In the previous installments I have pointed to some of the differences between popular U.S. perception of what the state of Israel stands for and the actuality as experienced by the people living in the country and the occupied territories. I also showed that the Jewish leadership in our country, which has significant influence on our domestic and foreign policy, is beginning to be out of step with factual developments both here and in Israel. The purpose of this installment is to further explain How Moses Shaped America. I have capitalized the initials because this is actually the title of an article which appeared in Time magazine last year (October12). The subtitle was, “From the Revolution to the Cold War, the Old Testament hero has been the country’s defining religious symbol. What we can learn from Moses today.” Bruce Feiler, the author, is best known for his book Walking the Bible in which he described his 10,000-mile trek retracing the journey of the Hebrews from Egypt to the Promised Land as described in the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch. Feiler’s article was an adaptation of his latest book, America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story, which, as yet, I have not read. Thus, the subsequent comments are limited to the Time magazine article.

            Feiler’s point was to exhort President Obama to persevere in the face of adversity, just as Moses did when confronted with difficulties from the Egyptian authorities and rebellions by his own people. Although he did not enter the “Promised Land” himself, he had paved the way by constantly emphasizing the vision of a land of “milk and honey,” which they would soon be able to enjoy. Feiler was correct when he pointed out that ever since the first pilgrims entered these shores, who regarded King James as their “pharaoh,” the Exodus story has been the guiding light for Whites and Negroes alike, who used it for their respective purposes. The title “pharaoh” was subsequently bestowed on King George, while the spiritual “Go down Moses . . .  tell Ole’ Pharaoh Let my People go,” could be regarded as the “Battle Hymn” of the Civil Rights Movement. George Washington was regarded as America’s Moses and so was Brigham Young by Mormons. Presidents from Lincoln on down to Obama have consistently emphasized Moses’ greatness as leader and lawgiver. The biblical fact that the “milk and honey” vision was accompanied not only by threats but physical destruction of opponents tends not to be mentioned by Moses’ admirers. Neither is the fact that although Canaan was reached, it did not yield the expected benefits, and that Moses has provided the Hebrews, later Israelites and now Jews, with a great deal of trouble ever since they left the “fleshpots of Egypt.”

            The Moses phenomenon is a classic example which demonstrates that human beings do not live by facts but myths. Moses never wrote the books, which later generations have ascribed to him. There are no historical data about him, and that the Exodus ever took place in the manner the Bible reports it. The only information we have comes from the Bible and a comment by Manetho, as related by Josephus (37- c.100 A.D.), who describes Moses as an Egyptian renegade priest. But this piece of information was regarded by Josephus as “slander” and only the biblical version was propagated by the faithful. I have discussed these aspects of the Moses story in The Moses Legacy and since it can be downloaded free of charge from this site they need not to be discussed further at this time.

Originally these were stories which had been orally transmitted and embellished by gifted storytellers. Their purpose was to serve not only as entertainment and educational tools by the nightly campfires, but also to instill awe as well as fear in the audience. Later on these stories solidified under the leadership of priests; they were put into written form and further modified to serve a religious and/or political purpose. With the passage of time some of these myths, such as the stories about the Greek gods, fell by the wayside and became relegated to “mythology,” while others which fulfilled a more direct political purpose at a given time were adopted and became the foundations of organized religions. Under these circumstances the line between story and historical fact becomes blurred. When myth is regarded as history we end up with “mythistory,” a term used by Shlomo Sand in his book on, “The Invention of the Jewish People.”

            The author is a Professor of History at Tel Aviv University and a typical product of the turbulent second half of the past century. He was born in 1946 in Linz, Austria, where his Jewish Polish parents, who had survived the atrocities of the war, lived temporarily in a DP (displaced persons) camp. In 1948 the family moved to Jaffa. Early on, like many others, he became enamored with communist ideology, joined its youth organization but also proved himself to be sufficiently non-conformist to be expelled from high school. After military service he did receive his matriculation certificate which allowed him to go to university. In 1975 he graduated with a BA in history from the University of Tel Aviv but his PhD (1982) was earned in Paris where he first studied, and subsequently taught, French history until 1985 when he returned to Tel Aviv. These bare-bone facts came from Wikipedia. The rest of the information, which is recounted below, was obtained from his mentioned book which also carries on its cover page, a quote from the New York Times, “Extravagantly denounced and praised.” It was originally published under the title Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi? and it is noteworthy that the Hebrew title had a question mark at the end. A faithful translation, as it appears in the English version, would have been, “When and How was the Jewish People invented?” 

