rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the region.

There is also now the irony that modern Israel was established by Jews of European origin, many of whom may be ethnically unconnected to Palestine.

Another cruel aspect of this irony is that the descendants of the ancient Israelites may include many Palestinians, who are genetically indistinct from the Sephardic Jews who were, like the Palestinians, original and indigenous inhabitants of this ancient land.

Yasir Arafat told me quite often that the Israelis are really cousins of the Palestinians. He may have been wrong; they are more likely brothers and sisters.

Morgan Strong is a former professor of Middle Eastern history, and was an advisor to CBS News “60 Minutes” on the Middle East.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/041109b.html
http://dialogic.blogspot.com/2009/04/morgan-strong-israeli-scholar-shlomo.html


Shlomo Sand


Shlomo Sand: “When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?”

Also:
Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State by Joshua Holland
An invention called 'the Jewish people' by Tom Segev
Israeli Historian: Palestinians Are Biological Descendants of Bible's Jews - Mondoweiss
Israeli best seller breaks national taboo By Jonathan Cook
Israel deliberately forgets its history by Schlomo Sand

Shlomo Sand並非唯一猶太歷史學家有類似理論。

The Origins of Modern Jewry
Against the Rationalization of Zionist Crimes
by Joachim Martillo

Zionists and their white racist Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist supporters justify mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native Palestinian population by asserting that ethnic Ashkenazim are descended from ancient Greco-Roman Palestinian Judeans or Galileans.

This belief has no connection to the facts as many Jewish studies scholars will admit in private. At an MIT lecture I asked Harvard Professor Shaye Cohen about the ancestral connection of modern ethnic Ashkenazim to ancient Palestine, and he told me there has been a lot of conversion since Greco-Roman times (whatever conversion meant in Greco-Roman times). In 2002 Marc Ferro published Les Tabous de l'histoire, which discusses in detail the conversion to which Professor Cohen referred.

Conversion is not the only process that deterritorialized Judaism. The Hasmoneans and Herodians seem to have pursued a policy of bringing as many worshippers of the high God El as possible within the fold of the Jerusalem Temple in order to improve the Judean kingdom's finances. El was Kronos to the Greeks and Saturnus to the Romans. In Hellenistic Tyre El Kon-Artz (El Creator of the Earth) was worshipped as El Kronos.

At the time of Jesus the vast majority of El-worshippers, who were adherents of 2nd Temple Judaism, probably had no ancestral connection whatsoever to Greco-Roman Judea, Persian Yehud or ancient Judah.

In very careful analysis of the sources, Seth Schwartz concludes in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) that by the end of the 2nd century 2nd Temple Judaism was completely shattered. He argues that the Constantinian Church reconstructed late Roman Judaism. In a way Shaye Cohen agrees because in The Beginnings of Jewishness he dates the origin of Jewishness as we understand it today to the 4th century.

In Schwartz's analysis Cohen's dating is probably too early because Talmudic/Geonic Judaism is not clearly the dominant current in late Roman Judaism, and Judean Christianity, which treats Jesus as messiah but not as God or son of God, still has many adherents throughout Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia Felix (Hijaz). Such Judean Christians viewed themselves as practicing some form of Judaism, and no Jewish group had a well-defined position on matrilineality or on conversion practices within the Judaism of this time period.

As the Christian late Roman Empire gradually retrenched or broke down, the Khazar Kingdom rose in Southern Russia and flourished from the seventh through tenth centuries. The wealth of the Khazar kingdom seems to have been based in trading Slavs and members of other Southern Russian ethnic groups as slaves first with the Byzantine Empire and then with the early Islamic Empires as well.

Trading in slaves in that time period cannot be equated with human trafficking today. Ancient servitude like later Islamic or Ottoman slavery could provide social mobility, confer political authority and give social status to members of an alien immigrant population. Ehud Toledano discusses such aspects of Ottoman Slavery in Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East. Khazar, Byzantine and early Islamic slavery was probably closer to the later Ottoman system.

