I just finished reading Shlomo Sand’s recent brilliant book of this title. While most reviews have focused on its implications for Israeli statehood – a matter also at the center of Sand’s preoccupations in writing – I think it is worth drawing attention to two other aspects which seem to have been less discussed: what the book has to offer in terms of insights into the genesis and self-understanding of the Jewish populations in Europe, and the many unanswered questions which remain in this regard; and the fascinating perspective it also offers on Christian origins, a perspective which, as a student of the subject, had been entirely lacking to me to date.
In relation to the first topic, Sand proposes that the Ashkenazi Jewish populations primarily descend from Jews of the Khazarian empire which dominated the Pontic steppe between the 7th and 11th centuries CE, and which adopted Judaism (partly perhaps Karaite) as the religion at least of its elite; their ethnic origins would be Turkic and partially Slav (though they admixed with the preceding Scythian and Sarmatian populations, and Hunnic elements have also been supposed). Jews from the Byzantine Empire and fleeing the Asian advance of the Muslim armies would also have swelled the Khazar population. Following its subjugation by Kievan Rus, and the Mongol invasions, the Khazar state ceased to exist, but its Jewish subjects are assumed to have sought refuge in the Slavic lands and in Lithuania.
This theory remains for the moment entirely speculative, but this is not the point. It is clearly less speculative, at least, than the Zionist myths of descent from the Jewish patriarchs. Moreover, it has math and therefore common sense on its side; the extent of Eastern European Jewry is far greater than descent from a tiny statelet like Judah could ever imply. Sadly, a veil of silence has fallen on this matter, scorned by those most interested – Zionists and Russians – because of its inconvenient relationship to their respective dominant ideologies, and ignored by others because of the fear of being labelled anti-Semitic. By reminding us of this thesis – which he did not invent – Sand helps me at least to start to make some sense of Jewish history in Eastern Europe and to normalize it within the development of the societies in question. Presumably, he must also help many Ashkenazi Jews themselves to follow the same journey of self-discovery, infinitely more satisfying and authentic than the distorsions of the Zionist discourse.
It is to be hoped that his work will be followed by more detailed research into these matters – the Khazar capital has yet to be located, never mind excavated; the sociological processes at work in the medieval Slavic lands remain to be elucidated, and the origin of the Yiddish language remains clouded in a good deal of mystery (the standard theory that it developed in the Rhineland in the 10th century is evident nonsense, since it incorporates a lexicon based on High German forms which did not spread to the Rhineland until centuries later – see here for a review of current theories).
It is however on the issue of Christian origins, which Sand hardly discusses at all, that I find the book most enlightening. It has always appeared to New Testament commentators that the consistent reference to Jewish matters and practice in the gospels and epistles testifies to the earliest stage of Judean Christianity or forms part of an ontological justifying discourse which needed to draw its roots in the Old Testament for endogenous theological reasons. This frame of reference relies on the supposed marginality of Jewish diaspora groups in the cities of the Roman empire where Paul did his preaching and Christianity initially spread. From Sand’s resurrection of Judaism’s proselytizing past, however, it becomes immediately apparent that (1) the two monotheistic religions were in intense competition for converts in the first centuries of our era and (2) Christianity initially is likely to have spread particularly within the communities of Jewish monotheistic belief, drawing on numerous elements already present in these communities, which must have displayed varying degrees of syncretism (and in any case, one cannot speak in this period of a unified Jewish religion even in Judea – far from it). Judaism was the first monotheistic religion to enter onto the Hellenistic scene which was prepared for monotheism by the great Greek philosophers; as such, its attraction seems to have been considerable. The thought of Plato, Pythagoras and others was increasingly incompatible with traditional Greek religion, yet their metaphysics must have been unsatisfactory for the religious needs of their contemporaries and their rulers (as the well-documented spread of Mithraism and other oriental mystery religions also attests). Paul exploited the same opportunity.
Awareness of this context casts numerous NT passages in an entirely new light. Just to take the example Sand cites, Galatians 3:29, “If ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise”. This kind of turn of phrase always seemed to me impossibly abstract and bizarrely irrelevant to a Greek audience. Imagining the rival claims of Jewish proselytizers targeting, or already having reached, the same audience immediately gives it a lot more sense.
To finish with Israel, though – and the least one can say is that it is and remains a thorny problem in international relations – I would like to quote and endorse Sand’s words in the afterword to the English edition :
It would never occur to anyone to deny the existence of the United States because indigenous peoples were robbed of their lands when the nation was formed. No one would claim that the Norman conquerors should be expelled from the British Isles, or the Arabs brought back to Spain. If we want to avoid transforming the world into a giant mental hospital, we must resist the urge to redistribute populations according to some historical model. Israel can today claim the right to exist only by accepting that a painful historical process led to its creation, and that any attempt to challenge this fact will produce new tragedies.
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