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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Sunday Sermon - No Jewish Israel

In previous blogs SOYMB has highlighted how unreliable the Bible is as history. Modern scholars are now re-assessing ideas that were taken for granted.


The commonly accepted narrative considers the Jews to be descended from residents of the Kingdom of Judah who were exiled and returned to their native land – the modern-day State of Israel – only after thousands of years of exile. In contrast,others support the theory that the Jews are descended from different peoples who lived in various regions in the Mediterranean Sea Basin, and who converted to Judaism in different eras. According to that theory, the story of the exile from Judah, the exilic life led by Jews in the countries of the Diaspora and their continual longing for their native homeland can be considered a myth.

The exile of the Jewish people has played a central role in Christian and Jewish theology for nearly 2,000 years, even being mentioned in Israel's national anthem and its declaration of independence. But what if the exile never actually happened? A documentary, by Israeli film-maker Ilan Ziv, examining the evidence that the Jewish exile from Jerusalem in AD 70 claims it may never have actually happened. It giveS the lie to Zionist claims that, in creating Israel, Jews were "returning" to the Promised Land. If they were never exiled, how could they be returning? And if they never left, would that not make the Biblical Jews today's Palestinians?


Shlomo Sand, professor of history at Tel Aviv University, argues in The Invention of the Jewish People that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’ with a common origin, but rather is a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion when Judaism was an active proselytising religion in the Greek and Roman Empires. They had no common language, since Hebrew was used only for prayer, like the dead language Latin and was not even spoken at the time of Jesus. Yiddish was the language of Ashkenazi Jews. So what is left to unite them? Religion? But religion does not make a people – think of Muslims and Catholics. And most Jews are not religious. Zionism? But that is a political position: one can be a Scot and not a Scottish nationalist. Besides, the majority of Jews, including many Zionists, have not the slightest intention of going "back" to the Holy Land, much preferring, and who can blame them, to stay put in north London, or Brooklyn or wherever. In other words, "Jewish People" is a political construct, an invention. He argues that for a number of Zionists , the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking. The idea of a Jewish homeland, he insists, is a turn-of-the-century Zionist invention (later given urgency by the Holocaust), to lend moral legitimacy to the seizing of territory to which the Jews have no historical right.

In his sequel, The Invention Of The Land of Israel”, he proposes that that even the "Land of Israel" was invented. The "Land of Israel" is barely mentioned in the Old Testament: the more common expression is the Land of Canaan. When it is mentioned, it does not include Jerusalem, Hebron, or Bethlehem. Biblical "Israel" is only northern Israel (Samaria) and there never was a united kingdom including both ancient Judea and Samaria. Even had such a kingdom ever existed and been promised by God to the Jews, it is hardly a clinching argument for claiming statehood after more than 2,000 years.

It is an irony of history that so many past Zionists, most of whom were secular Jews used religious arguments to buttress their case. Besides, the biblical account makes it quite clear (insofar as such accounts are ever clear) that the Jews, led by Moses and then by Joshua, were colonisers themselves and were commanded by God to exterminate "anything that breathes". "Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you." Imagine if the Amorites came back and claimed their ancient land. If they did, this is what Deuteronomy 20 has to say: "Put to the sword all the men ... As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else ... you may take these as plunder for yourselves." Today, such an injunction would take you straight to the international criminal court. What made the "State of Israel" possible was not God's promise of a return to a long-lost land, but the Holocaust and the western reluctance to provide a refuge for its survivors.

Geneticist Eran Elhaik of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, found “ that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaised Khazars, Greco-Roman Jews, Mesopotamian Jews and Judeans,” The geneticist goes on to explain that, among the various groups of European and non-European Jews, there are no blood or family connections: “The various groups of Jews in the world today do not share a common genetic origin. We are talking here about groups that are very heterogeneous and which are connected solely by religion.”

Elhaik’s conclusion contrasts with Yeshiva University professor Dr. Harry Ostrer, who teaches in the departments of pathology, genetics and pediatrics in the university’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, argues that all Jews have a common genetic origin and similar genetic characteristics. According to Ostrer, this common origin is not Khazar but rather Middle Eastern. Thus, in line with his theory, the Jews are descendants of residents of that region who resided there thousands of years ago, were exiled and recently returned to their native land – that is, modern-day Israel. The Jews, he argues, are closer to the Palestinians, Bedouin and Druze than to the Khazars. His findings lend a solid basis to the argument that the Jews originated in the Middle East.

Elhaik does not believe in the existence of a uniquely Jewish gene: “Each human being is a genetic amalgam. No population group has ever lived in total seclusion from other groups.” He also refutes the claim that the genome of many Jews contains a Middle Eastern component, proving that the Jews originated in that region: “The majority of Jews do not have the Middle Eastern genetic component in the quantity we would expect to find if they were descendants of the Jews of antiquity.”

“There is no Jewish genome and certainly no Jewish gene,” says the Israeli-born Elhaik. Instead, all humans are a mix of the same building blocks, built with slightly different architectures. “The confusion about European Jews results from their tragic history of persecutions and deportations, creating multiple links between ancestry and geography. By dismantling our notions of genetically distinct populations and understanding our kinship, we can better appreciate our common history, and more importantly, our shared future.“

Shlomo Sand is a critic of geneticists looking for Jewish genes: “For an ignoramus like me, genetics had always appeared to be crowned with a halo – as a precise science that deals with quantitative findings and whose conclusions are irrefutable.” When he began reading articles on the subject of the Jews’ origin, he found he had been mistaken: “I discovered geneticists – Jewish geneticists – whose knowledge of history ended at what was necessary for their high-school matriculation exams. Which is how I would describe my knowledge of biology. In high school they had learned that there is one Jewish nation, and, on the basis of this historical narrative, they reconstruct their scholarly finding... I used to think that only in such disciplines as history and literature can facts be given various interpretations, but I then discovered that the same thing is done in genetics. It is very easy to showcase certain findings while marginalizing others and to present your study as scholarly research. In general, specialization in genetics can create an incredibly high level of ignorance in history....Their search for the origin of a common gene in order to characterize a people or a nation is very dangerous,” says Sand. With several reservations, he cites the example of the Germans, “who also searched for a common component of blood ties.” The historical irony, he emphasizes, is expressed in the fact that “whereas, in the past, anyone who defined the Jews as a race was vilified as an anti-Semite, today anyone who is unprepared to define them as a race is labeled an anti-Semite.”

DNA either shows a reliable genetic map going back four or so generations - or it shows links that are so broad as to relate one to the Vikings! There was some elation that DNA seemed to be traceable through the female line in Ashkenazi - until it turned out that some of the same markers can be found in Palestinians. Which is generally what DNA research at Tel Aviv University has found for the past couple of decades - that it tends to lead back to what used to be called Mesopotamia, and shows more links with Palestinians than not.

Race and religion is an anti-socialist mix

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