Dealing with the Christian and Islamic Empires put pagan Khazars in a tricky position. Some seem to have converted to Christianity and Islam, but such conversion may have created problems for the slave trade because as Christians or Muslims, the Khazars would have had an obligation to convert Slav subjects to either Christianity or Islam and incorporate them into the community. Slaving in such a situation is quite problematic. That time period's Judaisms, which were far less committed to proselytization than Christianity or Islam, for the most part made strong distinctions between members of the community and gentiles as well as between Hebrew slaves and Canaanite (gentile) slaves. Starting in the 8th century (or maybe earlier) the Khazars began to convert to Judaism, and by the 10th century the Khazar Kingdom officially practiced Judaism. For the entire Middle Ages, Rabbinic Jewish literature consistently refers to Eastern Europe as Kanaan -- I presume -- because Eastern Europe was a source of Slavs who were treated legally as `avadim kanaanim (Canaanite slaves).

In contrast with Ibero-Berber Jewish naming practices, which often include Talmudic Aramaic names consistent with the occasional immigration of Jews from Babylonia to Spain, Khazar Jewish names show the typical convert pattern of choosing names out of scripture as described in the work of Columbia Professor William Bulliet. Archeological investigation finds mixed Turkic pagan and Judaic graveyards with the earliest such mixed graveyards in Southern Russia and the later such graveyards in the Balkans and Hungary. Archeologists have also found coins with Turkic and Hebrew inscriptions in Hebrew-Aramaic letters. There is no textual or epigraphical evidence of knowledge of Arabic or of Aramaic among Southern Russian and Eastern European Jews of the 10th century or earlier as one would expect if they or near ancestors were immigrants from Palestine or Mesopotamia.

The Khazars corresponded with the Geonim, who seem to have been willing to adjust the sacred law to fit the slave trade in exchange for economic support. Such accommodation is probably the origin of Medieval Rabbinic Judaism as Khazar slavers needed a codified legal system, and Khazar contributions made it possible for Geonic Judaism to dominate and finally absorb other forms of Judaism at the same time that many members of non-Khazar Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region, Germany and France became agents of the slave trade either directly or through finance, tax farming, or estate management, which were all heavily involved in the slave trade in the early Medieval period or through the medical profession, whose revenue stream came almost entirely from slave traders or slave owners during this time frame. The Jewish slavers that accompanied William the Conqueror to England seem to have been of Ibero-Berber origin and not of Khazar background.

Matrilineal non-proselytizing Medieval Rabbinic Judaism proved exceptionally friendly to the Slavic slave trade. Medieval centers of Rabbinic Jewish learning thrived along with the Slavic slave trade while Medieval Karaites were probably the last holdouts against the Geonic accommodation. Karaite centers declined and tended to be in rather isolated parts of the world.

Amitav Ghosh translated a lot of Geniza documents written by or about a Jewish slaver in India. The book is called In an Antique Land, and Ghosh is somewhat diffident about describing his subject's source of income.

This Khazar hypothesis complements the Pirenne Thesis (Mahomet et Charlegmagne) as well as some of the proposals of Crone, Cooke, and Nevo about the development of early Islam (Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Crossroads to Islam by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren). The spread of various forms of Judaism to Southern Russia probably explains why St. Kliment of Ohrid gave many Cyrillic letters forms similar to those in the Hebrew Aramaic alphabet. Members of a non-Rabbinic Jewish group probably created the Slavonic book of Esther while Bogomili Christianity and Catharism were probably brought westward by Slavic slaves that practiced evolved forms of Judean Christianity, no longer recognized as Judaism by Rabbinic Jewish Khazars.

As the Slavic slave trade expanded the Jewish traders probably needed to free semi-proselyte Slavic slaves to assist in the business. A similar process took place in West Africa as the Black African slave trade expanded. In Germano-Slavic territories where Sorbian and Polabian were spoken, the Slavo-Khazar traders, who initially probably used Sorbian and Polabian, had incentive to relexify their Slavic dialect to German in order to trade with dominant German-speaking populations and to separate themselves from pagan and Christian Sorbians and Polabians. During the 9th-13th centuries this process created an older form of Yiddish, which became the West Yiddish dialects of German territories. During this time period, as the Slavo-Khazar Jewish population became larger and more important within the Jewish community, Arabic died out as a language of religious discourse among non-Khazar Rabbinical Jews.

