Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La Lobby Neocon vuole cacciare via un'altro professore universitario scomodo

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/education/10barnard.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1189426082-WtqOEvAZ46ej+AtAP/3GrA
A tenure bid by an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard
College who has critically examined the use of archaeology in Israel
has put Columbia University once again at the center of a struggle
over scholarship on the Middle East.
The professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, who is of Palestinian descent, has
been at Barnard since 2002 and has won many awards and grants,
including a Fulbright scholarship and fellowships at Harvard and the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Barnard has already
approved her for tenure, officials said, and forwarded its
recommendation to Columbia University, its affiliate, which has the
final say.
It is Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological
Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," that has
made her a lightning rod, setting off warring petitions opposing and
supporting her candidacy, and producing charges of shoddy scholarship
and countercharges of an ideological witch hunt.
Judith R. Shapiro, Barnard's president, who is also an anthropologist,
said in a statement that the tenure process was "one of the linchpins
of academic freedom and liberal arts education," and that despite the
passions, it must be conducted "thoughtfully, comprehensively,
systematically and confidentially." She added, "This case will be no
different, both in its rigor and its freedom from outside lobbying."
The fracas is one of a growing list of bitter disputes over the Middle
East in academe, including charges a few years ago by Jewish students
at Columbia that they were being intimidated by professors of Middle
Eastern studies. A university investigation found no evidence of anti-
Semitic statements by professors, but it criticized one professor for
becoming angry at a student in his class in a discussion of Israel's
conduct.
At DePaul University in Chicago, a tenure fight led to the resignation
last week of an assistant professor, Norman G. Finkelstein. He has
written that Israel and Jews have used the Holocaust for their own
purposes, including to oppress Palestinians.
Zachary Lockman, a professor at New York University who is the
president of the Middle East Studies Association, said, "It's a very
conflicted field, given the passions about the Middle East, and there
are a lot of people outside academe who have very strong feelings."
Dr. Abu El-Haj, who is teaching a course on "Race and Sexuality in
Scientific and Social Practice" this semester, declined to be
interviewed while her tenure was under consideration.
Born in the United States in 1962, Dr. Abu El-Haj studied at Bryn Mawr
College and earned a Ph.D. at Duke. In her book, which grew out of her
doctoral research and was published by the University of Chicago Press
in 2001, Dr. Abu El-Haj says Israeli archaeologists searched for an
ancient Jewish presence to help build the case for a Jewish state. In
their quest, she writes, they sometimes used bulldozers, destroying
remains of other cultures, including those of Arabs.
She concludes her book by saying the ransacking by thousands of
Palestinians in 2000 of Joseph's tomb, a Jewish holy site in the West
Bank, "needs to be understood in relation to a colonial-national
history" of Israel and the symbolic resonance of artifacts.
The Middle East Studies Association, an organization of scholars who
focus on the region, chose her book in 2002 as one of the year's two
best books in English about the Middle East. The other was "Being
Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship," by Gershon Shafir and
Yoav Peled, published by Cambridge University Press.
Jere L. Bacharach, a historian at the University of Washington who
presented the awards, said at the time that both books were "nuanced,
nonpolemic works on subjects that too often lend themselves to
political tirades and polemics."
Critics of Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, however, said her aim was to
undermine Israel's right to exist, and challenged her methodology and
findings.
"Serious people are outraged when people who are rank amateurs come
in," Jacob Lassner, a professor of history and religion at
Northwestern University who wrote a negative review of her book, said
in an interview. "It's insulting. Brain surgeons would be offended if
a medical technician criticized their work. That's what's happened
here. The problem, of course, is that she is politically driven."
As Dr. Abu El-Haj's tenure deadline approached, Paula R. Stern, a 1982
Barnard graduate who lives in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank,
began an online petition against the professor for what it called her
"demonstrably inferior caliber, her knowing misrepresentation of data
and violation of accepted standards of scholarship." As of yesterday,
it had more than 2,000 signatures, some of them from Columbia faculty
members.
"I am horrified," Ms. Stern said in an interview, "that Barnard would
even consider tenure for a professor who is so clearly unqualified."
But Dr. Abu El-Haj also has many supporters, particularly in her
field, who say her book is solid, even brilliant, and part of an
innovative trend of looking at how disciplines function.
They have produced a counter-petition, signed by about 1,300 people,
including many professors around the country and abroad, urging that
she receive tenure and calling the attacks on her "an orchestrated
witch hunt" by those trying to shut down legitimate intellectual
inquiry.
Paul Manning, a linguist in the anthropology department at Trent
University in Peterborough, Ontario, who initiated the petition
supporting her, said that he acted in part because "Nadia has been
targeted a long time, for years, and she's not been having a very good
time of it."
He was also concerned about the "concerted attack on the autonomy of
the tenure process," Professor Manning said. He added that people were
"particularly angered" about the Barnard case because it came on the
heels of the DePaul case, in which Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law
professor, campaigned to derail Dr. Finkelstein's tenure bid.
Dr. Abu El-Haj has some opponents at her own college. "There is every
reason in the world to want her to have tenure, and only one reason
against it - her work," said Alan F. Segal, a professor of religion
and Jewish studies at Barnard. "I believe it is not good enough."
He said he was particularly troubled by her suggestion that ancient
Israelites had not inhabited the land where Israel now stands, and he
said that she had either misunderstood or ignored evidence to the
contrary. "She completely misunderstands what the biblical tradition
is saying," he added. "She is not even close. She is so bizarrely
off."
He also said that a Barnard official, whom he declined to name, had
asked him to suggest people who were not Jewish to comment on Dr. Abu
El-Haj's work for the tenure review, and that he had refused.
Elizabeth Gildersleeve, a Barnard spokeswoman, said that a high
official of the college had met with Professor Segal on the tenure
case and asked him to submit names for letters of reference. But Ms.
Gildersleeve said that "the charge that restrictions were put on that
request is absolutely untrue."
Dr. Abu El-Haj's supporters say that she has come under attack partly
because she is a Palestinian-American and that her opponents often
quote her out of context to distort her arguments.
"She is a scholar of the highest quality and integrity who is being
persecuted because she has the courage to focus an analytical lens on
subjects that others wish to shield from scrutiny," said Michael
Dietler, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, "and
because she happens to be of Palestinian origin."
Whether Dr. Abu El-Haj will win tenure is expected to be decided in
the next few months. The tenure rate at Barnard in recent years has
been high: The college said that of 37 faculty members nominated for
tenure by departments since 2002-3, tenure was granted to 33.

