Newsgroup: it.cultura.libri
Titolo: Israeli Bestseller Breaks National Taboo

Israeli Bestseller Breaks National Taboo
Idea of a Jewish people invented, says historian
by Jonathan Cook
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic
work has spent 19 weeks on Israel's bestseller list – and that success
has come to the history professor despite his book challenging
Israel's biggest taboo.
Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a
safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of
Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on
extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only
this claim but several more – all equally controversial.
In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy
Land, that most of today's Jews have no historical connection to the
land called Israel and that the only political solution to the
country's conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish
state.
The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks
likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched
last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print
runs.
Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic
and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby
when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the
United States next year.
In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at
least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country's
leading journalists, has called the book "fascinating and
challenging."
Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel
have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel
Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr. Bartal
made little effort to rebut Dr. Sand's claims. He dedicated much of
his article instead to defending his profession, suggesting that
Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of
Jewish history as Dr. Sand contends.
The idea for the book came to him many years ago, Dr. Sand said, but
he waited until recently to start working on it. "I cannot claim to be
particularly courageous in publishing the book now," he said. "I
waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in
Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort."
Dr. Sand's main argument is that until little more than a century ago,
Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common
religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews
challenged this idea and started creating a national history by
inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their
religion.
Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return
from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he
added.
"Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were
seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews
stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but
because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah
came."
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking
at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.
"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it
for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they
were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the
kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness
without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing
the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.
"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in
Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests
they stayed on their lands."
Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the
exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the
new faith. "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe
that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."
So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up
scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began
encouraging them to "return"?
Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and
following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion,
desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of
the time."
Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen
and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the
people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would
convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi
Jews of central and eastern Europe.
Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis
live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the
discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian
Sea.
Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth
Ahronoth, headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost
Jewish capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered
the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.
One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself
notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?
"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist
leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister],
believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's
original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."
Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues' reticence to engage with him to an
implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of "Jewish
history" taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of
cards.
The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr. Sand said,
dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two
disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was
assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was
considered unique.
"There's no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the
universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed
specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and
conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments
in historical research.
"I've been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when
European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a
historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical
inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world."
This article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu
Dhabi.


naturalmente quoto tutto, e consiglierei per gli scettici di abbinare
la lettura di
Cittadini delle tenebre  di Peter Kolosimo
E' possibile superare le barriere del tempo e conoscere il passato e
il futuro? La mente può agire
direttamente sulla natura? Quanti "corpi" ha l'uomo? Si sopravvive
alla morte fisica? In questo libro
Kolosimo esamina i più straordinari fenomeni dell'occulto e cerca di
spiegarli alla luce della scienza.
Naturalmente quello che la lobby ebraica ha impedito di pubblicare , o
forse Kolosimo temeva troppo per la sua vita, succedono tanti
incidenti, è il fatto che l'autore sarebbe stato in grado di
dimostrare aldilà di ogni ragionevole dubbio e che gli unici in grado
di poter usare coscientemente questi poteri sono gli ebrei, anche se
la domanda sorge spontanea, se gli ebrei non esistono come fanno ad
avere tutto questo potere? probabilmente bisogna andare molto indietro
nel tempo, quando Adamo ed Eva erano nel paradiso terrestre, e recenti
scavi russi hanno inequovicabilmente dimostrato essere nell'attuale
palestina, per palestina intendo chiaramente la terra usurpata dagli
eberi, poi forse scientology ha mandato un essere dallo spazio,
camuffato da serpente da lì prima cacciata dei palestinesi.
e con questo penso di aver sistemato la questione arabo palestinese.
p.s. naturalmente sono un fake
e non ho intenzione di continuare con inutili ...dimostra questo
dimostra quell'altro
non ci saranno ulteriori repliche da parte mia, ma la tentazione è
stata troppo forte

 avere tutto questo potere?
anche dio non esiste, eppure quante cose sono state fatte dagli uomini
in suo nome?


vengo meno alla mia parola,
sinceramente non pensavo che qualcuno potesse prendere sul serio
quello che ho scritto, tanto da
ribattermi sul punto.
ma tanto per pigiare qualche tasto, anche secondo me dio non esiste,
ma resta il fatto che non è stato
inventato, è una conseguenza di quello che è stato il processo
psichico dell’uomo, ossia quando
l’uomo ha preso coscienza che la sua vita aveva un inizio ed una fine,
quello che è più ragionevole
pensare è che l’angoscia sia stata tanto forte che si è autoconvinto
che anche se il suo corpo non
interagiva più con quanto lo circondava un qualcosa di lui avrebbe
dovuto comunque sopravvivere,
nel vento , in un albero, un animale quant’altro, poi l’evoluzione
delle varie forme della società ha
portato alle varie forme di religione e spiritualità che oggi
conosciamo, dal buddismo al
cristianesimo, ai medium , reincarnazioni eccetera eccetera
(questo per lo meno in sintesi e detto molto alla carlona è il
pensiero di S. Freud, che purtroppo
manco a farlo apposta era ebreo :))   )
o forse tu pensi che “dei grandi vecchi” un giorno si sono seduti in
una foresta o intorno ad un tavolo
e si sono chiesti, cosa potremmo fare per indirizzare l’umanità in un
verso piuttosto che in un altro, ci
inventiamo un creatore e iniziamo a raccontare che solo noi simao in
diretto contatto con lui e che
quindi devono obbedirci?