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.
Posts