off."
Piu' che doveroso che degli incapaci magari anche razzisti non ottengano
la cattedra in prestigiose universita'.
Ma sicuramente per certi *PIRLA* a 'la Torrieri anche questo docente
sara' parte della fantomatica "lobby neocon" :)
-Stefano

From a "henotheistic" cult in which Yahweh was worshiped as the chief
god among many, they refashioned the national religion so that
henceforth Yahweh would be worshiped to the exclusion of all other
deities. One law, that of Yahweh, would now reign supreme.
This is not, of course, the story that we have all been led to believe
is, at least to some degree, history. This is not the story told, for
instance, in such tomes as Paul Johnson's 1987 bestseller, A History
of the Jews, from which we learn that Abraham departed the ancient
city of Ur early in the second millennium B.C. as part of a great
westward trek of "Habiru" (i.e., Hebrew) nomads to the land of
Canaan . "[T]hough the monotheistic concept was not fully developed in
[Abraham's] mind," Johnson writes, "he was a man striving towards it,
who left Mesopotamian society precisely because it had reached a
spiritual impasse." Now, however, we know that this statement is
mainly bosh. Not only is there no evidence that any such figure as
Abraham ever lived but archaeologists believe that there is no way
such a figure could have lived given what we now know about ancient
Israelite origins.
A few pages later, Johnson declares that "we can be reasonably sure
that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century B.C. and had been
completed by about 1225 B.C." Bosh as well. A growing volume of
evidence concerning Egyptian border defenses, desert sites where the
fleeing Israelites supposedly camped, etc., indicates that the flight
from Egypt did not occur in the thirteenth century before Christ; it
never occurred at all. Although Johnson writes that the story of Moses
had to be true because it "was beyond the power of the human mind to
invent," we now know that Moses was no more historically real than
Abraham before him. Although Johnson adds that Joshua, Moses's
lieutenant, "began and to a great extent completed the conquest of
Canaan ," the Old Testament account of that conquest turns out to be
fictional as well. And although Johnson goes on to inform his readers
that after bottling up the Philistines in a narrow coastal strip, King
David "then moved east, south and north, establishing his authority
over Ammon, Moab, Edom, Aram-Zobar and even Aram-Damascus in the far
north-east," archaeologists believe that David was not a mighty
potentate whose power was felt from the Nile to the Euphrates but
rather a freebooter who carved out what was at most a small duchy in
the southern highlands around Jerusalem and Hebron. Indeed, the chief
disagreement among scholars nowadays is between those who hold that
David was a petty hilltop chieftain whose writ extended no more than a
few miles in any direction and a small but vociferous band of
"biblical minimalists" who maintain that he never existed at all.
In classic Copernican fashion, a new generation of archaeologists has
taken everything its teachers said about ancient Israel and stood it
on its head. Two myths are being dismantled as a consequence: one
concerning the origins of ancient Israel and the other concerning the
relationship between the Bible and science. Back in the days when
archaeology was buttressing the old biblical tales, the relationship
between science and religion had warmed considerably; now the old
chill has crept back in. The comfy ecumenicism that allowed one to
believe in, say, modern physics and Abraham, Isaac, et al. is
disappearing, replaced by a somewhat sharper dividing line between
science and faith. The implications are sweeping--after all, it is not
the Song of the Nibelungen or the Epic of Gilgamesh that is being
called into question here but a series of foundational myths to which
fully half the world's population, in one way or another, subscribes.
So how did such a glorious revolution come to be? As is usually the
case, we must first look to when cracks started developing in the
ancien regime.
Ironically, the new archaeology represents something of a circling
back to what was once known as the "Higher Criticism," a largely
German school of biblical study that relied solely on linguistic and
textual analysis. By the late nineteenth century members of this
school had arrived at the conclusion that the first five books of the
Old Testament--variously known as the Five Books of Moses, the Torah,
or the Pentateuch--were not written by Moses himself, as tradition
would have it. Rather, they were largely products of a "post-exilic
period" in which Jewish scribes, newly released from captivity in
Babylon , set about putting a jumbled collection of ancient writings
into some sort of coherent order. The Higher Criticism did not topple
the Old Testament as a whole, but it did conclude that Abraham, Isaac,
and the other tribal founders depicted in the Book of Genesis were no
more real than the heroes of Greek or Norse mythology. As the German
scholar Julius Wellhausen put it in the 1870s: "The whole literary
character and loose connection of the ... story of the patriarchs
reveal how gradually its different elements were brought together, and
how little they have coalesced into a unity." Rather than a chronicle
of genuine events, the history that Genesis set forth was an
