The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
42 Ibid., 6–7, 191–2.
43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1996, 19.
44 On the difference between borders and frontier areas, see J. R. V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries, London: Unwin Hyman, 1987, 12–51.
45 For a discussion of this subject based on a completely different theoretical approach, see Anthony D. Smith, “Nation and Ethnoscape,” in Myths and Memories of the Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 149–59.
Mytherritory: In the Beginning, God Promised the Land
When you father children and children’s children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, so as to provoke him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will be utterly destroyed.
—Deut. 4:25–6
What was the purpose of those three adjurations? One, that Israel shall not go up by a wall; one by which the Holy One, blessed be He, adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the world; and one by which the Holy One, blessed be He, adjured the idolaters [the nations of the world] that they not oppress Israel too much.
—Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 13:111
The word “homeland” (moledet) appears in the books of the Bible a total of nineteen times, almost half in the book of Genesis. All the meanings assigned to the word have to do with a person’s land of birth or familial place of origin, and never contain the civil or public dimensions encountered in the cultures of the Greek polis or the ancient Roman Republic. Biblical heroes never set out to defend their home-land in order to attain freedom, nor do they articulate expressions of civil love for it. They were also unfamiliar with the meaning of the “ultimate sacrifice” and the “sweetness” of dying for the homeland. In short, the idea of patriotism that developed in the northern Mediterranean basin was barely known on its southern shores and known even less in the Fertile Crescent.
Devotees of the Zionist idea that began to take shape toward the end of the nineteenth century appear to have been faced with a thorny issue. Because they employed the Bible as a title deed to Palestine, which would quickly become the “Land of Israel,” they needed to use all means necessary to effect its transformation from an imagined foreign land from which all Jews were supposedly exiled into an ancient homeland once owned by their mythological ancestors. To fulfill this purpose, the Bible now began to take on the character of a nationalist book. From a collection of theological texts incorporating historical plots and divine miracles aimed at inculcating faith in its readers, it became a compilation of historiographic texts that bore only a smattering of optional religious meaning. In this context, it was necessary to obscure the metaphysical entity of God to the greatest extent possible and to distill from it a completely patriotic personality. The Zionist intellectuals all tended to be at least somewhat secular and were therefore uninterested in deep theological discussion. From their perspective, God, whose existence had been undermined, promised a land to his “chosen people” as a reward for devotedly maintaining their faith in him. In this way, he was converted into a sort of voice-over in a historical movie guiding a nation to strive for a homeland and to immigrate there.
It was no simple endeavor to persist in using the term “Promised Land” when the force that had done the promising was dying or, according to many, was already deceased.1 It could not have been easy to plant an imagined sense of patriotism in theological works that were completely foreign to the nationalist spirit. Despite being complicated and problematic, the undertaking was ultimately successful. But its goal was not achieved by the talent of Zionist thinkers and writers alone. The true secret of its success was the historical circumstances in which it was carried out, which I will discuss later in this book.
GIFTED THEOLOGIANS BESTOW A LAND UPON THEMSELVES
The books of the Bible make no mention of the political dimension of a national homeland.2 Unlike later Christianity, they do not teach that the true homeland lies in the eternal heavens. Territory, however, does play a leading role in the stories. The word “land” appears in the Bible more than a thousand times and, in the vast majority of the texts, carries great significance.
In contrast to Jerusalem, which is not mentioned in the Pentateuch,3 the land of Canaan is introduced in the beginning, in Genesis, and subsequently serves as a destination, an arena of action and of compensation, an inheritance, a place that is chosen, and plays other roles as well. It is described as “an exceedingly good land” (Num. 14:7), “a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates” (Deut. 8:8), and of course “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Lev. 20:24; Exod. 3:8; Deut. 27:3). The fundamental assumption of the Jewish and non-Jewish general public alike is that the land was granted to the “seed of Israel” until the end of days, and numerous Biblical verses appear to confirm this assumption.
Like other masterpieces in the history of human literature, Biblical verses can be interpreted in different ways, and this versatility is one source of the power they hold. But this does not mean that every verse can be interpreted in completely contradictory ways. Paradoxically, despite the Christian scripts that trace the belief in Jesus to the land of Judea, the texts of the Bible repeatedly indicate that the Yahwistic religion neither appeared nor developed in the territory that God designated for his chosen ones. Surprisingly, the two first instances of theophany that played a decisive role in establishing God’s following and lay the foundation for monotheism in the Western Hemisphere (Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization) both in theory and in practice did not take place in the land of Canaan.
In the first instance, God appeared in Harran, in what is today Turkey, and issued the following instructions to Abram the Aramaean: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Indeed, the first follower of Yahweh abandoned his homeland and embarked on a journey to the unknown Promised Land. Because of the famine, he did not stay there long, and quickly relocated to Egypt.
According to the founding mythos, the second major dramatic encounter took place in the desert, during the Exodus from Egypt.4 Yahweh engaged Moses directly during the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. After the Ten Commandments, in addition to his instructions, commandments, and advice, God also spoke of the Promised Land: “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared . . . When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out” (Exod. 23:20, 23). Although the listeners should have already known that the land was not empty, the divine commitment now, for the first time, contains an explicit promise to remove its original inhabitants, who may disrupt the colonization.
That is to say, neither Abraham, the father of the nation, nor Moses, its first great prophet—both of