As the Khazar traders reconstructed trade routes or created entirely new trade routes, Khazar and non-Khazar Jews developed distribution networks for goods unrelated to Slavery. In Spain the Jewish non-Slavery-related trade did not seem to have been highly valued because Spain expelled its Jewish population within 50 years of the shutdown of Slavic slave trade in Mediterranean Christian countries as a consequence of the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople.

The development of sophisticated heterogeneous distribution networks by Jews in Poland made Commonwealth Poland a wealthy world power while Jewish estate management, finance and tax farming remained important and often thrived in Poland even after the complete shutdown of the overland Slavic slave trade by the end of the Wars of the Reformation.

As Jews from the German territories migrated Eastward because of the Crusades and the Wars of the Reformation, the Slavic Kiev-Polessian dialects of the Slavo-Turkic Eastern European and Southern Russian Jewish populations (with the exception of certain isolated Judeoslavic-speaking communities in Slovakia and the Sub-Carpathian region) were relexified to West Yiddish to create East Yiddish dialects. Paul Wexler explains the vocabulary of Yiddish in Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish without proposing any historical reasons for the process. The work of Alexander Beider and other specialists in onomastic studies also demonstrate a westward migration of Eastern Slavic-speaking Jews. Some of the linguistic development of East Yiddish may have taken place in German territories.

By the 17th century practically all consciousness of the Khazar kingdom was lost among Jews, and Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews constitute a distinct Eastern European Ashkenazi ethnic group. During the German economic depression of the century following the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), there was considerable mixing of impoverished German Christians and German Jews, and many Jews probably passed into the Christian community while some Christians were probably absorbed in the Jewish community. During the same time period, as Poland collapsed after the Chmielnicki Rebellion (1648), Polish Prussia came under German rule, and German Jews began to develop some familiarity with the Polish estate system. Thus even after the crystallization of Ashkenazi ethnicity, the boundary between German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim has never been particularly solid.

This article seems to conflict with genetic anthropological studies of Hammer, Oppenheim and similar people but these studies are severely flawed as Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh and I point out in http://tinyurl.com/3e4xby . A recent article by Talia Bloch in the Forward ("One Big, Happy Family," Aug. 22, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/11444/ ) indicates that even some of the most extreme Zionist genetics researchers are beginning to concede that ethnic Ashkenazim are a separate ethnic group distinct from other Jewish groups except insofar as members of ethnic Ashkenazi communities or related Eastern European and Southern Russian populations have been exported to non-Ashkenazi communities in the past.

The rationalization of Zionist crimes against Palestinians on the basis of some sort of modern Jewish ancestral connection to ancient Palestinian populations has always been unethical, but even those that believe genes confer superior rights to one group over another must concede that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists in Palestine are murderous genocidal thieves and interlopers.

http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/origins-of-modern-jewry.html

Dr. Shaye Cohen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaye_J.D._Cohen

巴勒斯坦的猶太人：神話與史實（譯）
2008-12-07 20:49

　　近年來解析的數千份埃及史料已確定無疑：《聖經》中描述的民眾大舉出走一事根本沒有發生過。這些文件鉅細靡遺地記載了該時代中迦南各地所發生的一切，毋庸置疑地證明了，根本沒有「征服迦南」一事，也沒有大衛與所羅門的王國。以色列與猶大兩王國佔據地中海與約旦之間的部分疆土，與周邊列國並無不同。巴比倫征服耶路撒冷後，猶大國的一些精英被放逐到巴比倫，他們在那裡接觸到了當時重要的文化源流。由此而產生了人類的偉大創造之一猶太教。從一開始，當「猶太人」從巴比倫歸國時，此地的猶太人就佔猶太總人口的少數。在整個「第二聖殿」時期（公元前518年－公元70年——譯者注），大多數猶太人居住在其他地方。現代猶太神話認為，今天的猶太人幾乎全是兩千年前居住於巴勒斯坦、在公元70年遭羅馬人驅逐的猶太人的後裔。這顯然無憑無據。

