it into the soil on which the new nation began to tread and build as it saw fit. If for Judaism the opposite of metaphysical exile was primarily messianic salvation, embracing a spiritual connection to the place though lacking any concrete claim to it, for Zionism the opposite of the imagined exile was manifested in the aggressive redemption of the land through the creation of a modern geographic, physical homeland. Absent permanent borders, however, this homeland remains dangerous for both its inhabitants and its neighbors.
1 The Western Wall is not the temple wall referred to in the Midrash Rabbah, Song of Songs (2:4). It was not an internal wall but rather a city wall, and for this reason its name is misleading. It was established as a site of prayer only relatively recently, apparently during the seventeenth century. Its importance cannot be compared to the long-standing sacred status of the Temple Mount (the plaza of the Al-Aqsa Mosque), to which observant Jews are permitted to ascend only after acquiring the ashes of a red heifer.
2 As with the Western Wall, there were things I did not know about the song so closely associated with the Six-Day War. Like many others at the time, I was unaware that the tune we were humming was actually taken from a Basque lullaby called “Pello Joxepe.” This is not unusual. Most people who sing “Hatikvah,” the anthem of the Zionist movement that was adopted as the national anthem of the State of Israel, are unaware that its tune was borrowed from a symphonic poem by Smetana known as “Vltava” (My Homeland) or “Die Moldau.” The same is true of the Israeli flag; the Star of David is not an ancient Jewish symbol but rather a symbol originating from the Indian subcontinent, where various religious and military cultures made extensive use of it throughout history. National traditions are thus often more the product of imitation and reproduction than of originality and inspiration. On this, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
3 A program of the Israel Defense Forces that combines military service and the establishment of new agricultural settlements.
4 Or at least worthy of actor George C. Scott, who played the well-known American general in the 1970 film Patton.
5 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1968, 136–7.
6 A typical example can be found in the work of Anita Shapira, who refers to the traumatic “encounter with the Arabs in the Land of Israel,” as in “From the Palmach Generation to the Candle Children: Changing Patterns in Israeli Identity,” Partisan Review 67:4 (2000), 622–34.
7 The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2009. See the review in the Financial Times, November 13, 2009.
8 As a result of the establishment of the State of Israel and its ensuing conflict with Arab nationalism, the Jewish communities of Arab countries were also uprooted from their homelands; some were either forced to immigrate to Israel or did so by choice.
9 Influential elements within Christianity found it difficult to regard Judaism as a legitimate rival religion and instead preferred to see its followers as a repulsive group of shared ethnic descent and a legacy of punishment by God. The initial crystallization of a modern people, consisting of the large population of Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe—a nucleus that was just beginning to emerge when it was brutally wiped out during the twentieth century—also played an indirect role in facilitating this mistaken conceptualization of a worldwide “Jewish people.”
10 The legend of the Jews’ mass displacement by the Romans is related to the Babylonian exile referred to in the Bible. However, it also has Christian sources, and appears to have originated with the punitive prophecy articulated by Jesus in the New Testament: “There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people. They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations” (Luke 21:23–4).
11 Specifically, I am referring to the Adiabene kingdom of Mesopotamia, the Himyarite kingdom of southwestern Arabia, the kingdom of Dahyā al-Kāhina of northern Africa, the kingdom of Semien of eastern Africa, the kingdom of Kodungallur of the southern Indian subcontinent, and the great Khazar empire of southern Russia. It should come as no surprise that we are unable to locate even one comparative study that attempts to explore the fascinating Judaization of these kingdoms and the fate of their many subjects.
12 For an example, see Ben-Gurion’s 1917 article “Clarifying the Origins of the Felahs,” in David Ben-Gurion, We and Our Neighbors, Tel Aviv: Davar Press, 1931, 13–25 (in Hebrew).
13 On this, see Sand, Invention of the Jewish People, 272–80.
14 See chapter titled “The Other Arthur Balfour” in Brian Klug, Being Jewish and Doing Justice, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011, 199–210.
15 For a discussion of the promised lands of the Puritans and Afrikaners, see Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 137–44.
16 Even the Zionist factions that at times proposed federative schemes did so for pragmatic reasons, primarily in order to facilitate the creation of a Jewish majority, and did not seek integration with the local population.
17 Virtually all the religious groups listed above evolved in the areas ruled by the Judaized kingdoms mentioned in footnote 11 above. For example, see the assertions of Marc Bloch, one of the great historians of the twentieth century, in his book L’Étrange défaite, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, 31, and of Raymond Aron, in Mémoires, Paris: Julliard, 1983, 502-3.
18 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: Fontana Press, 1995, 5–6.
19 Despite the existence of a number of more “Land”-related conceptions, which (not coincidentally) were among the most ethnocentric, the trickle of pilgrims and the small minority of immigrants from both Europe and the Middle East confirm the tendency of the Jewish masses, the Jewish elite, and the Jewish leadership to refrain from immigrating to Zion.
20 The masses of assimilationists—from Liberal Israelites to international socialists—were not the only ones to have trouble understanding the essence of Zionism’s new pseudo-religious connection to the Holy Land. The Bund, the most widespread semi-nationalist movement among Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe, was also astounded by the effort to spur Jewish immigration to the Middle East.
21 On this cynical form of Zionism, see the interview
