In Search of the Origin of the Jews For a long time, the biblical narrative held sway. Now scholars seek to distinguish historical fact from religious myth—if it is possible to do so. By Benjamin Balint
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-search-of-the-origin-of-the-jews-1499726881
Can we grasp the essence of something by laying bare its origins? “An origin is not just a beginning,” Steven Weitzman writes, “it is a ‘beginning that explains.’ ” In “The Origin of the Jews,” Mr. Weitzman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, aims to find one nation’s elusive starting point. “The Jews have one of the longest and most intensively studied histories of any population on earth,” he notes, “but the beginning of their history, how it is that the Jews came to be, remains surprisingly unsettled.”
The reason for this is that, until recently, the biblical narrative held sway: Jews understood themselves to be the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, members of a family that was forged into a people by enslavement in Egypt and revelation at Mount Sinai. Yet ever since the Bible’s historical veracity came under scrutiny in the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars seeking to distinguish historical fact from religious myth have questioned how Jews today are related to the Hebrews of the Torah and the Judeans of the New Testament.
Because origins can be entangled with authenticity, the inquiry is not without its risks. “Going back to antiquity,” Mr. Weitzman writes, “anti-Jewish animosity has sometimes expressed itself in the form of counter-origin stories that seek to mock and discredit the Jews by negating their own understanding of their origin.” Centuries of Christian polemics, Mr. Weitzman adds, “sought to discredit the Jews as authentic heirs to biblical Israel” by questioning the continuity between Jews and their ancient forebears and caricaturing them as a rootless people.
Today the search for origins, already fraught, has come to be entangled with the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Mr. Weitzman cites critics who challenge Zionist claims that modern-day Jews, sharing a genealogical and geographical origin with their ancient ancestors, are indigenous to the land of Israel.
The Origin of the Jews
By Steven Weitzman
Princeton, 394 pages, $35
The first to gauge the formative moment of this people’s story, Mr. Weitzman says, were 20th-century archaeologists who claimed that around 1200 B.C. the Israelites emerged from the earlier Canaanite culture. The archaeologists variously proposed that the Israelites were invaders from Egypt who seized Canaan in an act of conquest; migrants from Mesopotamia who infiltrated the land peacefully; or Canaanite peasants who revolted against their exploiters and gave birth to a new set of rituals and principles. The pioneering biblical archaeologist W.F. Albright (1891-1971) found evidence of an abrupt leap: “The Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature-worship . . . were replaced by Israel, with its nomadic simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics.”
Still other scholars locate the Jews’ founding moment in the encounter with the ancient Greeks. Drawing on Shaye Cohen’s study “The Beginnings of Jewishness” (1999), Mr. Weitzman takes up the theory that Judaism (itself a Greek coinage of the second century B.C.) was catalyzed by the Judeans’ cross-fertilization with Hellenistic culture. Before Alexander the Great’s conquest, Judean identity was a matter of ethnicity, determined by birth. Afterward, emulating the ways in which Greeks thought of their “Greekness,” it became a community of belief. Paraphrasing Mr. Cohen, Mr. Weitzman writes that “the Judeans realized under the influence of the Greeks that identity was not fixed by birth, that one could make oneself into a Jew through conversion.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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