artificial construct, a narrative framework created long after the
facts in order to link together a series of unconnected folktales like
pearls on a string.
If the linguists of the Higher Criticism were generally skeptical in
regard to the Old Testament, modern biblical archaeology as it began
taking shape in the early nineteenth century was something entirely
different. The first modern archaeologists to set foot in the Holy
Land were New England Congregationalists determined to make use of
rigorous scientific methods in order to strip away centuries of what
they regarded as Roman Catholic superstition and prejudice. As the
American biblical scholar Edward Robinson, who first came to Palestine
in 1838, put it, he would accept nothing until it was absolutely
proven. And yet, as a dutiful Calvinist, Robinson assumed from the
outset that whatever he uncovered would broadly confirm what he had
learned years earlier in Sunday school. Evidence that buttressed the
biblical account was eagerly sought out, while evidence that
contradicted it was ignored. British archaeologists set sail a
generation later with an even more explicit set of preconceptions. As
the Archbishop of York told the newly created Palestine Exploration
Fund in London in 1865,
   This country of
Palestine
 belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours.
   It was given to the Father of Israel [i.e., Abraham] in the words:
"Walk
   through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for
I will
   give it unto thee." We mean to walk through
Palestine
 in the length and in
   the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us....
The first archaeologists were thus guilty of one of the most
elementary of scientific blunders: rather than allowing the facts to
speak for themselves, they had tried to fit them into a preconceived
theoretical framework. Another layer of political mystification was
added in the twentieth century by Zionist pioneers eager for evidence
that the Jewish claim to the Holy Land was every bit as ancient as the
Old Testament said it was. In 1928 members of a settlement known as
Beth Alpha uncovered an ancient synagogue mosaic while digging an
irrigation ditch. Since the settlers were members of a left-wing
faction known as Hashomer Hatzair, it was inevitable that some would
argue that the find should be left to the dustbin of history and that
the work of building a modern agricultural settlement should continue
uninterrupted. But others recognized its significance: the more
evidence they uncovered of an ancient Jewish presence in the Holy
Land , the more they would succeed in legitimizing a modern
colonization effort. As the number of digs multiplied and turned into
a national passion, what the Israeli archaeologist Eliezer Sukenik
described as a specifically "Jewish archaeology" was born.
The result was a happy union of science, religion, and politics that
by the 1950s would eventually bring together everyone from Christian
fundamentalists in the American heartland to the Israeli military
establishment. When David Ben-Gurion, the founder of modern Israel ,
spoke of a sweeping offensive in the 1948 War of Independence, he did
so in language purposely evocative of the Book of Joshua. The armies
of Israel , he declared, had "struck the kings of Lod and Ramleh, the
kings of Belt Naballa and Deir Tarif, the kings of Kola and Migdal
Zedek.... "Yigael Yadin, Eliezer Sukenik's Son, who was not only
Israel 's leading archaeologist but a top military commander, referred
to an Israeli military incursion into the Sinai by quipping that it
was the first time Israeli forces had set foot on the peninsula in
3,400 years. All assumed that the ancient events Israel claimed to be
reenacting had actually occurred.
The politicization of archaeology reached something of a climax in the
early 1960s, when Yadin was put in command of the excavation of
Masada, a hilltop fortress where nearly 1,000 Jewish warriors had
committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in A.D. 73. In
Yadin's hands, Masada emerged as Israel's preeminent nationalist
shrine, a place where military recruits were assembled to take an oath
of allegiance in dramatic nighttime ceremonies--this despite
complaints on the part of a few scholars that evidence for a mass
suicide was lacking and that there was reason to believe that ancient
accounts of the event were deliberately falsified.
Around this time, the pop novelist James Michener summed up the state
of official belief in his heavy-breathing bestseller The Source (which
this writer savored as a teenager). Using a fictional archaeological
dig to weave a series of tales about Palestinian life from prehistoric
times to the modern era, Michener briskly laid out the middlebrow
orthodoxy of the day: i.e., that God had entered into a pact with the
ancient Israelites early in the second millennium B.C., that Jews had
dominated the Holy Land for some 2,000 years thereafter, and that with
the birth of modern Israel they were claiming their birthright.
"Deuteronomy is so real to me," Michener has a fictional Israeli
archaeologist declare, "that I feel as if my immediate ancestor--say,
my great-grandfather with desert dust still in his clothes--came down
that valley with goats and donkeys and stumbled onto this spot."
Michener says of another fictional archaeologist, an American who has
just been reading the Torah,
