Từ sau năm 1967 khi nhà thơ Palestian Mahmoud Darwish cho phát hành tập thơ “Giấc Mộng Bạch Hợp của Một Người Lính" (A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies) nói về sự thức tỉnh của người lính Do Thái về những tàn bạo của quân đội đối với người Palestine, đã có không biết bao nhiêu người "Do Thái", ĐỦ MỌI THÀNH PHẦN, thức tỉnh LÊN TIẾNG TỐ CÁO NHỮNG TÀN ĐỘC GIAN TRÁ của DÂN TỘC và NHÀ NƯỚC DO THÁI của CHÍNH HỌ. Ngoài những nhóm như Refuseniks thuộc các sĩ quan quân đội và các văn nghệ sĩ, cựu chính trị gia như Atmon, còn có các cựu thành viên "ành hùng lập quốc" như Uri Arvey, gia đình tướng Peled với quyển sách nổi tiếng "Con Trai vị Tướng" (The General' Son), cóhai (2) cuốn sách làm rúng động gốc rễ không chỉ giới nhà nước theo chủ nghĩa quốc gia dân tộc Đại do thái (Zionism), mà cả toàn bộ cộng đồng thiên chúa giáo ủng hộ chủ trương đại Do Thái vì Ý Chúa, đó là hai tác phẩm sử của giáo sư sử học thuộc viên đại học thủ đô Do Thái, Tel Aviv, giáo sư sử gia Shlomo Sand phát hành năm 2007. Ông chính là "người lính mơ hoa bạch hợp" cách đó 40 năm ẩn danh trong tập thơ "người Palestine".
Hai quyển sách của giáo sư sử gia Shlomo Sand được dịch ra nhiều thứ tiếng và bán rất chạy tại chính Do Thái và Pháp, nó gây rúng động vì đây không phải chỉ là hai quyển sách bày tỏ quan chính trị thời cuộc mà nó là hai quyển nghiên cứu và lý giải LỊCH SỬ DỰA TRÊN CƠ SỞ VẬT CHỨNG KHAI QUẬT và LUẬN SỬ KHOA HỌC về cái gọi là "Dân Do Thái" trong Kinh Thánh và "miền Đất Hứa".
- Quyển thứ nhất, năm 2007, " Dân Do Thái được bịa đặt ra KHI NÀO và NHƯ THẾ NÀO" When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?) được đón nhận nồng nhiệt tại âu châu và đoạt giải "Aujourd'hui Award" một giải cao nhất về báo chí điều tra chính trị và lịch sử của Pháp.
- Quyển thứ hai năm 2012, , "Sự Bịa Đặt về Vùng Đất của Do Thái" ( The Invention of the Land of Israel)
Dĩ nhiên, nó phải bị các nhà "dân tộc giống nòi ái quốc và tôn giáo tổ tiên" bài bác và chối bỏ.. và "truyền thuyết kinh thánh" vẫn là căn bản "chân lý.. như người Việt "ái quốc dân tộc" vẫn bám vào sử nguồn của một bà quái vật đẻ 100 trứng bò lổn ngổn, hoặc Bác Hồ có 4 đồng tử làm niềm tin chân lý vậy!!!
Chúng ta nên tìm đọc, vì không chỉ là vấn đề của người Do Thái và các sắc dân tại khu vực trung đông, mà nó còn giúp chúng ta nhiều bằng chứng khoa học cũng như phương cách khoa học để nhìn lại TÔN GIÁO và các CHỦ THUYẾT DÂN TỘC QUỐC GIA khởi đầu với các huyền sử thần kỳ..
Nhân Chủ
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Book review: Shlomo Sand’s "The Invention of the Jewish People"
22 October 2009
In 1967 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his poem “A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies,” only to be accused of “collaboration with the Zionist enemy” for his sympathetic depiction of an Israeli soldier’s remorse of conscience. Forty years later that soldier has identified himself as the historian Shlomo Sand. He has translated his remorse into a book that has become a bestseller in Israel and France, where the award of the Prix Aujourd’hui has made the author something of a TV star.
Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century “[t]he national project was … a fully conscious one … It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation” (45).
Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism “into something hermetic, like the German Volk …” (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted “to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity.” Together, these engendered an “ethnonationalist historiography” which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who “needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people” (256).
According to Sand, the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple in 70 AD left the indigenous Jewish population of Judea and Samaria in place. “[T]he Romans never deported entire peoples. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers” (130). Furthermore, at that time there were already Jewish communities numbering up to four million persons in Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere (145). Palestine’s status as the unique “ancestral homeland” of the Jews collapses together with the myth of David and Solomon’s imposing kingdom.
Against the ethno-biological concept of a Jewish people — a “race” — whose linear descendants returned from exile to (re)found today’s Israel, Sand posits a religious community proliferating throughout and beyond the Mediterranean region by means of proselytism and conversion. He offers a detailed rebuttal of the conventional wisdom whereby “Judaism was never a proselytizing religion,” a view disseminated by historian Martin Goodman and others (150, note 42).
Most importantly, he concentrates attention on Khazaria, that “Strange Empire” that flourished in the Caspian region between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. By the eighth century the Khazars had adopted Hebrew as their sacred and written tongue, and “[a]t some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, the[y] … adopted Jewish monotheism” (221). Sand speculates that this conversion was calculated to save them from absorption into either the Roman or the Islamic empires. The Khazars, he contends, engendered those Askhenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe who would later invent the myths of Zionism to justify their colonization of Palestine, a land to which they had no “ethnic” connection and where they remain the dominant elite.
So if the exile was a myth — fomented, Sand writes, by the Christian church as an image of divine punishment (“The Wandering Jew”) — what happened to the indigenous Jews? Sand’s answer: they converted to Islam and survive as today’s disinherited Palestinians. This seemingly radical thesis was once shared by, among others, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister who in 1918 still believed that (in Sand’s words) “the ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam … for material reasons … Indeed, by clinging to their soil they remained loyal to their homeland” (186).
Ultimately, the case against the Jewish state cannot be based on an unseemly tussle for genetic primacy, but on a discourse of fundamental political and human rights. Sand turns toward such a discussion in the final chapter, describing it as the raison d’etre of The Invention of the Jewish People, which he admits essentially contains nothing not already found in the work of other historians and archaeologists.
Today’s Israel is not a democracy but a “liberal ethnocracy” (307) that assumes its “growing and strengthening” Arab minority “will always accept its exclusion from the political and cultural heart” (309). Ultimately we may see “an uprising in the Arab Galilee, followed by iron-fisted repression,” which would constitute “a turning-point for the existence of Israel” in the region. Hence, Sand states that the ideal solution would be the creation of a democratic binational state.
Sadly, Sand hastily dismisses this “ideal project.” In terms all too drearily reminiscent of Zionist apologetics he states that to “ask the Jewish Israeli people, after such a long and bloody conflict, and in view of the tragedy experienced by many of its immigrant founders in the twentieth century, to become overnight a minority in its own state may not be the smartest thing to do” (311-312). Instead, he falls back on a sequence of rhetorical questions: “[h]ow many Jews would be willing to forgo the privileges they enjoy in the Zionist state? … will anyone dare to repeal the Law of Return … ? To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the … image of the ‘chosen people,’ and to cease … excluding the ‘other’ from its midst?”
What is behind this sorry post-Zionist anti-climax to a book that seemed to presage a heady anti-Zionist conclusion? In an interview Sand admitted that he “waited until [he] was a full professor” before publishing the book, adding that there “is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort.” In providing the premises for radical conclusions without either drawing or excluding those conclusions, Sand has the best of both worlds with few if any consequences.
Ultimately, Shlomo Sand is a little like Moses, unable to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. The journey so far, however, is instructive, and very stylishly accomplished; one hopes that the “soldier dreaming of white lilies” may eventually be emboldened to complete it.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist (www.raymonddeane.com).
=================
Part 1Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century “[t]he national project was … a fully conscious one … It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation” (45).
Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism “into something hermetic, like the German Volk …” (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted “to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity.” Together, these engendered an “ethnonationalist historiography” which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who “needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people” (256).
