WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Ok, it’s more fun to read adventures of Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins than, try as I might, my book tracing 3,000 years’ homeland Jewish presence. But we American Jews, along with Israelis themselves, must refute the delegitimizing canards. So here, rather than three millennia of history in three Word doc pages, is stand-on-one-leg-level ammunition for refuting some of the most-Jewish-homeland-presence-denigrating myths.
The Case We Must Make: Homeland Jewish History (All Three Thousand Years of It) Historically Happened
I may not live to see it, but when the keys to the last church in Europe are handed over to a Muslim to be turned into a mosque, Europe’s last Christian will lament to the Muslim, “You know, this is all the fault of the Jews.” And the Muslim (pocketing the keys) will smile and nod, “Yep, you’re right.”
What I have lived alas to see is every moment of Jewish history – from “King David was as real as King Arthur” and “there was no Solomon’s Temple” to “the Holocaust never happened” and “Israel’s creation displaced Palestinians” – being mockingly denigrated in both East and West and in the UN where they meet. In last week’s #1115, I suggested Israel should forcefully make three points to the world regarding Jews’ presence in our homeland over the past three thousand years – biblical era Jewish history happened; we weren’t “exiled” and gone from our homeland for close to two thousand years; and we Jews weren’t an insignificant minority in Palestine when homeland Jewish sovereignty was reborn in 1948.
Alevai, but the burden’s not Israel’s alone. We grassroots American Jews have to make a few grassroots points of our own. We’re not PhD’s in three-millennia Jewish history, but we have to have a general grasp of core facts giving us confidence to refute the most delegitimizing canards.
“King David was as Real as King Arthur”
Through much of the twentieth century, repeated diggings embarrassingly revealed a paucity of archeological remains from the tenth century BCE, the time of King David’s establishment of the biblical Jewish kingdom’s Jerusalem capital. Cynics, including credentialed archeologists, leapt on this to deride King David as having been “as real as King Arthur.”
But then in 1993 archeologists unearthed at Tel Dan in northern Israel a ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription boasting of victories over both the northern kingdom of Israel and “House of David.” Finkelstein & Silberman [skeptics themselves of the substantiality of David & Solomon’s United Kingdom, as opposed to that of the northern kingdom of Israel], The Bible Unearthed, p. 129: “This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon.”
True, the inscription says “House of David,” not “King David,” allowing die-hard skeptics to claim David founded a dynasty and was himself just a “tribal chieftain,” not “king.” But that enemy king’s stone is a big enough rock on which to build a biblical kingdom (or two), and, the point here, to shift the focus, as Finkelstein & Silberman put it themselves (pp. 129-30) from “David and Solomon’s mere existence.”
Since then, much more evidence has been unearthed, in Jerusalem itself (including what may have been David’s palace and a Solomon-built wall) and outside it (e.g., Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tel Zayit) evidencing David-time substantiality of a Jerusalem-based Jewish kingdom. So, take it from me (Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, section 2.2, pp. 22-31), Gentle Reader, King David was More Real Than King Arthur.
“There Was No Solomon’s Temple”
Evidence extent today – the Temple Mount with Western Wall – incontestably evidences the Jews’ Second Temple, destroyed by Rome in 70 CE, but what of Solomon’s Temple on that same site, destroyed by Babylonians back in 586 BCE? Let me cite you two lines of evidence.
In his book What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? (p. 145), archeologist William Dever, noting the highly detailed description of Solomon’s Temple in the Hebrew Bible, states: “Indeed, the ‘fabulous’ nature of Solomon’s temple in the Bible is largely what prompts the revisionists and others to dismiss it as a figment of later writers’ and editors’ imaginations, fired by old legends of the ‘Golden Age of Solomon.’” “But,” he goes on (ibid), “the fact is we now have direct Bronze and Iron Age parallels for every single feature [emphasis Dever’s] of the ‘Solomonic Temple’ as described in the Hebrew Bible.” Biblical Archeology Review (July-Oct 2009) quotes Harvard Professor Lawrence Stager that the Ain Dara temple in Syria “proves that the Biblical description of Solomon’s Temple was neither an anachronistic account based on later temple archetypes nor a literary creation.’”
The second line of evidence, Locating the Original Temple Mount, Biblical Archeology Review, March-April 1992, is an astonishing piece of Holmes-worthy detective work by archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer. It’s worth working through a skeleton sketch. Ritmeyer starts with an earlier observation that the bottom step of one of the eight flights of steps leading up to the Dome of the Rock is slightly not parallel to the Dome wall to which it leads, but exactly parallel to the Mount’s pre-Herodian eastern wall, and that this step had a boss typical of the pre-Herodian section of the Mount’s eastern wall near the Golden Gate, suggesting that it may have been a part of the pre-Herodian Mount’s western wall. A line projected west from a rock scarp believed to have been cut for the foundation of the original northern wall right angles with the northern edge of the step/wall, marking it as the northwest corner of the original Mount. From ancient writings we know that the original Mount was 500 cubits square. It’s 861 feet from this northwest corner step/wall to the Mount’s eastern wall, which at the Royal cubit of 20.67 inches is 500 cubits (861 x 12 / 20.67 = 499.86). 861 feet south of the Mount’s northeast corner is a slight bend, noted by Warren, in the Mount’s eastern wall, indicating a masonry change. This then is the original square Mount’s southeastern corner. There’s a lot more to this described in the BAR article, but there you have it – a ghost of the original Mount that supported the Mount’s original Temple.