   This time he gained a sense of the enormous historicity of the
book.... He
   now read the Ten Commandments as if he were among the tribes
listening to
   Moses. It was he who was coming out of
Egypt
, dying of thirst in the Sinai,
   retreating in petulant fear from the first invasion of the Promised
Land.
   He put the Bible down with a distinct sense of having read the
history of a
   real people....
Yet it was precisely this "historicity" that was beginning to come
under fire. Resurrecting a theory first proposed in the 1920s, an
Israeli named Yohanan Aharoni infuriated the Israeli archaeological
establishment by arguing that evidence in support of an Israelite war
of conquest in the thirteenth century B.C. was weak and unconvincing.
Basing his argument on a redating of pottery shards found at a dig in
the biblical city of Hazor , Aharoni proposed instead that the first
Hebrew settlers had filtered into Palestine in a nonviolent fashion,
peacefully settling among the Canaanites rather than putting them to
the sword. Although archaeologists claimed in the 1930s to have
uncovered evidence that the walls of Jericho had fallen much as the
Book of Joshua said they had, a British archaeologist named Kathleen
Kenyon was subsequently able to demonstrate, based on Mycenaean
pottery shards found amid the ruins, that the destruction had occurred
no later than 1300 B.C., seventy years or more before the conquest
could have happened. Whatever caused the walls of Jericho to come
tumbling down, it was not Joshua's army.
The enormous ideological edifice that Yigael Yadin and others had
erected was weakening at the base. Whereas formerly every pottery
fragment or stone tablet appeared to confirm the biblical account, now
nothing seemed to fit. Attempting to pinpoint precisely when Abraham
had departed the ancient city of Ur, the American scholar William F.
Albright, a pillar of the archaeological establishment until his death
in 1971, theorized that he had left as part of a great migration of
"Amorite" (literally "western") desert nomads sometime between 2100
and 1800 B.C. This was the theory that Paul Johnson would later cite
in A History of the Jews. Subsequent research into urban development
and nomadic growth patterns indicated that no such mass migration had
taken place and that several cities mentioned in the Genesis account
did not exist during the time frame Albright had suggested. Efforts to
salvage the theory by moving up Abraham's departure to around 1500
B.C. foundered when it was pointed out that, this time around, Genesis
failed to mention cities that did dominate the landscape during this
period. No matter what time frame was advanced, the biblical text did
not accord with what archaeologists were learning about the land of
Canaan in the second millennium.
This was not all. As Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv
University, and Neil Asher Silberman, a journalist who specializes in
biblical and religious subjects, point out in their recent book, The
Bible Unearthed, the patriarchal tales make frequent mention of camel
caravans. When, for example, Abraham sent one of his servants to look
for a wife for Abraham's son, Isaac, Genesis 24 says that the emissary
"took ten of his master's camels and left, taking with him all kinds
of good things from his master." Yet analysis of ancient animal bones
confirms that camels were not widely used for transport in the region
until well after 1000 B.C. Genesis 26 tells of Isaac seeking help from
a certain "Abimelech, king of the Philistines." Yet archaeological
research has confirmed that the Philistines were not a presence in the
area until after 1200 B.C. The wealth of detail concerning people,
goods, and cities that makes the patriarchal tales so vivid and
lifelike, archaeologists discovered, were reflective of a period long
after the one that Albright had pinpointed. They were reflective of
the mid-first millennium, not the early second.
In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. An ancient text purporting to
be a record of events centuries earlier--how could it not fall short
of modern historical standards? How could it not reflect contemporary
events more than events in the distant past? Beginning in the 1950s,
doubts concerning the Book of Exodus multiplied just as they had about
Genesis. The most obvious concerned the complete silence in
contemporary Egyptian records concerning the mass escape of what the
Bible says were no fewer than 603,550 Hebrew slaves. Such numbers no
doubt were exaggerated. Yet considering how closely Egypt 's eastern
borders were patrolled at that time, how could the chroniclers of the
day have failed to mention what was still likely a major security
breach?
Old-guard academics professed to be untroubled. John Bright, a
prominent historian, was dismissive of the entire issue. "Not only
were Pharaohs not accustomed to celebrate reverses," he wrote in A
History of Israel, long considered the standard account, "but an
affair involving only a party of runaway slaves would have been to
them of altogether minor significance." The scribes' silence
concerning the mysterious figure of Moses, Bright went on, was also of
no account. Regardless of what the chronicles did or did not say, "The
events of exodus and Sinai require a great personality behind them.
And a faith so unique as Israel 's demands a founder as surely as does
Christianity--or Islam, for that matter."