            To understand the furor the book has created it is useful to first look at the meaning of the word “people.” In English it is derived from populus, as for instance in Senatus Populusqe Romanus (SPQR, the Senate and the people of Rome). The term referred to the people under Roman authority, in the sense “of forming a political community,” but did not necessarily convey an ethnic status. In contrast, the German corollary Volk, when used in a political context, is largely identical with ethnicity. These are not academic distinctions. They can have very practical and in fact lethal consequences. When Hitler issued his decrees in the name of “das deutsche Volk,” a distinction was drawn from other Voelker, such as the French, British etc. Inasmuch as Zionists proclaimed that Jews are also a Volk, a people or nation, they were automatically foreigners and could never be “real” Germans. All of the disasters which befell the Jews of Germany flowed from this interpretation of one word.

            Closely connected with the idea of Volk in this narrow sense is that of Heimat, a concept which has little meaning in America. Since it is a concept, rather than simply a six letter word, it cannot be properly translated but must be described. Although the term “homeland” could be used, it is not merely the country where one happened to have been born. The concept includes: place of birth, the language one is raised in, and most importantly the identification with the history of one’s place of birth. These aspects together form the emotional attachment to, and responsibility for, that place which was the first “home” in one’s life. Let me make this quite concrete. I was born in Austria and at first had Austrian citizenship; when Austria disappeared from the map through Hitler’s annexation, I became officially German, albeit of inferior status because of my Jewish grandfather. In April 1945, after the Soviet Union had “liberated” Austria and established a government in Vienna I became Austrian again. When I left Austria for the U.S., married Martha and subsequently obtained citizenship, I became and have remained an American. While living in this country Martha and I have resided in four different states of the Union: so where is my Heimat? Well, I still happen to have an official legal document which is called Heimatschein. This is a certificate that was issued in 1933 by the City of Vienna which guarantees me “Heimatrecht” in Vienna throughout my lifetime.  

            This excursion into German language and thought might seem totally irrelevant to Americans, but it is in fact the essence of our current problems in the Middle East. One tends to forget that the early Zionists spoke, thought, and wrote mainly in the German language rather than English, French, Polish or Russian. The official language of the First Zionist Congress (Basel 1897) was German and Wikipedia shows the first page of the “Programm.” The first handwritten sentence reads, “Der Zionismus erstrebt fuer das juedische Volk die Schaffung einer oeffentlich [in insert] rechtlich gesicherten Heimstaette in Palaestina.” This might be translated as: Zionism strives toward the creation of an official, legally guaranteed, homeland in Palestine. As such, Volk and Heimat were the concepts they operated with. Zionists did not feel “at home” in the countries where they happened to have been born and raised, because regardless where they lived they were in a minority and as such liable to discrimination as well as outright persecution.

For assimilated secular Jews all of this was dangerous nonsense because they did identify with the country they were born in: Germany, France, England, America etc. They knew that instead of anti-Semitism magically disappearing, when the Jews moved to Palestine from the countries they lived in, their troubles would not be over but new ones would follow in their wake. Although sporadic anti-Semitism was a nuisance it was not a danger in Central and Western Europe. They, therefore, had no intention of packing up and leaving. The well-to-do had come to identify with the country of their birth, although this was not the case to that extent in Poland and Russia where the largely poor majority of Jews resided.

Hitler’s policies changed all that because he took the Zionists at their word and applied their aspirations to all Jews. The logic was: If you are a Volk and your Heimat is in Palestine please go but leave the major portions of your property here. Germany is for Germans and if you wish to remain you will no longer have the right to full citizenship, but only residency with limited professional opportunities. These policies were codified in the Nuremberg laws. In 1938 the annexation of Austria added a sizeable Jewish minority to the Reich and brought new chicaneries. But systematic state sponsored, rather than sporadic, murder of Jews did not occur until WWII and especially the campaign against the Soviet Union. Although the November 1938 Kristallnacht could be regarded as foreshadowing the future. When one is aware of these historic facts, of which I happen to be an eye-witness, the current Israeli policies towards its non-Jewish citizens, and especially in the occupied territories, evoke eerie memories. The official stance of the state is that all of Palestine is Heimat solely for Jews, just as Germany was only for Germans during the Hitler years. Non-Jewish citizens in Israel proper (within pre June 1967 borders) have limited rights and the Palestinians in the occupied territories are currently stateless, although the Palestinian authority does issue them passports for travel abroad.