“Rome Exiled the Jews Who Were Gone for 2,000 Years”
The Romans, on defeating the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, did NOT “exile “ Judaea’s surviving Jews. Parkes, Whose Land? (pp. 44-45): “The population remained as it had been before the loss of independence, primarily peasants and landowners…. Jewish villages were thickly scattered in the hills and valleys of the region.” This continued even after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity. Wilken, The Land Called Holy (pp. 194-95): “Jewish life in Palestine went on undisturbed during the Christian era – such is the testimony of archeology.”
Lines of evidence include remains of Roman-Byzantine era synagogues throughout the land (see, e.g., citations from respected author Zev Vilnay, The Guide to Israel (16th ed, 1973, collected in Verlin, supra, pp. 69-72); Roman recognition until the fifth century of the Patriarch as head of the homeland’s Jews; writing by sages in the land of the Mishnah and then Jerusalem Talmud; and participation of self-mustered battalions of homeland Jews fighting alongside the 614 CE Persian invaders against the Romans’ Byzantine heirs.
In the 630’s, Arab-led Muslim invaders defeated the Byzantines in Palestine. Jews remained in the land. Archeologist Bahat, The Forgotten Generations (pp.30-31) drew a map of a hundred ninth century Jewish communities we know of today. The Muslims were ousted by the next invader, the European Christian Crusaders of 1099, who acknowledged “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them in Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall,” and that Haifa’s Jews, fighting alone, “courageously” held them off for a month. When the dust settled from Saladin-led Muslims’ defeat of the Crusaders in the next century, non-Arab Mamluks ruled Palestine and surrounding areas for over two centuries, followed by Ottoman Turks for four. Jews were present throughout, in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land.
So don’t let them tell you the Romans “exiled” us Jews from the land and we were gone from Hadrian until Herzl, some eighteen hundred years later.
“Jews Were an Insignificant Minority When Israel was Created in Arab Palestine in 1948”
If Israel was “created” ex nihilo in an Arab land in 1948, how is it that a homeland army of homeland Jews threw back and then some the instant invasion for its destruction of several neighboring Arab states? The fact is that Jews had never abandoned their homeland, were always present, and declared independence as the land’s next native state after ancient Jewish Judaea’s destruction by Rome.
Over its four centuries of misrule from 1517 to 1917, Turkey had gradually virtually emptied the land of its people. “The lowpoint was probably reached in 1850, when estimates varied between fifty and one hundred thousand.” DeHaas, History of Palestine: The Last Two Thousand Years, p. 39. By 1947, it had risen back to about a million Arabs and some 600,000 Jews. See authorities cited in Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 23. So Jews were a good third, far from an insignificant minority in 1948.
But the Jewish indigenous presence claim doesn’t stop there. Over the almost two millennia of uninterrupted foreign empire rule, the rulers – Romans-Byzantines, Crusaders and others – repeatedly massacred homeland Jews, while barring the gates, along with European decrees against “transport of Jews to the East,” to Diaspora Jews coming home. This culminated in Mandate trustee Britain’s Mandate-defying before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade and barring land purchase in most of the land by Jews. And count the Jews in 1948 in “Displaced Persons” camps in Europe, who were clamoring to go home to their homeland, and in British prison camps on Cyprus, whom the Aliyah Bet had striven to bring there. But for all this, Jews would have been the big majority in 1948.
And “the Palestinians,” who claim they were displaced by Israel’s “creation,” were party to the Arab war for Israel’s destruction. A greater number of Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jews, today the majority of Israel’s population, were displaced in the 1948 war and its wake from Arab and other Muslim lands. In fact, Palestinian Arabs are not “THE Palestinians” at all. The AP has acknowledged that Jews, Christians and Muslims living in Palestine during the Mandate were all called Palestinian. Indeed, the UN itself in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution referenced the land’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.” Palestinian Arabs comprise the majority of eastern Palestine’s, Jordan’s, population, and Jordan, Palestine east of the River, comprised 78% of the Palestine Mandate.
So don’t let them tell you the homeland’s Jews were an insignificant minority in 1948.
Summing Up
So King David and Solomon’s Temple were real. The Romans didn’t “exile” us, and we weren’t gone from our homeland for close to two thousand years. We were a good third of the land’s population in 1948, and but for successive slaughters of homeland Jews by successive foreign empire rulers between Judaea’s fall and Israel’s rebirth, the barring of the gates to Jews going home, restriction of Jews buying land in their homeland including by Britain in direct violation of the Mandate’s call for “close settlement on the land” by Jews , and homeland-striving Jews still stuck in Europe and Cyprus in 1948, we’d have been the big majority in the land. We and Israelis have to strenuously make known these homeland-legitimizing facts in the West.