This was dogma masquerading as scholarship. Not only was there a
dearth of physical evidence concerning the escape itself, as
archaeologists pointed out, but the slate was blank concerning the
nearly five centuries that the Israelites had supposedly lived in
Egypt prior to the Exodus as well as the forty years that they
supposedly spent wandering in the Sinai. Not so much as a skeleton,
campsite, or cooking pot had turned up, Finkelstein and Silberman
noted, even though "modern archeological techniques are quite capable
of tracing even the very meager remains of hunter-gatherers and
pastoral nomads all over the world." Indeed, although archaeologists
have found remains in the Sinai from the third millennium B.C. and the
late first, they have found none from the thirteenth century.
As with Abraham, the effort to nail down a time frame for the
departure created more problems than it resolved. Archaeologists had
long zeroed in on a relatively narrow window of opportunity in the
thirteenth century B.C. bounded by two independently verifiable
events--the start of work on two royal cities in which the Book of
Exodus says Hebrew slaves were employed ("and they built Pithom and
Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh ...") and the subsequent erection
of a victory stele, or monument, that describes a people identified as
"Israel" already existing in Canaan. Hence, the flight into the Sinai
had to have taken place either during the reign of a pharaoh known as
Rameses or shortly after the death of Ramses II in 1213 B.C.
Once again the theory didn't add up. The Book of Numbers states that,
following their escape, the Israelites came under attack from the
"Canaanite king of Arad , who lived in the Negev ," as they were
"coming along the road to Atharim." But although excavations showed
that a city of Arad existed in the early Bronze Age from roughly 3500
to 2200 B.C., and that an Iron Age fort arose on the site beginning in
roughly 1150 B.C., it was deserted during the years in between. The
Pentateuch says the Hebrews did battle with Sihon, king of the
Amorites, at a city called Heshbon, but excavations have revealed that
Heshbon did not exist during this period either. Nor did Edom ,
against whose king the Old Testament says the ancient Jews also made
war.
Then came a series of archaeological studies conducted in the
aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967. Previously archaeologists had
intensively studied specific sites and locales, digging deep in order
to determine how technology and culture had changed from one century
to the next. Now they tramped through hills and valleys looking for
pottery shards and remnants of ancient walls in order to map out how
settlement patterns had ebbed and flowed across broad stretches of
terrain. Whereas previously archaeologists had concentrated on the
lowland cities where the great battles mentioned in the Bible were
said to have taken place, they now shifted their attention to the
highlands located in the present West Bank . The results were little
short of revolutionary. Rather than revealing that Canaan was entered
from the outside, analysis of ancient settlement patterns indicated
that a distinctive Israelite culture arose locally around 1200 B.C. as
nomadic shepherds and goatherds ceased their wanderings and began
settling down in the nearby uplands. Instead of an alien culture, the
Israelites were indigenous. Indeed, they were highly similar to other
cultures that were emerging in the region around the same time--except
for one thing: whereas archaeologists found pig bones in other sites,
they found none among the Israelites. A prohibition on eating pork may
have been one of the earliest ways in which the Israelites
distinguished themselves from their neighbors.
Thus there was no migration from Mesopotamia , no sojourn in Egypt ,
and no exodus. There was no conquest upon the Israelites' return and,
for that matter, no peaceful infiltration such as the one advanced by
Yohanan Aharoni. Rather than conquerors, the Hebrews were a native
people who had never left in the first place. So why invent for
themselves an identity as exiles and invaders? One reason may have
been that people in the ancient world did not establish rights to a
particular piece of territory by farming or by raising families on it
but by seizing it through force of arms. Indigenous rights are an
ideological invention of the twentieth century A.D. and are still not
fully established in the twenty-first, as the plight of today's
Palestinians would indicate. The only way that the Israelites could
establish a moral right to the land they inhabited was by claiming to
have conquered it sometime in the distant past. Given the brutal power
politics of the day, a nation either enslaved others or was enslaved
itself, and the Israelites were determined not to fall into the latter
category.
If the Old Testament is to be believed, David and Solomon, rulers of
the southern kingdom of Judah from about 1005 to about 931 B.C., made
themselves masters of the northern kingdom of Israel as well. They
represent, in the official account, a rare moment of national unity
and power; under their reign, the combined kingdom was a force
throughout the Fertile Crescent . The unified kingdom is said to have
split into two rump states shortly after Solomon's death and, thus
weakened, was all too easy for the Assyrian Empire and its Babylonian
