Not so long ago Canadian PM, Stephen Harper, made a speech in which he claimed that criticism of Israel and support of a boycott was tantamount to 'hatred of the Jewish people'. This is an extreme statement. Many advocates of a boycott and divestment campaign against Israel are themselves Jewish - Naomi Klein to name one. During operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Guardian newspaper in the UK published a letter signed by 80 British Jews calling for the boycott.
With all the anti-Semitic charges that have been flying around in the wake of Gaza few address the difficult truth that the very term "Semitic" when applied to Israelis is in many instances misleading. The notion of an exiled people who depart from the Holy Land to wander in foreign lands before their eventual return is pure mythology.
On a purely anecdotal basis, anyone who has visited Israel would have to be blind not to notice that a great many Israelis look anything but Semitic. The view that a blond blue-eyed Israeli with ancestral roots going back many generations in Eastern Europe is in every case purely Semitic, is more about myth than reality. It's like a white Brit from Yorkshire whose genetic profile shows the likelihood of some very remote connection to Ethiopia or Peru or possibly China. Bottom line he's still percentage-wise a white Brit and dude in Israel is still a relocated Ukrainian with a new passport, Jewish or not.
There is much deception and malarkey at play when it comes to the "Jewish people" myth, but most people are too afraid to address the elephant in the room for fear of being branded ironically enough... anti-Semitic.
An academic who presents an interesting thesis on the question of where Israeli Jews originated is Dr Shlomo Sand, a historian at Tel Aviv University. In his book "Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi?" ("When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?") Dr Sand provides historical evidence to demonstrate that Jews now living in Israel are not direct descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the Kingdom of Judah.
In an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Dr Sand laid out his views.
He contends that the true origins of many Israeli Jews lie in the Mediterranean region, Eastern Europe, North Africa and other locations far removed from ancient Judea. In fact Dr Sand states that the concept of 'an exile' is a Christian myth, having to do with the punishment placed upon the Jews for rejecting the Christian gospel.
So how did these disparate peoples all end up becoming Jewish?
Dr Sand emphasizes that early Judaism was a proselytizing religion. He refers to the mass conversions undertaken by the Hasmoneans. It wasn't until the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century that the rate of conversion to Judaism began to slow in the Christian world.
He researched the origins of Jewish communities in Europe and came up with some interesting conclusions. The roots of the Jewish community in Spain for example can be tracked back to the Berbers. To support this thesis he cites Christian sources from the time that state that many of the Berber conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts.
In Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century there were 3 million Jews in Poland alone. Zionist historiography claims that these people originated in Germany, but they don't explain how Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could possibly have founded the Yiddish peoples of Eastern Europe. Moreover Dr Sand points out that there is no etymological connection between the German spoken in the Middle Ages and Yiddish. So where did these large populations of Yiddish speakers come from?
Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, said the Khazars were the origins of Eastern European Jewry. Dr Sand refers to the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria - an empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the Steppes along the Volga River. He says that in the 8th century, the kings of the Khazars converted to Judaism and made Hebrew the written language of the Kingdom.
The celebrated author, Arthur Koestler, also explored the fascinating topic of the Khazars in his 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage. Koestler, himself an Ashkenazi Jew, admitted that some of the findings are incendiary and said it is an area some historians prefer to avoid. The implications are indeed far reaching as this passage from Koestler's book would suggest:
"...the large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European - and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar - origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term 'anti-Semitism' would become void of meaning ..."
Link here for Koestler's book online.
If Dr Sand is even approximately correct in some of his conclusions obviously a people, many of them descendants of converts, originating in so many different regions cannot be accurately described as Semitic. In fact, Dr Sand goes further and says that the real descendants of the ancient Kingdom of Judah are more likely to be the Palestinians, not contemporary Israeli Jews. He claims that the first Zionists up until the Arab Revolt (1936-1939) knew there had been no exile and that Palestinians were descended from the original inhabitants of the land.
Toward the end of the article, Dr Sand speaks more personally about his vision for the future of Israel:
In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation - I will have done my bit.
We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it.
