WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I read this week that an active American group calls Israel “a settler-colonial project” needing to be “dismantled.” Our 3000-year Jewish homeland is further from “settler-colonialism” than any nation on earth. We weren’t “exiled” eighteen hundred years ago and just now “returned,” but remained in our homeland, as well as in Diaspora, from Judaea’s destruction by Rome until today’s Israel’s independence as the land of Israel’s next native state. But we don’t give the Yishuv’s tenacious continuous presence its due.
Exile, Shmexile; Historian Parkes Asserted that From Hadrian to Herzl Jews Never Abandoned Our Homeland of Israel, Writing Israelis’ “Real Title Deeds.” If That’s True, Shouldn’t We Make a Big Deal of It?
The two-page final chapter of an obscure little book (more about which anon) tracing our Jewish people’s three millennia presence in the land of Israel is set in a Tel Aviv museum in the lengthening shadows of Erev Shabbat, Friday, May 14, 1948. The leader, Zionist to the core, rises and, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, begins reading an extraordinary document proclaiming the renewed independence of a people in a place which had seen no native state since that very people had defended against the world’s mightiest empire and lost its independence there eighteen hundred years earlier. “His face shone,” Zeev Sharif wrote in Three Days, “as the passages rolled sonorously from his lips, and took on life and form.”
“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people…. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance …. wrote and gave the Bible to the world….”
That leader, Zionist, as I said, to the core, read on (emphasis added) that “exiled from the Land of Israel, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom”; that “impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood”; that “in recent decades they returned in their masses. They reclaimed the wilderness, revived their language, built cities and villages.” He cited the First Zionist Congress’ proclamation, the League of Nations’ Mandate, the UN Partition Resolution, and “the natural right of the Jewish people, like any other people, to control their own destiny in their sovereign state.”
But what if they hadn’t been exiled? What if these Zionist framers of Israel’s Declaration of Independence themselves – harping as they did on “exiled … return … go back … returned” hadn’t omitted that, Diaspora notwithstanding, Jews had never physically abandoned their land of Israel homeland? Would that not have painted a fuller picture of today’s Israelis’ homeland rights? An eminent twentieth-century British historian, James Parkes, thought that it would:
It was, perhaps, inevitable that the Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266 [emphasis added]
Indeed, Parkes immediately went on to criticize us bitterly for not making that continuous presence point to the world: “The omission allowed the anti-Zionist, whether Jewish, Arab or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry in trying to re-establish a two thousand year old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period.” (Ibid.)
But is Parkes right that we Jews never physically abandoned our homeland presence? It turns out that he is, as traced in that obscure little book mentioned above. And yet, so widespread is the misbelief – enunciated, e.g., by President Carter in his Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (p. 2),
“135 [CE]: Romans suppress a Jewish revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile”
– that we ourselves seem hesitant to argue
[1] that every ruler between Jewish Judaea’s destruction by Rome in 135 and today’s Israel as the land of Israel’s next native state eighteen hundred years later was without exception a foreign empire invader (and mostly non-Arab at that); and
[2] that during those long dark foreign empire rule centuries the Jewish people, not as stray individuals but as the organized, openly Jewish, still homeland-claiming Yishuv, remained in the land.
So, at warp speed, let’s glimpse through those eighteen hundred foreign empire rule years.
Post-Revolt Roman-Byzantine Rule (135-638)
Archeological remains: Parkes wrote: “The population remained as it had been before the loss of independence …. Jewish villages were thickly scattered in the hills and valleys of the region.” Scattered throughout Vilnay’s minutely detailed classic Guide To Israel are unearthed remains of Roman-Byzantine era synagogues throughout the land. Wilken in The Land Called Holy: “Jewish life in Palestine went on undisturbed during the Christian era – such is the testimony of archeology.” Avi-Yonah in The Holy Land: Architecture, Scupture, Painting: …the Jews were able to maintain their status in the country, and shared in the material prosperity of the Byzantine period. The numerous synagogues of the 4th to 7th centuries attest to this.”
Mishnah, Talmud, Hegemony Over Diaspora: From a religious perspective, the post-Revolts Roman-Byzantine rule period was the homeland Jews’ Talmudic Era, thoroughly documented by scholar Gedaliah Alon in The Jews In Their Land in the Talmudic Age. Scholars in the land, Tannaim and then Amoraim, constructed monumental religious works, the Mishnah and then Jerusalem Talmud, actually many Talmuds based on the Mishnah, only one of which has come down to us. Parkes wrote that Romans-Byzantines recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community, and indeed “for the whole Jewish community within the empire,” until firing him in 425, ostensibly, Alon said, for violating a no-new-synagogues ban, which, if so, “was a defiant assertion by the Yishuv of its rights.” Alon cited detailed evidence of the Patriarch’s and Sanhedrin’s (which continued) hegemony over the Diaspora, even in Babylon.
