terrorism and counterterrorism. Most important, it took me a long time to comprehend the power of the Zionist conception of the Land of Israel relative to the fragility of the day-to-day Israeliness that was still in the process of crystallizing, and to process the simple fact that the Zionists’ forced separation from parts of their ancestral homeland in 1948 was only temporary. I was not yet a historian of political ideas and cultures; I had not yet begun to consider the role and influence of modern mythologies regarding land, particularly those that thrive on the intoxication caused by the combination of military power and nationalized religion.
In 2008, I published the Hebrew edition of my book The Invention of the Jewish People, a theoretical endeavor to deconstruct the historical supermythos of the Jews as a wandering people in exile. The book was translated into twenty languages and reviewed by numerous hostile Zionist critics. In one review, the British historian Simon Schama maintained that the book “fails to sever the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience.”7 Initially, I must admit, I was surprised by the insinuation that this had been my intention. Yet when many more scholars repeated the assertion that my goal had been to undermine the Jews’ right to their ancient homeland, I realized that Schama’s claim was a significant and symptomatic precursor to the broader attack on my work.
In the course of writing The Invention of the Jewish People, I never expected that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, so many critics would step forward to justify Zionist colonization and the establishment of the State of Israel by invoking claims of ancestral lands, historical rights, and millennia-old national yearnings. I was certain that most serious grounds for the establishment of the State of Israel would be based on the tragic period beginning in the late nineteenth century, during which Europe ejected its Jews and, at a certain point, the United States closed its doors to immigration.8 But I soon came to realize that my writing had been unbalanced in a number of ways. To a certain extent, the present book is meant as a modest addition to my previous book and aims both to provide greater accuracy and to fill in some gaps.
I must begin, however, by clarifying that The Invention of the Jewish People addressed neither Jewish ties nor Jewish rights to the ancestral Jewish “homeland,” even if its content had direct implications for the subject. My aim in writing it had been mainly to use historical and historiographical sources to question the ethnocentric and ahistorical concept of essentialism and the role it has played in past and present definitions of Judaism and Jewish identity. Although it is widely evident that the Jews are not a pure race, many people—Judeophobes and Zionists in particular—still tend to espouse the incorrect and misleading view that most Jews belong to an ancient race-based people, an eternal “ethnos” who found places of residence among other peoples and, at a decisive stage in history, when their host societies cast them out, began to return to their ancestral land.
After many centuries of living with the self-image of a “chosen people” (which preserved and reinforced the ability of Jews to endure their ongoing humiliation and persecution), after almost two thousand years of Christian insistence on seeing Jews as the direct descendants of the killers of God’s son, and, most important, after the emergence (alongside traditional anti-Jewish hostility) of a new antiSemitism that cast Jews as members of a foreign and contaminating race, it was no easy task to deconstruct European culture’s “ethnic” defamiliarization of the Jews.9 In attempting to do so, my previous book employed one basic working premise: that a human unit of pluralistic origin, whose members are united by a common fabric devoid of any secular cultural component—a unit that can be joined, even by an atheist, not by forging a linguistic or cultural connection with its members but solely through religious conversion—cannot under any criteria be considered a people or an ethnic group (the latter is a concept that flourished in academic circles after the bankruptcy of the term “race”).
If we are to be consistent and logical in our understanding of the term “people,” as used in cases such as the “French people,” the “American people,” “the Vietnamese people,” or even the “Israeli people,” then referring to a “Jewish people” is just as strange as referring to a “Buddhist people,” an “Evangelical people,” or a “Baha’i people.” A common fate of holders of a shared belief bound by a degree of solidarity does not make them a people or a nation. Even if human society consists of a linked collection of multifaceted complex experiences that defy all attempts at formulation in mathematical terms, we must nonetheless do our utmost to employ precise mechanisms of conceptualization. Since the beginning of the modern era, “peoples” have been conceptualized as groups possessing a unifying culture (including elements such as cuisine, a spoken language, and music). However, despite their great uniqueness, Jews throughout all of history have been characterized by “only” a diverse culture of religion (including elements such as a common nonspoken sacred language and common rituals and ceremonies).
Nonetheless, many of my critics, who not coincidentally are all sworn secular scholars, remained adamant in defining historical Jewry and its modern-day descendants as a people, albeit not a chosen people, but one unique, exceptional, and immune to comparison. Such a view could be maintained only by providing the masses with a mythological image of the exile of a people that ostensibly took place in the first century BCE, despite the fact that the scholarly elite was well aware that such an exile never really occurred during the entire period in question. For this reason, not even one research-based book has thus been written on the forced uprooting of the “Jewish people.”10
In addition to this effective technology for the preservation and dissemination of a formative historical mythos, it was also necessary (1) to erase, in a seemingly unintentional manner, all memory of Judaism having been a dynamic and proselytizing religion at least between the second century BCE and the eighth century CE; (2) to disregard the existence of many Judaized kingdoms that emerged and flourished throughout history in various geographic regions;11 (3) to delete from collective memory the enormous number of persons who converted to Judaism under the rule of these Judaized kingdoms, providing the historical foundation for most of the world’s Jewish communities; and (4) to downplay statements of the early Zionists—most prominently those of David Ben-Gurion, founding father of the State of Israel12—who well knew that an exile had never taken place and therefore regarded most of the territory’s local peasants as the authentic offspring of the ancient Hebrews.
The most desperate and dangerous proponents of this ethnocentric view sought a genetic identity common to all the world’s Jewish offspring, so as to distinguish them from the populations among which they lived. Forswearing negligence, pseudoscientists gathered shreds of data aimed at corroborating presuppositions suggesting the existence of an ancient race. “Scientific” anti-Semitism having failed in its deplorable attempt to locate the uniqueness of the Jews in their blood and other internal attributes, we witnessed the emergence of a perverted Jewish nationalist hope that perhaps DNA could serve as solid proof of a migrating Jewish ethnos of common origin that eventually reached the Land of Israel.13
The fundamental, but by no means sole, reason for this uncompromising position, which became only partially clear to me in the course of writing this book, was simple: according to an unwritten consensus of all enlightened worldviews, all peoples possess a right of collective ownership over the defined territory in which they live and from which they generate a livelihood. No religious community with a diverse membership dispersed among different continents was ever granted such a right of possession.
For
