‘Here [in the State if Israel] their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave the world the Eternal Book of Books.’
David Ben-Gurion, 14 May 1948
‘Let there be no more war or bloodshed between Arabs and Israelis. Let there be no more suffering or denial of rights. Let there be no more despair or loss of faith.’
Anwar Sadat, 26 March 1979
Ben-Gurion and Sadat were entrenched enemies who had been determined to see the other’s ambitions thwarted to the point where Sadat expressed the determination to see that a State of Israel would never come into existence. However, the eventual recognition by him that Israel had a right to exist because of her history and of the tribulations she had been through won the day and seventy years ago, the State of Israel became a reality. This work sets out a chronological history of the journey of the Jewish people to that day in 1948 and recounts the many trials and tribulations that they experienced. It is a story of great tragedy but also of great resilience and joy and one that demonstrates that the spirit of hope within a people can never be extinguished by hate and suffering, when that hope is based on a belief that what is hoped for is right and just. It is also very true of those who hold a religious persuasion that remains fixed on their Messiah and the conviction that one day He will stand on the Mount of Zion and the deliverance of the Jewish people will be total and complete.
In setting out to write this account there is one thing I have had reinforced, that in coming to understand any issue, context is hugely important. Whether it is in Theology, Psychology, counselling clients or writing history, knowing what went before and what is happening currently allows a better and more accurate picture to be seen. So often, opinions or attitudes on many subjects are based on ill-informed views or are formed through the prism of prejudice and irrational hatred. Unfortunately, this is particularly true when the subject is Israel and the Jewish people. This book sets out to look at their journey – a terrible journey that takes them through almost every country on earth. They are a rejected people, an exploited people and a people who have to take whatever steps are necessary simply to survive and keep their Jewish identity alive. Indeed, in researching for the book I discovered so many cases of massacres, killings, property confiscation and other anti-Semitic attacks that it became impossible for one book to contain them. It may be asked why highlight the Jewish experience, when there are many other cases of ethnic cleansing and massacres and the simple answer is that there has been no other group who have been systematically attacked with a view to remove them from the face of the earth, in almost every century of human history, since they first entered the scene.
A major question on identity needs to be clarified right from the start which, in many ways, is a question that initially seems strange. Who is a Jew? The answer is not straightforward. Louis Finkelstein between 1949 and 1960 went through contortions of physical, cultural and religious aspects to try and reach a conclusion, without arrival at a satisfactory answer. The Jews are descendants of a branch of a group known as the Semites. The term Semites was first recorded in the 1770s by researchers at the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. The existence of Semites can be traced to the earliest records of history. Archaeological research in the Middle East has found evidence of Western Semitic people from around the 4-3 millennia BCE. There is a caution that must be given in that the term ‘Semite’ really refers to those who speak the Semitic language and is often confused with race or ethnicity. There is a general acceptance that Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, South Arabian Sabaeans, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Abyssinians and Bedouins of northern Arabia and of Mesopotamia belong to this Semitic group.
The term ‘race’ is regularly used to describe human groups and the Nazis would employ it heavily in their attitudes to Jews, Gypsies and so on. Yet the word was not found in ancient literature. It was a word that appeared in the sixteenth century. From Middle French (rasse) and Italian (razza) it was used to classify ‘race, breed, lineage, family’ and ‘people of common descent’. There may be a connection with Latin radix ‘root,’ but this may have been a means to arrive at the idea of ‘tribe’. In modern times, ‘race’ has come to be used to debate skin colour, physical features and blood line – the latter being at the centre of the notorious Nazi Nuremberg Blood Laws. The simplistic view that any of these traits determine ‘race’ is erroneous and misses out a basic fact. The human being no matter where he or she originates has the same basic genetic make-up and blood types which vary in the finer DNA detail. In fact, all human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup. As Naomi Zack wrote, ‘All human beings belong to the same species’. There is a debate between mono-origins of man and multi-origins; is man descended from one source or from multiple sources around the world? The University of Cambridge, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, carried out a significant study, the results of which concluded, ‘Our findings show that humans originated in a single area in Sub-Saharan Africa’. Therefore, because there is only one race, all who try to argue for the superiority of one racial group over another, as the Nazis did, is flawed. It is more correct to speak of one human race that has developed cultural and regional diversity from an original tribe, with each individual equal in dignity and value
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist at University College London, and many others have done a great deal of work looking at how mankind developed. There is agreement that mankind began in family groups, which expanded to clans and then to tribes. These tribes needed space to live and resources to survive with land from which to obtain them. From this, the concept of tribal lands arose. As populations grew, these tribal lands expanded and combined to create the modern ideas of countries. Often this growth was accompanied by violence and tribal conflict which even today can be seen in the Middle East, India, Africa and the Baltic regions. From this came the ideas of countries expanding into empires as one group attempted to exploit and take a greater share of the world’s resources and accumulate wealth and power. Throw in religion and a powerful cocktail is developed, that breeds prejudice, violence and persecution. The Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Russian and British, are all examples of such activity. Again, this was always with war.
The tribal group we will focus on is that of the ‘Semitic’ tribe, the Jews, who in turn had twelve sub-tribes. There will be an examination of who belongs to that group, who they were, their origins, their journey and their arrival in a homeland, not specifically focusing on the religion of the Jews and only touching on it when necessary to explain a geo-politically related idea or attitude. This is not because their religion is unimportant but to recognise that it is a matter of faith and belief and that religion in itself does not define a Jew. There are further complications in definition of a ‘Jew’. In the Jewish Scriptures we find in the record that kings and patriarchs have mixed their blood in marriage. Ishmael was the son of Abraham by an Egyptian woman. Isaac and Jacob both had Aramean wives. Joseph married an Egyptian and Moses a Midianite and even king David himself was descended from Ruth the Moabite. Religious reforms over the centuries have brought about a developing awareness of what the reformers called ‘purity’. This has never been truly successful and even in modern times many marry outside the faith.
That is why we can speak of religious Jews, atheistic Jews, British Jews, American Jews and Jews from every nationality. There are also those Jews who hold the belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and chose to embrace that belief and in modern times refer to themselves as Messianic Jews.
Many non-Jews may join the Jewish population through religion and identify themselves as Jews, some may even naturalise themselves in Israel and take the name Jew. More correctly nowadays, the term Israelis would apply to the citizens of that modern country; Israel. No matter what the adjective, the Jews originate from a common source. That source would be the Jewish tribe and particularly the sub-tribe of Judah, that eventually settled in Israel under King David and despite internecine wars and intermittent banishment to other lands, they have remained rooted in that region.
I will therefore concentrate on the historical facts were known and allow these to speak to the central theme of a Jewish homeland. One thing that will become apparent is that from earliest times there were many attempts to establish the Jewish people back in what has been called the Holy Land. These attempts have been inspired by the religious faith of the Jewish people wanting to return to the birthplace of their people and the promises of a land within their Scriptures. These attempts were also inspired by Christian Zionists who believed in the establishment of a Jewish state as part of their own faith’s second coming of their Messiah. It is a relatively modern phenomenon that has seen this desire to establish a Jewish homeland becoming the realisation of a more secular ambition, which some religious Jews have embraced, while others treat it with suspicion.
Perhaps it may be wise to remember the words of Maya Angelou, who was a civil rights activist in America, ‘Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.’ There is in the Jewish Scriptures in the Book of Proverbs a wise saying, ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.’ As a friend of the Jews, it is therefore necessary to also look at the issues of injustice, not only against the Jews, but those perpetrated by them. Only then can we arrive at a place to view the entire picture in the round and understand the founding of the State of Israel.