Military Aid to the Persians: Twenty to twenty-six thousand homeland Jews, self-organized into their own battalions, fought in their own self-interest alongside the Persians who invaded in 614 to take on the Romans’ Byzantine heirs. Historian Dinur in Ben-Gurion-edited The Jews In Their Land wrote: “The mass participation of Jews in the war indicates that the Yishuv was large at the time, though it is impossible to gauge what percentage of the overall population was Jewish.” More than that. Alon wrote that homeland Jews’ “considerable” military and other aid to the Persian invaders evidenced “Palestinian Jewry’s awareness of itself as a political force, capable of taking action.” DeHaas wrote that the homeland Jews believed they were still fighting for independence,” and Dinur that the Persians had “promised the Jews self-government in Palestine within the framework of the Persian Empire.”
Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid Foreign Rule Dynasties (638-1099)
The successful Persians shortly reneged on their pact with the Yishuv, and the Byzantines, on briefly regaining control, went on a Jew-murdering rampage which DeHaas wrote seriously diminished the homeland’s Jews for several centuries. But the homeland Jews then materially aided the 638 Arab-led Muslim invaders, which Omar acknowledged, giving them rewards. We have much evidence of Jewish life in the land during the successive foreign Muslim dynasties’ rule, which began as Arab controlled, progressively fading to Turk. Archeologist Bahat in The Forgotten Generations included a map showing a hundred ninth century Jewish communities and cities with Jewish communities in this land the size of New Jersey.
European Christian Crusaders (1099-1187)
Dinur quoted a contemporary Crusader account that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them “with fire and venom” at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.” Katz wrote in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine: “The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month,” the Crusaders themselves stating “with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” Dinur added that except for a few places in the south, we know of no other Jewish defense actions, “but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.” Crimson tales of the slaughter of homeland (and European en route) Jews by the Crusaders are extant today, and when the famous Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited the land in Crusader times, and estimated the number of Jews living in various places, the wonder is not that he didn’t count a great number, but that he counted any at all. An 1102 Christian pilgrim, one Saewulf, wrote of many Jewish site and place names surviving a millennium after the Roman destruction, half a millennium after the Muslim takeover, including “the region called Judea” between the Jordan River and Sea.
Ayyubids, Mongols, Mamluks (1187-1517)
Parkes: “… the reversion of the country to Islam, when it came, was not to come from Arab sources, but from a fresh wave of Turkish invaders represented by Saladin the Kurd,” who founded a brief Ayyubid rule. Following waves of destruction-wreaking Asian and Mongol invaders, Turk-Circassian Mamluks ruled the land from Turkey then Egypt from 1250 to 1517. We know a lot about Jewish life in the land, enabling construction from multiple sources in that aforesaid obscure little book of a fifteenth century Jewish timeline in Jerusalem. Katz wrote that toward the end of Mamluk rule Christian and Jewish pilgrims noted the presence of “substantial Jewish communities.”
Turks (1517-1917)
Over their four hundred years of misrule, the Turks managed to reduce the land’s population down to its lowest of all recorded times, a desolation famously described by Mark Twain and others.. Persecution of Jewish communities – in their four holy cities, Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias and Hebron, in Galilee farming villages, and elsewhere in the land was routine. Yet, by the mid-1800’s, before the Zionists came, Jews became Jerusalem’s biggest population segment, and by century’s end the majority. An 1859 British Consulate document observed: “The Mohammadans of Jerusalem are less fanatical than in many other places owing to the circumstances of their numbers scarcely exceeding one-quarter of the whole population – and of their being surpassed in wealth (except among the Effendi class) in trade and manufactures by both Jews and Christians.” Charles Warren’s 1860’s survey of Jerusalemites’ occupations shows that the image of its Jews as pious paupers dependent on Diaspora alms and ghostly mourners of a destruction almost two thousand years in the past is inaccurate. They were merchants, artisans from shoemakers to silversmiths, porters, stone-cutters and letter writers. It was to an already reviving Yishuv that the Zionists came.
The Significance of the Yishuv
Superimposed upon difficulties and dangers confronting all audacious travelers in every era have incessantly been specifically-placed obstacles – from decrees of medieval religious leaders and rulers against “transport of Jews to the East” to the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade – in the paths of Jews going home.
Yet they came. At the end of the obscure little book that I wrote, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon), I quote Katz citing some 1600’s Jews fleeing from one place in Europe to another, to which he appended: “Again the bolder spirits among them made their way to Palestine,” with which, except for that final two-page epilogue citing the Zionists citing all but one key foundation of Israel’s reborn independence, I ended my book:
“And so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.”
Newcomer “settler-colonial project”? Bull.