　　作者：Uri Avnery 2008.04.19

　　今晚全世界的猶太人將慶祝逾越節。這一獨特的儀式把各地的猶太人團結到「出埃及」這個神話之下，那是奠定猶太人身份的神話。

　　每年我都驚異於這個儀式的神妙。它令闔家一體，上至尊貴的祖父，下至最小的孩童，無不躬行其事。它涉及所有感覺：視覺、聽覺、嗅覺、味覺與觸覺。高誦哈加達書的簡單條文、象徵性的食物、四杯葡萄酒、合唱、年復一年一絲不苟地重複，這一切在幼年孩童的意識裡留下不可磨滅的印記，不論他們信奉宗教與否，都會將之帶入墳墓。合家圍攏在逾越節餐桌前，安逸而溫暖，這樣的感覺永難忘懷，到老仍令人追念不已。憤世嫉俗的人也許視之為洗腦的最佳範例。

　　這一神話如此深入人心，至於出埃及一事純屬子虛烏有，又有什麼關係？近年來解析的數千份埃及史料已確定無疑：《聖經》中描述的民眾大舉出走一事根本沒有發生過。這些文件鉅細靡遺地記載了該時代中迦南各地所發生的一切，毋庸置疑地證明了，根本沒有「征服迦南」一事，也沒有大衛與所羅門的王國。一百年來，猶太復國主義考古學家不知疲憊地工作，想要找到哪怕一件遺物來印證《聖經》中的敘述，卻全是空忙一場。

　　但這無足輕重。在「客觀」歷史與神話的較量中，符合我們需求的神話總能得勝，而且是大勝。歷史究竟如何並不重要，令我們浮想聯翩的東西才是重要的。迄今為止就是這些在為我們引道。

　　《聖經》的敘述只有一處與有據可查的歷史相印證，那就是公元前853年左右，以色列王亞哈的一萬名軍士與兩千輛戰車，參加敘利亞與巴勒斯坦諸國的盛大盟軍，與亞述作戰。此戰發生於敘利亞的Qarqar，於亞述史書中有述。亞述兵鋒遇挫，但未失敗。

　　（注：我不是歷史學家，但多年來我反思我們的歷史，想得出一些符合邏輯的結論，謹列於下。這些結論大都是世界各地獨立學者正在形成的共識。）

　　以色列與猶大兩王國佔據地中海與約旦之間的部分疆土，與周邊列國並無不同。就連《聖經》中也記載，其民「在各高岡上，各青翠樹下」向各種異教神獻祭。（《列王紀上》14章23節）

　　耶路撒冷是個極小的市鎮，又小又窮，《聖經》中記載的事當時根本不可能在那裡發生。在《聖經》涉及這一時段的各書中，「猶太人」（希伯萊語作Yehudi）一名幾乎未出現，僅見的幾處明顯僅指耶路撒冷周邊、猶大國的居民。當有人請求一位亞述將領「不要用猶大言語和我們說話」（《列王紀下》18章26節）時，猶大言語指的是猶大地方的希伯萊語。「猶太」革命發生於流亡巴比倫期間（前587年－前539年）。巴比倫征服耶路撒冷後，猶大國的一些精英被放逐到巴比倫，他們在那裡接觸到了當時重要的文化源流。由此而產生了人類的偉大創造之一猶太教。約五十年後，一些流亡者回到巴勒斯坦，也帶回了「猶太人」這一稱呼，系指一種宗教、意識形態與政治性的運動，很像當今的「猶太復國主義者」。故而，當今約定俗成的「猶太教」與「猶太人」二詞的意思，只能從那個時間算起。其後的五百年間，猶太一神教漸臻精煉。也正是在這期間，史上最傑出的文學創作希伯萊語《聖經》方才成書。《聖經》作者無意書寫當今意義上的「歷史」，他們只是在寫一部訓導性與啟迪性的宗教經文。