This is the situation, which is deplored by Israelis who are guided by history and the light of reason. It has, therefore, given rise to numerous articles as well as books. The mentioned one by Professor Sand has struck at the root of the problem and this is why his book is both praised and vilified.  His intention was to expose the voelkisch, nationalistic and chauvinistic interpretation of the word “people,” and that of a common national origin, as a myth which is taken for actual history.  This is why he used the word “mythistory” to define the thinking which has given rise to the current tragedy.

            The Introduction lays out the absurdity of Israel’s nationality law. Every person living in Israel has to have an official identity card which also states the individual’s “nationality.” Those who are Jews by birth or conversion, regardless of the country they were born in, are designated as “Jewish;” all others carry the names of the country of their birth. But since the state of Israel does not recognize “Palestine” as a country the Palestinians who had remained after the nakba (the events surrounding the founding of the state which led to the massive and as yet unsolved refugee problem), are referred to as “Arabs.” As Sands pointed out Israel has thereby become the first country in the world which recognizes Arab nationality and unity, which, by the way, even Nasser had failed to accomplish. He described the situation as,

“Dominated by Zionism’s particular concept of nationality, the state of Israel still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not characterized as Jews, and the laws of the state imply that it is not their state nor do they own it. The state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands) – that is to say, a state that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which they chose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.”

The book then demonstrates that Jews have never been one unified people, who resided more or less continuously in Palestine until they were “exiled” after the Jewish wars in the first and second century of our era. Instead, they were characterized by what Arthur Koestler called in his book, The Thirteenth Tribe, “Wanderlust” (desire to roam the world) which established large Jewish Diaspora communities within the various empires of their day. Koestler’s book, published in 1976, with the subtitle, The Khazar Empire and its Heritage was the first one which popularized the theory that the large Eastern European Ashkenazi Jewish population might not have originated, as commonly assumed, from German Jews of the Rhineland. Instead, Koestler argued, they might have come to a large extent from a westward movement when the Khazar Empire, which was ruled by Jews for some time, collapsed in the tenth century AD.

This is not the place to enter into the pros and cons of this theory, which is the basis of Koestler’s book and was also discussed by Sand as well as by Kevin Alan Brook in The Jews of Khazaria.  Suffice it to say that this kingdom covered an extensive area between the Caspian and the western shore of the Black Sea, including the Crimea. To the North it reached up to Kiev, and Georgia in the South was its tributary. A map is available on  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chasaren.jpg. The relevancy for now is that at some point in time Judaism became the state religion. The empire was ruled on a hereditary basis by a “Kagan” who held the supreme authority although the military commander could also have that title. Since Judaism was the state religion it should not be surprising that a Muslim traveler in the tenth century wrote, “In Khazaria, sheep, honey and Jews exist in large quantities [Koestler 1976].” But when Khazaria lost its independence, in the latter half of the tenth century, the people did not vanish; instead a gradual westward migration took place into what is now Southern Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Hungary.

From an etymologic point of view it is of interest that Kagan has become a relatively common Jewish name as for instance of the recently appointed Supreme Court Justice. In Russia the better known Lazar Kaganovich (son of Kagan) was one of the early leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution and co-author of the decrees which led to the famine in the Ukraine (1932-1933) for which he has recently been accused of genocide. In Brook’s book there is also a legend about the origin of the Khazars. They consisted of several Turkish tribes and the most powerful of these was called: A-shi-na. It may not be too far fetched to relate this to Ashkenaz, also spelled Ashenaz, although Brook did not make this connection. Yet, it may not be totally unfounded. In Genesis 10:2-3 Ashkenaz was the great-grandson of Noah via Japheth and Gomer. In Jeremiah 51:27 where the Lord vents his anger against Babylon, the kingdoms of “Ararat, Minni and Ashenaz” were to assist from the North while the Medes were to join in the destruction from the South. In addition it might not be irrelevant that Noah’s ark supposedly came to rest on “Mount Ararat,” which is in southern Turkey.

