The contrarian view is interesting and important. I didn’t read the book. But I just listened to over an hour lecture in New York by Shlomo Sand, published on his blog (the relevant part starts at the 20 min mark). I find the presentation and the conclusions are extremely charged politically and this does a great disservice to the scientific validity of the book.
OK, the Maccabees converted entire nations to Judaism, hence King Herod, I get that. There were Judaic kingdoms in Iraq, Berbers in Morocco, the Jewish kingdom in Yemen and of course the Khazars. I am even willing to accept the idea that there was no mass expulsions by the Romans. The Khazars founded Kiev, the birthplace of Russia. So far so good. But if Shlomo Sand intends to draw a direct line between the Khazars and the Eastern European Jews, he would have to explain in relative detail what happen between the Jewish Kiev and the Jewish Kovno. This is the glaring ten century gap, I doubt Shlomo Sand adds anything new on the subject, but I am keeping my mind open. But Shlomo Sand is right, the idea that Jew and Judaism resists conversions is a very recent distortion. Undoubtedly there were mass conversions by force and through missionary work. Hence the kingdoms and the Jewish colonies.
The cavalier dismissal by Sand of the German track into the Eastern Europe is not very serious, I don’t recall anyone in Berditchev speaking a Turkic dialect of Khazars, they spoke “German”, enough said. The marginal communities in Georgia, the Mountain Jews and even Iranian Jews is a different story, but those are the low hanging apples, too low even for Shlomo Sand.
Further Reading:
The Curse of the Jewish
The Jewish Black Death Treasures of Colmar and Erfurt
The Poetic Justice of Shlomo Carlebach
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Simon Schama reviewing the book in the London FT writes:
‘Sand is right in believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a “true” Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not to himself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were not mythical’.
This strikes me as a correct conclusion (even though it is not his last paragraph). The straight line between Kiev and Kovno would be sufficiently described as a homogenising continuum of suffering and low level struggle. No detail required / none available.
Cue some solid genetic research re-packed and presented by an articulate social anthropologist with no regard for the political consequences?
This Khazar theory has been debunked and debunked and debunked. It’s like Holocaust revisionism, and usually promoted by the same people. The goal is to divorce contemporary Jewry from its past, in order to delegitimize israel as a Jewish state and Jews as a people with a long history in. That. Place.
The legitimacy of Israel is not as a consolation prize for suffering. (Preserve us from our friends like Simon Schama!) it’s the historic homeland of the Jewish people, which has been continuously inhabited by Jews for at least 3500 years (recognizable to contemporary Jews as Jews, based on artifacts) except for brief periods of time when we were not able to overcome the repeated ethnic cleansing. The miracle of israel is not that it was recreated but that it was tenuously held onto generation after generation in the face of repeated massacre and expulsion.
Even if we had been “given” some other “homeland” in Africa or wherever, Jewish history would still be in Israel. That’s where it was. You know, in Reality, not “narrative.” People try to construct these elaborate Khazar theories to get around that. It’s another version of Nazi racialism – it’s so all-important to these people that Jews can be painstakingly traced from here to there, totally missing the continuity of Jewish values, culture, language…. I can go into any synagogue anywhere in the world, in any Jewish community, and the service will be 90% the same (except for some American 20th c variations). The sacred texts are the same. The methods of study of the sacred texts are the same. The halacha is 90% the same. I mean, it is amazing how uniform Jewish life is, around the world, and each cultural change during our history propagated itself throughout the entire Jewish world pretty thoroughly, except in a few cases like the Karaites. It was propagated by intentional community, and rule of law, and literacy. And not so shabby messenger service throughout the Middle East, Near East, and Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Enlightenment.
This culture self-awarely carrying itself forward for several thousand years and across vast distances, adapting as necessary but never losing its cultural coherence, and not only that but repeatedly re-establishing itself in its original landscape, refusing to be stopped for long by Persian or Roman or Muslim or Christian.
These Khazar obsessives need to stop gazing at their shoes once in a while, they are missing the whole show.