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11 comments from readers

pete999
06 November 2009 at 20:20

Given that Israel has been about since 1948 and is the preminent power in the middle east isnt this a touch late?

Or is it just another way to prolong the Arab/Isreali fight by given the morons on both sides more aummunition...

Attrition47
07 November 2009 at 21:41

Has Dennis promised to stay sober?

irish viking
07 November 2009 at 22:08

He promised,but I`m not absolutely sure if he was sober when he made that promise

Martin Jacob
07 November 2009 at 22:18

I will be turning up. I have also invited Harry Hill - just to confirm that Jonathon and Harry are indeed not the same person...

davka
07 November 2009 at 22:19

What a twit Sand is. The genetic evidence that Jews originate in the Middle east is incontrovertible.

mark gardner
10 November 2009 at 09:30

why does the new statesman expend such effort on promoting shlomo sand?

Zkharya
10 November 2009 at 14:33

Why get non-academic, non-historian Denis Macshane to speak with Sand?

Why not an academic Jewish historian from the nearby UCL Hebrew and Jewish studies department?

Is this a silly question?

I am a student immersed every day in many of the primary texts in which Sand, a historian in French cinema, is far from a specialist. I can tell you that the assumption that Jews are a people dispossessed of temple, city and land is very ancient. It is a datum of both Christian and Islamic culture and civilisation from their beginnings i.e. the cultures and societies in which most Jews have lived for the last 2000 years. But it is an ancient, traditional Jewish datum too. It is far from a 17th century invention.

Sand’s holding a post-Revolutionary French notion of nationality as the touch stone of its definition is absurd: the Greeks and the Romans regarded Jews as a distinct ethno-national group, along with Syrians and Egyptians.

But, more to the point, Sand’s criterion proves the very opposite of his thesis: the granting to Jews of French citizenship was significant precisely because it was the first time since antiquity that Jews could transcend their (anciently regarded) Jewish ethno-nationality without having first to convert from Judaism to Christianity.

The intellectuals of the French Republic all assumed the Jews were an ethno-national group historically dispossessed because this was not merely how Jews saw themselves, it had been a datum of European culture for nearly 2000 years.

It was precisely this identity Jews were supposed to surrender in order to become French citizens. That was why orthodox rabbis viewed emancipation with such ambivalence, and why Liberal Judaism evolved as a response.

Zkharya
10 November 2009 at 18:53

The exile is assumed in rabbinic and Talmudic literature, as it is in Christian and Islamic. The Talmud is an expression of the rabbis’ resolve that every scrap of Jewish law, lore, custom and memory be retained in the face of the catastrophic loss of temple, Jerusalem, Judea and state.

The Mishna and Talmuds are “the book”.

There are no “books” on any events in Jewish history, subsequently, for over 1500 years. That does not mean they did not take place.

And there is another book: Bellum Judaeorum. Josephus is too early to realise the loss of temple and Jerusalem is permanent, and he likely hoped for their return to Jewish soveignty. But there is no question that he perceives the loss of a Jewish state, of which Jerusalem is the capital.

Soon after Jews fall from favour. We hear no more of Hellenistic Jewish intellectuals, like Philo, whether Roman citizens or no. The destruction of the Alexandrian Jewish communities signals a decline in Hellenistic Jewish civilisation, a decline completed by the Christians. Jews no longer write Greco-Roman historiography. Hellenistic and Roman Jewish works, the provenance, in any case, of an elite, are lost. All Jews, empirewide, are punished for the rebels of Judea by collection of the temple tax. Indeed this likely plays a part in triggering the revolts in Alexandria and Cyrenaica. All Jews are thus identified as “Judeans”, and the Christians continue the policy. But now Jews are not only treated as de facto rebels, or potential rebels, against the Roman state and its gods, they are rebels against their own God, who know favours Greco-Roman gentile Christians, who inherit Jerusalem and Judea, now renamed “Palestine”, from their pagan predecessors, who acted as agents of divine wrath against Israel for rejecting or slaying Christ.

The “myth” of exile arises precisely because it is no longer possible to retain or research information about the past in detail. Except in the Talmud. It is a shorthand that most neatly encapsulates the Jewish experience of dispossession, disfavour, subjugation and displacement. Jews intermingle and intermarry, and the rabbis forge a pan-Jewish identity precisely because they fear Israel will be lost among the nations. Thereafter the tendency is less to convert new as to retain old Jews.

The assumption, indeed the necessity, that Jews are a people dispossessed of temple, city and land for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets only bolsters Jewish self-definition.

And the Christians continue the process of Jewish dispossession of the land of Israel by laws seeking to alienate or marginalise them. Yes, a sizable Jewish community remains in the land, largely in the Galil, whether many Judean refugees likely went.

Shlomo’s assertion that Romans did not exile peoples is idiotic: they certainly carried out tranfer or genocide against Dacia, the only other province, other than Judaea, to be renamed as a consequence.

Cassius Dio says 500 000 Judeans were killed during the suppression of the second Jewish revolt. Exaggeration? Possibly. But ethnic cleansing even by modern standards (and the Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian experience springs to mind).

Judaea is changed to Syria Palaestina both to likely reflect that “demographic” change and to alienate Jews from the land for ever. It was never complete, sure. But I can tell you that every ancient Christian author, even those living in Palestine speaks as though Israel has been completely dispossessed from the land, not because it necessarily reflects reality, but because it reflects things as they think they should be.

Which is why Jews have been regarded as a people dispossessed of temple, city and land, in Christendom and Islam, for most of Christian and Islamic history.

Especially Palestinian Christian and Islamic history.

I am a PhD student, and I can tell you the Khazar theory has no takers among the academics I know.

Zkharya
10 November 2009 at 22:02

Conte de Clermont-Tonnerre to the General Assembly of the Republic 'To the Jews as individuals everything, to the Jews as a nation nothing.'

It goes without saying that this presupposes Jews to have been a national group of some kind, although this was what Jews needed to abandon to become French citizens.

Zkharya
12 November 2009 at 17:55

May one ask whether Colin Shindler, Professor of Israel Studies at SOAS, was invited to address Shlomo Sand last night?

Professor Colin Shindler will be giving a talk on the origins of leftwing anti-Zionism at the Brunei Lecture Hall, next week:

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/colin-shindlers...

Jonathan
13 November 2009 at 06:45

http://cifwatch.com/2009/11/12/pondlife-buried-in-the-sand/#...

Why does the New Staesman promote a thesis which has never been subject to academic peer review at a conference of Jewish historians; which contains the antisemitic misuse of the ‘chosen people’ phrase (p313); and which ignores archaeological and genetic evidence for the existence of the Jewish people in Israel in biblical times?