　　要理解猶太教的誕生與發展，就須考慮兩個重要事實：（一）從一開始，當「猶太人」從巴比倫歸國時，此地的猶太人就佔猶太總人口的少數。在整個「第二聖殿」時期（公元前518年－公元70年——譯者注），大多數猶太人居住在其他地方，即今天的伊拉克、埃及、利比亞、敘利亞、塞浦路斯、意大利、西班牙等。當時的猶太人並非一個「民族」——那時還無此概念。利比亞與塞浦路斯猶太人的反羅馬起義，巴勒斯坦的猶太人並未參與，而巴勒斯坦猶太人的大起義，別國猶太人也未參與。「馬喀比派」不是民族戰士，而是宗教戰士，很像當今的塔利班，而且所殺的「希臘化」猶太人比敵軍多得多。（二）流亡猶太人並非獨一無二的現象。當時這很平常。「民族」觀念只存在於現代。「第二聖殿」期間及其後，主要的社會政治模式是享有自治權的宗教政治群體，並無任何特定的地域歸屬。亞歷山大港的猶太教男子可以娶大馬士革的猶太教女子，卻不能娶對門的基督教女子。該女子可以嫁羅馬的基督教男子，卻不能嫁她的希臘化鄰居。流亡猶太人只不過是諸多類似社群之一。這一社會模式在拜占庭帝國得到保留，後來為奧斯曼土耳其帝國繼承，現在仍能在以色列法律中覓得蹤跡。今天，以色列穆斯林不能與以色列猶太教徒結婚，德魯茲人不能與基督徒結婚（至少在以色列不能）——德魯茲人本身就是這種流亡社群延及今日的例子。猶太人只在一點上與眾不同：在歐洲各族漸漸轉向新式的組織架構，最終形成民族之後，猶太人仍是一個宗教流亡群體。

　　困擾史家的謎題是：一小群巴比倫流民何以變成了遍佈世界、有數百萬人之多的人群？足以服人的答案僅有一個：勸化。

　　現代猶太神話認為，今天的猶太人幾乎全是兩千年前居住於巴勒斯坦、在公元70年遭羅馬人驅逐的猶太人的後裔。這顯然無憑無據。「驅逐去國」是個宗教神話：神因猶太人的罪孽而厭棄之，將其從「本國」流放。但羅馬人沒有遷移人口的習慣，而且有確鑿的證據表明，在「狂熱者起義」與「巴爾庫克巴暴動」後，相當多的猶太人仍留在巴勒斯坦，而早在那之前，猶太人的大多數即居住在巴勒斯坦之外。在「第二聖殿」時期及其後，猶太教是勸化性宗教的典範。在公元後的幾百年間它與基督教激烈競爭。有著感人故事的基督教，對羅馬帝國的奴隸與其他底層民眾更具吸引力，而上層則偏好猶太教。在帝國各地，許多人皈依猶太教。

　　德系猶太人的由來尤為令人困惑。在第一千年末，一個龐大的猶太群體倏然間在歐洲出現，而之前並無他們存在的記錄。他們從何而來？

　　有幾種理論。傳統說法是，猶太人從地中海地區向北游走，定居於萊茵河谷，因遭大迫害而避居當時歐洲最自由的波蘭，後從那裡散入俄國與烏克蘭，並帶去一種日爾曼方言，即後來的意地緒語。但特拉維夫大學學者Paul Wexler則斷言，意地緒語的源頭非日爾曼語，而是一種斯拉夫語。根據他的理論，相當多的德系猶太人是Sorbs人後代，那是居於德國東部的一支斯拉夫族群，被迫放棄了其古老的異教信條。其中的許多人選擇信奉猶太教，而非基督教。

　　以色列史家Shlomo Sand寫有一本新書，其書名頗有挑釁性——《猶太人是何時、如何杜撰出來的》。與Arthur Koestler等之前的史家一樣，Sand稱德系猶太人其實大多是Khazar人之後。Khazar人是突厥人的一支，一千多年前曾在今天的俄羅斯南部創建大王國。Khazar王皈依猶太教，而根據這一理論，東歐猶太人大多是Khazar皈依者的後嗣。Sand還認為，西班牙系猶太人的祖先大都是北非一些未成為穆斯林、而是皈依猶太教的阿拉伯與柏柏爾部落，他們曾與穆斯林一道征服西班牙。