successor to pick off. But did a united monarchy encompassing all
twelve tribes ever truly exist?
According to the Bible, Solomon was both a master builder and an
insatiable accumulator. He drank out of golden goblets, outfitted his
soldiers with golden shields, maintained a fleet of sailing ships to
seek out exotic treasures, kept a harem of 1,000 wives and concubines,
and spent thirteen years building a palace and a richly decorated
temple to house the Ark of the Covenant. Yet not one goblet, not one
brick, has ever been found to indicate that such a reign existed. If
David and Solomon had been important regional power brokers, one might
reasonably expect their names to crop up on monuments and in the
diplomatic correspondence of the day. Yet once again the record is
silent. True, an inscription referring to "Ahaziahu, son of Jehoram,
king of the House of David" was found in 1993 on a fragment dating
from the late ninth century B.C. But that was more than a hundred
years after David's death, and at most all it indicates is that David
(or someone with a similar name) was credited with establishing the
Judahite royal line. It hardly proves that he ruled over a powerful
empire.
Moreover, by the 1970s and 1980s a good deal of countervailing
evidence--or, rather, lack of evidence--was beginning to accumulate.
Supposedly, David had used his power base in Judah as a springboard
from which to conquer the north. But archaeological surveys of the
southern hill country show that Judah in the eleventh and tenth
centuries B.C. was too poor and backward and sparsely populated to
support such a military expedition. Moreover, there was no evidence of
wealth or booty flowing back to the southern power base once the
conquest of the north had taken place. Jerusalem seems to have been
hardly more than a rural village when Solomon was reportedly
transforming it into a glittering capital. And although archaeologists
had long credited Solomon with the construction of major palaces in
the northern cities of Gezer , Hazor, and Megiddo (better known as the
site of Armageddon), recent analysis of pottery shards found on the
sites, plus refined carbon-14 dating techniques, indicate that the
palaces postdate Solomon's reign by a century or more.
Finkelstein and Silberman concluded that Judah and Israel had never
existed under the same roof. The Israelite culture that had taken
shape in the central hill country around 1200 B.C. had evolved into
two distinct kingdoms from the start. Whereas Judah remained weak and
isolated, Israel did in fact develop into an important regional power
beginning around 900 B.C. It was as strong and rich as David and
Solomon's kingdom had supposedly been a century earlier, yet it was
not the sort of state of which the Jewish priesthood approved. The
reason had to do with the nature of the northern kingdom's expansion.
As Israel grew, various foreign cultures came under its sway, cultures
that sacrificed to gods other than Yahweh. Pluralism became the order
of the day: the northern kings could manage such a diverse empire only
by allowing these cultures to worship their own gods in return for
their continued loyalty. The result was a policy of religious
syncretism, a theological pastiche in which the cult of Yahweh
coexisted alongside those of other Semitic deities.
When the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians, the Jewish priesthood
concluded not that Israel had played its cards badly in the game of
international politics but that by tolerating other cults it had given
grave offense to the only god that mattered. Joining ,a stream of
refugees to the south, the priests swelled the ranks of an influential
political party dedicated to the proposition that the only way for
Judah to avoid a similar fate was to cleanse itself of all rival
beliefs and devote itself exclusively to Yahweh.
"They did wicked things that provoked Yahweh to anger. They worshiped
idols, though Yahweh had said, `You shall not do this.'" Such was the
"Yahweh-alone" movement's explanation for Israel 's downfall. The
monotheistic movement reached a climax in the late seventh century
B.C. when a certain King Josiah took the throne and gave the go-ahead
for a long-awaited purge. Storming through the countryside, Josiah and
his Yahwist supporters destroyed rival shrines, slaughtered alien
priests, defiled their altars, and ensured that henceforth even Jewish
sacrifice take place exclusively in Jerusalem, where the priests could
exercise tight control. The result, the priests and scribes believed,
was a national renaissance that would soon lead to the liberation of
the north and a similar cleansing there as well.
But then: disaster. After allowing his priests to establish a rigid
religious dictatorship, Josiah rode off to rendezvous with an Egyptian
pharaoh named Necho in the year 609 B.C. Although Chronicles says that
the two monarchs met to do battle, archaeologists, pointing out that
Josiah was in no position to challenge the mighty Egyptian army,
suspect that Necho merely summoned Josiah to some sort of royal parley
and then had him killed for unknown reasons. A model of pious
rectitude, Josiah had done everything he thought God wanted of him. He
had purified his kingdom and consecrated his people exclusively to
Yahweh. Yet he suffered regardless. Judah entered into a period of
decline culminating some twenty-three years later in the Babylonian