Furthermore, in The Moses Legacy I have pointed out that Abraham’s original name was Abram and since Indo Europeans were already present during the second millennium B.C. in what are now Turkey, Syria and Iraq, some of the biblical names need not be thought of as originating within Semitic languages but could have counterparts in Sanskrit, from which most European languages were subsequently derived. In that language the verb “bhram” means “to rove” or “to wander” and the prefix “a” indicated the imperfect tense. Abhram would have meant “wandered.” Is this suggestion totally uncalled for? Well, in Deuteronomy 26:5 Moses exhorted the Israelites to say at the time when they bring the first fruits as an offering to the Lord, “A wandering Aramean was my father . . . [The Soncino Chumash].” The King James Version substituted the word “Syrian” for Aramean, which is more modern but less historical. Abram’s father was Tera, and in Sanskrit Thera means “Elder.” Abram’s grandfather as well as his brother was called Nahor and the root nah means “to bind,” Sarah has numerous meanings in Sanskrit of which “precious” is one. Furthermore, the Ur from which father Tera supposedly migrated need not be the Ur in southern Mesopotamia but could have been Urfa, as Gordon and Rendsburg in The Bible and the Ancient Near East have pointed out. Urfa was close to Haran as well as the city of Nahor, where Abram’s clan resided and from which Jacob brought his wives: Leah and Rachel. These places were to the east of the Euphrates in what is now southern Turkey. Thus, a case can be made that Jewish ancestry is more closely associated with the northern portion of the Levant and its eastern extension, rather than the “Land of Zion,” which is considerably further south.

In the eyes of confirmed Zionists this is, of course, rank heresy because the title to the land and with it the expulsion of the locals in Palestine, who relish their orchards and are not gripped by “Wanderlust,” loses its justification. This is why Sand’s book has been so vigorously attacked in official circles. Since the entire moral justification for the Zionist enterprise resides in the Bible, archeology has a political dimension in Israel. Jerusalem is the key flashpoint in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and Prime Minister Netanyahu has recently reaffirmed that “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” This allows him to bulldoze Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem in order to create space for Jewish settlers. Unfortunately, there is no evidence, apart from the Bible, that Jerusalem was the seat of a powerful kingdom in ancient times. Sand referred to this lack of evidence and it is further documented in the book by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (published in 2002) The Bible Unearthed. Archeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts.

The authors, who are professional archeologists, reaffirmed that the stories about the patriarchs, Moses, the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan by Joshua are legends rather than facts, but Chapter 6 was the bombshell which galvanized Sand. Its title, “One State, One Nation, One People?” immediately brought memories of Vienna during the Ides of March 1938 to my mind. In those days the masses cried themselves hoarse with the slogan: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer to celebrate that Austria had again joined Germany as had been the case prior to 1866. “Heim ins Reich” was the slogan, but in 1945 “Heim aus dem Reich” was more popular because Austrians had found out that the neighbors to the North were not their Heimat after all.  In the mentioned chapter, which clearly influenced the title of Sand’s book, Finkelstein and Silberman presented evidence that the most hallowed belief in the powerful united monarchy under David and Solomon was an invention by Jerusalem’s priesthood during the reign of Josiah in the 7^th century B.C.

Contrary to poplar belief archeological discoveries suggest that the northern Kingdom of Israel was the more densely settled and prosperous, while the southern Kingdom of Judah was sparsely inhabited and economically backward. In the tenth century (supposed time of David and Solomon) “the built-up area of Jerusalem covered an area of no more than one hundred and fifty acres. . . .  Its population of around fifteen thousand would have made it seem hardly more than a small Middle Eastern market town. . . . ” Instead of the Davidic kingdom having been the glorious one it was the line of Omri in the North which achieved international importance in the ninth century. The kingdom of Judah only entered the larger scene in the eighth century, when it was flooded by refugees from the north after the Assyrian conquest, and especially in the seventh under the reign of Josiah (639-609). It was under his rule that the “book of law,” which is commonly regarded as having been Deuteronomy, was “discovered.” A strict monotheism with a single place of worship, the Jerusalem temple, was instituted and enforced. In addition History was rewritten from the point of view of the Jerusalem priesthood which resulted in the “historical” portions of the Bible as we know it. The tribe of Judah and its descendants became the heroes and the Northerners had received their just desert for having hankered after false gods. A second editing and embellishment of the Bible had taken place after the fall of Jerusalem (587), which was likewise blamed on the waywardness of its inhabitants towards Yahweh. Nevertheless, the supposed promise of the messianic kingdom under a descendant of David and centered in Jerusalem, has remained intact to this day and provides the excuse for Israeli policies.