　　當不再勸化信眾之後，猶太人就成為一個封閉的、種族宗教性的群體（正如塔木德所言，「皈依者之於以色列，猶如癬疥之難。」）。

　　但歷史真相終歸是無足輕重的。神話強於事實，而神話說猶太人被從這塊土地上驅逐。這是現代猶太意識的重要層面，什麼學術研究都無法動搖。

　　三百年來，歐洲「民族化」了。現代民族國家取代了之前的社會構架，如城邦、封建社會與世襲帝國。民族理念承載著之前的一切，包括歷史。這些新民族都為自身制訂了一種「臆想的歷史」。換言之，每個國家都重新編排了古老的神話與歷史事實，以形成一種「民族歷史」，倡言其重要性，凝聚民眾。

　　如前所述，流散的猶太人在兩千年前是「正常」的，嗣後就變得「不正常」、特別了。在基督教歐洲流行的對猶太人的仇恨，也因此而強化。由於歐洲民族運動幾乎都有些反猶，許多猶太人覺得他們成了「局外人」，在新歐洲無處立足。一些人認定，猶太人必須遵行新的時代精神，把猶太群體變成一個猶太「民族」。

　　為此就需要對猶太歷史做修訂和重述，把一個宗教種族流散群體的編年史變成一部「民族」史詩。肩負其責的人是一位德國猶太人Heinrich Graetz，可把他認作猶太復國主義理念的教父。他受德意志民族主義影響，創造了猶太「民族」史。他的觀念直至今日仍在影響猶太人的意識。

　　Graetz把《聖經》當作一部史書，收集所有的神話，提出了一套完整連貫的歷史敘述：先祖時代、出埃及、征服迦南、「第一聖殿」、巴比倫之囚、「第二聖殿」、聖殿被毀、大流亡。這就是我們在學校中學的歷史，也是猶太復國主義賴以立身的根基。

　　猶太復國主義在許多方面代表一場革命，但其精神革命是不徹底的。猶太復國主義的意識形態把猶太群體解釋成一支猶太族群，又解釋猶太族群為一個民族，但從未釐定其間的差異。為贏得東歐傾向宗教的猶太群眾，猶太復國主義又向宗教妥協，最終成為一個大雜燴——宗教即民族，民族即宗教。猶太復國主義後又斷言，以色列不僅是屬於其公民（猶太公民？）的「猶太國」，而且是世界各地「猶太人」的「猶太國」。以色列的官方說法以以色列為「猶太人的民族國家」，但以色列法律定義的「猶太人」卻狹窄，只是猶太教民。

　　赫茨爾及其後繼者的勇氣，不如創建現代土耳其的基馬爾。基馬爾在土耳其國家與伊斯蘭之間明定疆界。並施行徹底的政教分離。但在以色列，一切仍混雜在一起。這對現實生活有許多影響。

　　例如，倘如我國法律條文所言，以色列是「猶太民族」的國家，則以色列猶太人加入加州或澳洲的猶太社群，即不應受阻礙。故而幾乎所有以色列領導人都有子女遷居國外，便不足為奇了。

　　區分以色列民族與流散猶太人為何如此重要？回答之一就是，與一群宗教種族流散人口相比，一個國家對己對人的態度均有差別。

　　譬如：諸獸對危險的反應不同。瞪羚見有危險即竄逃，而自然又予其必要的稟賦與技能。獅子則堅守領地，抵禦入侵者。兩種方法都成功了，否則世上就沒有瞪羚與獅子了。

　　流散猶太人逐漸形成了一種有效的、適應形勢的應對方法：猶太人一嗅到危險即四散逃離。正因如此，流散猶太人才能躲過無數的迫害，就連納粹種族滅絕也未將其毀滅。當猶太復國主義者決定建國，並真正在此地建國時，他們採取了國家性的應對方式：自衛並攻擊危險源頭。因而，流散人群與國家不可兼具，正如瞪羚與獅子不可兼具一樣。

　　我們以色列人如欲鞏固國家，就必須從子虛烏有的神話中解放自身，重新界定我們的民族史。出埃及紀是個很好的神話故事，也是個很好的寓言——它倡揚自由的價值，但我們必須承認神話與歷史、宗教與民族、流散人群與國家之間的區別，以找到我們在這一地區的位置，並逐漸與相鄰族群建立一種正常的關係。

　　（作者為以色列前議員、作家、和平主義者。譯者劉波。原題做《獅子與瞪羚》。http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1208648191/。翻譯已預得對方同意。）

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