conquest and exile.
Does this mean that monotheism was nothing more than a con, a ruse
cooked up by ambitious priests in order to fool a gullible population?
As with any religion, cynicism and belief, realpolitik and genuine
fervor, all came together in a way that we can barely begin to
untangle. To say that the Jerusalem priesthood intentionally cooked up
a phony history is to assume that the priests possessed a modern
concept of historical truth and falsehood, and surely this is not so.
As the biblical minimalist Thomas L. Thompson has noted, the Old
Testament's authors did not subscribe to a sequential chronology but
to some more complicated arrangement in which the great events of the
past were seen as taking place in some foggy time before time. The
priests, after all, were not inventing a past; they were inventing a
present and, they trusted, a future.
Monotheism was unquestionably a great leap forward. At a time when
there was no science, no philosophy, and no appreciable knowledge of
the outside world, an obscure, out-of-the-way people somehow conceived
of a lone deity holding the entire universe in his grasp. This was no
small feat of imagination, and its consequences were enormous.
Monotheism's attempt at a unified field theory--a single explanation
for everything from the creation of the universe to the origin of law--
failed, but in failing it ensured that people would try doubly hard to
come up with some new "theory of everything" to take its place. The
monotheistic revolution continued to build because it enlisted a
larger and larger portion of the population in its great totalizing
effort. The Book of Kings tells of the discovery, during Josiah's
reign, of a sacred book, filled with rules and regulations that the
Jews had so far failed to follow, deep within the recesses of the
Temple . In other cultures, the king might have huddled over the book
with his advisers and priests. But not Josiah. He
   called together all the elders of
Judah
 and
Jerusalem
. He went up to the
temple
 of
Yahweh
 with the men of Judah, the people of
Jerusalem
, the
   priests and the prophets--all the people from the least to the
greatest. He
   read in their hearing all the words of the Book of the Covenant,
which had
   been found in the
temple
 of
Yahweh
. The king stood by the pillar and
   renewed the covenant in the presence of Yahweh.... Then all the
people
   pledged themselves to this covenant.
This was all quite novel. Whereas formerly the king and the priests
alone were responsible to the national deity, now "all the people from
the least to the greatest" took the pledge. The people had been
transformed from mere onlookers into active participants. Arguably,
the people of Judah were less free as a consequence of Josiah's
reforms. Under the old pluralistic order they could sacrifice to other
gods, and now they could sacrifice to just one. Yet with the new
system's responsibilities to uphold the sacred covenant came the
makings of a voice. No longer could the masses be counted on to remain
silent.
Was the purpose of all this merely to pluck one tiny nation out of
obscurity and elevate it above all others? If the Yahwists were
groping for some concept of ethics to go with their universalism, for
the most part they seem to have fallen woefully short. To quote Julius
Wellhausen on the Jewish scriptures: "Monotheism is worked out to its
furthest consequences, and at the same time is enlisted in the service
of the narrowest selfishness."
A single, all-powerful god required a single set of sacred texts, and
the process of composition and codification that led to what we now
know as the Bible began under King Josiah and continued well into the
Christian era. "Canonization" of this sort concentrated rather than
dispelled questions of nationalism and universalism. A framework for
faith, the Bible was equally a machine for generating heresy and
doubt, and out of this debate eventually arose Christianity, Islam,
Protestantism, and a great deal else besides.
The new universalism had enormous energy, encompassing as it did the
entire cosmos and enlisting the entire population, but the new
democratic spirit ran aground over the issue of universalism versus
narrow nationalism. What, after all, was the point of mobilizing such
a broad population in this manner? So that they could slaughter their
neighbors all the more thoroughly? How could Moses prohibit murder and
then, in Numbers 31, fly into a rage because a returning Israelite war
party has slaughtered only the adult male Midianites? ("Now kill all
the boys," he tells them when he calms down. "And kill every woman who
has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never
slept with a man.") Was murder a crime only when it involved members
of the in-group? Or was it a crime when it involved human beings in
general, regardless of nationality? Did an emerging concept of a more
equitable social order apply only to Israel or to other nations as
well?
In one form or another, these questions have been with us ever since.
Daniel Lazare is the author of America 's Undeclared War: What's
Killing Our Cities and How We Can Stop It (Harcourt) and The Velvet
Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American
Democracy (Verso). His essay "Your Constitution Is Killing You"
appeared in the October 1999 issue.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

