The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand

Author:Shlomo Sand
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781844676231
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2010-06-13T23:00:00+00:00

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING THE “PEOPLE OF THE LAND”

“He shall even return, and have intelligence with them that forsake the holy covenant” (Dan. 11: 30)—the consoling prophecy of the prophet from Babylon—was interpreted by Rabbi Saadia Gaon in the tenth century CE as follows: “They are the Ishmaelites in Jerusalem; and then they defiled the mighty temple.” The great Jewish scholar, who translated the Bible into Arabic, continued his commentary: “[He] shall speak marvelous things against the God of gods” (Dan. 11: 36)—“outrageous words against the Lord of Eternity, till he discharge his anger with Israel, then the Creator will destroy the enemies of Israel.” He went on to interpret the verse “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12: 2), saying, “at is the resurrection of the Israelite dead, destined to eternal life. Those who will not awake are those who turned away from the Lord, who will descend to the lowermost level of hell, and will be the shame of all flesh.”

In 1967 these comments from the works of Saadia Gaon, expressing his profound grief about Islamization, were presented and highlighted in a fascinating essay by the historian Abraham Polak, the founder of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University.113 Soon after Israel seized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, this scholar thought that the conquered population would become an insoluble problem for the State, and cautiously brought up the vexed issue of “the origin of the Arabs of the Land of Israel.” Polak, a confirmed Zionist, was a bold student of Islam, and he disliked unjustifiable suppressions of memory, as we shall see in the next chapter. Since no one was willing to talk about those who did “forsake the holy covenant,” those “Ishmaelites in Jerusalem,” or those “enemies of Israel” who “turned away from the Lord,” he took the almost impossible mission upon himself.

His important essay did not argue that all Palestinians were the direct or exclusive descendants of the Judeans. As a serious historian, he knew that over thousands or even hundreds of years almost any population, especially in such geographic junctions as the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, mingles with its neighbors, its captives or its conquerors. Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Egyptians and Crusaders had all come to the country and always mingled and integrated with the local population. Polak assumed that there was considerable likelihood that Judeans did convert to Islam, meaning that there was a demographic continuity in the agrarian “people of the land” from antiquity to our time, and that this should be the subject of a legitimate scientific study. But as we know, what history did not wish to relate, it omitted. No university or other research institution responded to Polak’s challenge, and no funds or students were assigned to the problematic subject.

Bold as he was, Polak was not the first to raise the issue of mass Islamization, and he pointed this out in his introduction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.