Since archeology has failed to deliver the expected results attention has now shifted to genetics to bolster the idea of the “One People.” While “race” was a bad word that had to be avoided after Hitler, it has now resurfaced under the more scientific term, “DNA.” A few years ago a “Cohen gene” had been found but it made no appreciable impact. Earlier this year, however, two scientific papers appeared, which were reported in the New York Times (June 9, 2010) under the title “Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity.” The two Jewish communities of Europe, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, were found to have been genetically close and the studies “refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand . . . that Jews have no common origin. . . . Jewish communities from Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus all have substantial genetic ancestry that traces back to the Levant; Ethiopian Jews and two Judaic communities in India are genetically much closer to their host populations.”  

When I read the article another headline from the Times sprang to mind, “Tests Show King Tut Died from Malaria [February 16, 2010].” When one reads the fine print of the actual paper in JAMA it becomes clear that the malaria parasite had not been found only in Tut’s tissues, but it was also present in other royal mummies from that period and the precise cause of his death still remains a matter of speculation. The article on Jewish genes was based on two papers. One, “Abraham’s children in the genome era: major Jewish diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry,” was by Atzmon and co-workers; while Behar and his group had published, “The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people.” For me the key sentence from Behar paper was that “Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations.” The major population center of the Druze is, however, not in southern Palestine i.e. Jerusalem and the former Kingdom of Judah but further north in Lebanon and Syria. When one goes from Cyprus to the east and a tad north one arrives in Haran from where Abram is supposed to have set out on his journey. From there to Khazaria is just the proverbial “hop, skip and jump.” This particular paper, therefore, hardly lends itself to support a claim to Jerusalem on a genetic basis.

The Atzmon study is very complex and for me somewhat difficult to interpret but here are the key points. Principal component analysis (a statistical technique which allows separation into major contributing elements) showed, “that the Jewish populations clustered with European groups.” This result was, of course, not particularly desirable so the data were milked further; subclusters were identified and not surprisingly “Europeans were closest to Ashkenazi Jews.” It can, therefore be concluded that genetics are likewise a poor tool to claim the land of Palestine as the birthplace of the Jewish people, rather than its religion.

This brings us back to America and its Jews who currently hold the fate of the world in their hands. Since one may regard this as an exaggeration I shall refer for now only to the book by Elliott Abrams, Faith or Fear, which he published in 1997 while temporarily out of office. During the Reagan administration he was intimately involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal, indicted by the Senate for withholding information, but pardoned during the presidency of Georg H W Bush who elevated him to the post of “Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs.” On June 25, 2001, during the Bush-Cheney presidency he became “Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations at the National Security Council.” On December 2, 2002 he became “Special Assistant to the President and the NSC's [National Security Council] Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs.” In this capacity he was the major American player in Fatah’s military attempt to gain power in Gaza after Hamas’ unexpected success in the Palestinian elections. The coup, instigated by the U.S., not only failed, but consolidated Hamas’ rule in Gaza with the consequences all of us are aware of. Although temporarily out of office again he still is a person of  considerable influence whose views one should listen to.

His book carries the subtitle, “How Jews can survive in a Christian America” and is remarkable for its candor. Had a Gentile written about how the Jewish leadership has conducted itself during the past century, he/she would have been summarily drummed out of court for blatant anti-Semitism. Abrams noted that, haunted by fears of past persecutions, they decided that religion was the major problem and secularism with a strict separation of Church and State had to be enforced. To this end numerous lawsuits were instigated and we know the result. The social fabric was rent asunder, personal gratification rules and “love thy neighbor” is obsolete in the circles which shape public policy.Yet, this and the other mechanisms the Jewish leadership has employed to overcome this primal fear, such as the promotion of identification with the land of Israel and devotion to the holocaust, will, according to Abrams, not succeed in the long run.

Abrams’ noted that Christianity has changed over the past several decades. It no longer bedevils Jews but respects them, therefore, they have nothing to fear from Christians. The greatest current danger to Judaism in America is intermarriage, because about fifty percent of Jews marry partners from other belief systems. Assimilation will lead to loss of identity unless Jews return to Judaism i.e. the Torah and its teaching. Abrams obviously failed to recognize that those Jews who do obey the Torah – the orthodox and ultra-orthodox segment – have to be in perpetual conflict with the rest of the world because it demands separation and “otherness.”

The Torah myths are the basis of the Middle East wars and as long as policymakers subscribe to them there can be no peace.  Given these facts the “peace talks” which are supposed to begin again in Washington in the middle of this month have hardly any chance for success and, as in the past, the Palestinians will likely be blamed in the American media for the failure. Inasmuch as the popular media dispense myths rather than facts, as an excuse for political decisions, the topic will be continued in next month’s installment, with further documentation of the vital role Jewish individuals and organizations play in shaping the policies of our country.