 In one form or another, these questions have been with us
*us* sarebbero quelli che cercano un fondamento sacro della politica?
Oppure chi vuol distruggere la propria parte ebraica ricorrendo
all'archeologia?
Lo dico perché tutti noi altri, quelli per cui la Torah non è nel
cielo né nelle profondità degli abissi, siamo molto orgogliosi di
sostenere uno Stato in cui la ricerca è libera. Se poi fosse
possibile, per i nostra archeologi, poter visitare Ebla e Dora
Ouroporos... ma chissà perché il tollerante e liberale e secolare
governo siriano dissente. In nome di una concezione diciamo così
peculiare della ricerca e dei suoi obiettivi.

century before Christ; it never occurred at all.
Altra stronzata senza nulla a sostegno.
<CUT del resto delle stronzate senza nulla a sostegno>
-Stefano

 Ouroporos
sarebbe Dora Europos?
http://www.syriagate.com/Syria/about/cities/Deir_Ezzor/douraeuropos.htm


ti risulta che studiosi israeliani possano visitare il materiale
custodito al Museo Nazionale di Damasco? Perché quella sinagoga
potrebbe dire molte cose sulla presenza ebraica da quelle parti...

 potrebbe dire molte cose sulla presenza ebraica da quelle parti...
aha, sei della setta "dal Nilo all'Eufrate", eh?


ma allora è vero che non capisci un cazzo (cit.)
Come ogni persona civile, trovo ridicolo fondare pretese politiche
sull'archeologia o sui testi sacri. Ma se i siriani sono della mia
stessa opinione, perché non permettono ad altri studiosi di studiare?

 sull'archeologia o sui testi sacri.
a sì? e perchè allora Israele è proprio lì, e non, per esempio, in
Uganda, come fu proposto in uno dei primi congressi sionisti mondiali?

Uganda
Magari perche' "proprio li, e non, per esempio, in Uganda" erano gia'
presenti ebrei da millenni, oltre ad alcuni importantissimi luoghi sacri
per gli ebrei stessi, caro fessacchiotto di un Giovannino?
-Stefano

 per gli ebrei stessi
aha, allora la storia e la religione c'entrano per fondare pretese
politiche....

politiche....
Ca**o c'entra l'immigrazione ebraica in Palestina (invece che in Uganda)
con "fondare pretese politiche" lo sai anche spiegare, povero *PIRLA* di
un Giovannino?
-Stefano

 un Giovannino?
certo, decidere di creare uno stato in Palestina non è fondare delle
pretese politiche....

certo, decidere di creare uno stato in Palestina
Il nesso tra "immigrazione ebraica in Palestina" e "decidere di creare
uno stato in Palestina" quale dovrebbe essere, caro *PIRLA* di un
Giovannino?
O gli italiani emigrati, ad esempio, in Belgio o in USA avevano "deciso
di creare uno stato" in virtu' della loro immigrazione in tali luoghi,
caro *PIRLA* di un Giovannino?
-Stefano

 la cattedra in prestigiose universita'.
Piccolo particolare: La El Haj non ha mai scritto quello che le viene
attribuito da quelli che vorrebbero
cacciarla via.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c40_a715/News/Israel.html
GT


http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c40_a715/News/Israel.html
Vediamo se e' vero:
=====
“She denies the ancient history of the Jewish kingdoms in many ways,”
Stern said in an email about Abu El-Haj, “as when she says that
Jerusalem in the times of Herod was not Jewish.”
The statement in question, in Abu El-Haj’s own voice, reads,  “For most
of its history, including the Herodian period, Jerusalem was not a
Jewish city, but rather one integrated into larger empires and
inhabited, primarily, by ‘other’ communities.”
=====
Si direbbe l'esatto contrario.
-Stefano