According to Sand, the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple in 70 AD left the indigenous Jewish population of Judea and Samaria in place. “[T]he Romans never deported entire peoples. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers” (130). Furthermore, at that time there were already Jewish communities numbering up to four million persons in Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere (145). Palestine’s status as the unique “ancestral homeland” of the Jews collapses together with the myth of David and Solomon’s imposing kingdom.
Against the ethno-biological concept of a Jewish people — a “race” — whose linear descendants returned from exile to (re)found today’s Israel, Sand posits a religious community proliferating throughout and beyond the Mediterranean region by means of proselytism and conversion. He offers a detailed rebuttal of the conventional wisdom whereby “Judaism was never a proselytizing religion,” a view disseminated by historian Martin Goodman and others (150, note 42).
Most importantly, he concentrates attention on Khazaria, that “Strange Empire” that flourished in the Caspian region between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. By the eighth century the Khazars had adopted Hebrew as their sacred and written tongue, and “[a]t some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, the[y] … adopted Jewish monotheism” (221). Sand speculates that this conversion was calculated to save them from absorption into either the Roman or the Islamic empires. The Khazars, he contends, engendered those Askhenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe who would later invent the myths of Zionism to justify their colonization of Palestine, a land to which they had no “ethnic” connection and where they remain the dominant elite.
So if the exile was a myth — fomented, Sand writes, by the Christian church as an image of divine punishment (“The Wandering Jew”) — what happened to the indigenous Jews? Sand’s answer: they converted to Islam and survive as today’s disinherited Palestinians. This seemingly radical thesis was once shared by, among others, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister who in 1918 still believed that (in Sand’s words) “the ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam … for material reasons … Indeed, by clinging to their soil they remained loyal to their homeland” (186).
Ultimately, the case against the Jewish state cannot be based on an unseemly tussle for genetic primacy, but on a discourse of fundamental political and human rights. Sand turns toward such a discussion in the final chapter, describing it as the raison d’etre of The Invention of the Jewish People, which he admits essentially contains nothing not already found in the work of other historians and archaeologists.
Today’s Israel is not a democracy but a “liberal ethnocracy” (307) that assumes its “growing and strengthening” Arab minority “will always accept its exclusion from the political and cultural heart” (309). Ultimately we may see “an uprising in the Arab Galilee, followed by iron-fisted repression,” which would constitute “a turning-point for the existence of Israel” in the region. Hence, Sand states that the ideal solution would be the creation of a democratic binational state.
Sadly, Sand hastily dismisses this “ideal project.” In terms all too drearily reminiscent of Zionist apologetics he states that to “ask the Jewish Israeli people, after such a long and bloody conflict, and in view of the tragedy experienced by many of its immigrant founders in the twentieth century, to become overnight a minority in its own state may not be the smartest thing to do” (311-312). Instead, he falls back on a sequence of rhetorical questions: “[h]ow many Jews would be willing to forgo the privileges they enjoy in the Zionist state? … will anyone dare to repeal the Law of Return … ? To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the … image of the ‘chosen people,’ and to cease … excluding the ‘other’ from its midst?”
What is behind this sorry post-Zionist anti-climax to a book that seemed to presage a heady anti-Zionist conclusion? In an interview Sand admitted that he “waited until [he] was a full professor” before publishing the book, adding that there “is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort.” In providing the premises for radical conclusions without either drawing or excluding those conclusions, Sand has the best of both worlds with few if any consequences.
Ultimately, Shlomo Sand is a little like Moses, unable to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. The journey so far, however, is instructive, and very stylishly accomplished; one hopes that the “soldier dreaming of white lilies” may eventually be emboldened to complete it.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist (www.raymonddeane.com).
=================
Video - Riz Khan - Changing perspectives on Israel
Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity
Conventional ideas about Jewishness hold that Jews are a single ethnic group (or nationality) with substantial shared biological ancestry going back to the biblical kingdom of Judea, from which they were exiled in waves to scatter widely across the Mediterranean world, then far beyond. The core of Sand's historical case is that the whole story is a myth: a very elaborate fiction, supported by hordes of eminent scholars, which became foundational and essential for the state of Israel, but mostly a very recent fabrication without much evidence.
Posted December 03, 2009- Broadcast - December 01, 2009
Part 2
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