Professor casts doubt on 'Wandering Jews' in exile and brands them converts

She's an amazing Amazigh preistess who drove back Arab invaders from Morocco back in the eighth century.
Professor Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian,has just penned a controversial academic treatise in Hebrew, which translates as 'When and How was the Jewish People Invented?'. In it, he extols this Berber warrior queen and high priestess, Dahia al-Kahina, as an appropriate and overlooked Jewish heroine and suggests that the Jews as a people were never dispersed and exiled from Eretz Israel. Most are converts, he insists, and Eastern European Jews can trace Khazar origins.
The Haaretz reporter Ofri Ilani takes Sand to task for shattering a 'national mythology' and undermining the historic birthright to the Holy Land.

..he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the
Christian gospel.

Professor Sand is likely to be written off as a self-hating crank, and the timing of this piece, coinciding with Purim festivities and Good Friday, means it won't get much notice. Izzy Bee wonders if shifting Sands is merely being contrarian, or seeking publicity for deliberately heretical views. Suggesting that an hour in memory of "the Nakba" be instituted as part of pan-Israeli Memorial Day Independence Day holidays won't go far, I reckon.

What was Moses smokin'? Burning bush and divine sounds linked to psychedelics

Like many modern Israelis, Moses may have been stoned while he wandered in the Sinai way back when. At least one Israeli academic, who sampled strong hallucinogenic potions during his own South American fieldwork in the early 1990s, asserts that similar psychedelics derived from the desert acacia or the Bedouin stimulant rue may have fueled the patriarch's religious visions shared with his tribe in the wilderness.

Benny Shanon, a cognitive psychology professor at Hebrew U, has no explicit proof, but revived a venerable controversy in a recent scientific article, Ofri Ilani reports in Haaretz.

“And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking.” Thus the book of Exodus describes the impressive moment of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

The “perceiving of the voices” has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca.

“One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds,” he says.Shanon presents a provocative theory in an article published this week in the philosophy journal Time and Mind. The religious ceremonies of the Israelites included the use of psychotropic materials that can found in the Negev and Sinai, he says.

“I have no direct proof of this interpretation,” and such proof cannot be expected, he says. However, “it seems logical that something was altered in people’s consciousness. There are other stories in the Bible that mention the use of plants: for example, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden.”

Shanon, former head of the Hebrew University psychology department, said his first experience with ayahuasca was in 1991 when he was invited to a religious ceremony in the northern Amazon in 1991 in Brazil.

“I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations,” he says.

Since that time, he has used it hundreds of times, and has published a book about the plant.

“Hypotheses have been around for 20 years connecting the beginning of religions with psychoactive materials,” Shanon says. He believes the Israelites used two plants in Sinai and the Negev: one of them is wild rue, a hallucinogen used by the Bedoin to this day. However this plant is not identified with any plant mentioned in the Bible.

The acacia tree also has psychedelic properties, Shanon says, which the Israelites could have used. The acacia is mentioned frequently in the Bible, and was the type of wood of which the Ark of the Covenant was made. According to Shanon, he drank a potion prepared from a species of acacia while he was in South America, which caused similar experiences to those produced by the ayahuasca.

Shanon also sees signs of a hallucinogenic vision in the story of the burning bush. “Moses ‘looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed,’” Shanon quotes from Exodus 3:2. Time passes differently when under the influence of the plant, he notes. “That’s why Moses thought the bush was not consumed. It should have been burned in the time he thought had passed. And in that time, he heard God speaking to him.”

“But not everyone who uses a plant like this brings the Torah,” Shanon concedes. “For that, you have to be Moses.”

Red Sea, red indeed

Izzy took off for the Sinai coast last week, despite the latest terrorism alerts and arrests, and had a blast. No, not literally. We just relaxed and took a pleasant dip in the Red Sea on the far side of the border. This time, during my sixth swim here ever, the water was blood red. Clearly red. Not an illusion.

Scholars always say that the Red Sea's evocative name has nothing to do with its colour, but is derived from a mis-translation of the Hebrew name, Yam suph (ים סוף)--or "Reed Sea"-- the one through which Moses and his Biblical throng made their exodus. Wikipedia's clickable clique notes that this traditional name comes from the Greek Erythra Thalassa (Ερυθρά Θάλασσα), Latin Mare Rubrum, and Arabic Al-Baḥr Al-Aḥmar. The colour red also might indicate the cardinal direction south, or the rich colour of the sunburnt earthen hills that crouch down to the water's edge and get reflected in the waters. Hmmmm. Could have fooled me.
The simplest explanation is that old-time sailors saw red. Check out my photographic proof above, snapped on the Gulf of Aqaba just north of Nuweiba in the Egyptian Sinai one week ago. (On this aerial photo below, it's near the tip of the little watery horn on the right.)


This startling redness was not a smelly slick on top, like the red tides of southern California. It was not a chemical. The pigment was mixed right into the translucent water and it resembled Martian canal-water or a sign from the heavens that blood would flow. Abdullah, a Bedouin scuba instructor, reassured us that this was just algae which overblooms once in a while, whenever the reef fish which usually eat it are in decline. The scientific name of this plankton-like stuff is cyanobacteria Trichodesmium erythraeum, and I even found a microscopic photo.

Alarmingly, the condition means the coral reefs are at risk.