Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

MYTHISTORY 97
discoveries, because, ever since Dubnow, the name of the historiographic
game was science. Thus,
The biblical tradition, though overlaid with legendary motifs, preserved
the distinct recollection that Israel's patriarchs had stemmed from
Chaldaea and more particularly from the cities of Ur and Haran. Ur,
as we know from British excavations during the last two decades, had
been an ancient center of Sumero-Accadian civilization. Whether or not
Abraham's father, Terah, and his brother, Nahor, had any connection
with like-sounding raiders in Syria and Palestine allegedly mentioned
in two Ugaritic poems, their names have been plausibly deduced from
Mesopotamian localities Certainly the invention of such coincidental
names by a later Palestinian poet or historian, an hypothesis long accepted
by biblical critics, would require much more arduous explanations than
the now prevalent assumption of a solid kernel of authentic historic
tradition in the biblical narratives. 62
From now on, it would be possible to relate the history of the Jews almost
exactly as it was told in the Old Testament, minus the wonders and miracles
(supposedly these were volcanic natural phenomena) and the heavy religious
sermonizing. History now appeared clothed in a more secular garb, freed
from divine metaphysics but wholly subordinate to a specific, well-defined
protonationalist discourse. Jewish history was the story of a nomadic people
born in great antiquity, which had mysteriously and marvelously continued
to exist throughout history. Graetz and Dubnow's great enterprise received,
with some adjustments, the honored imprimatur of academe, and biblical
truth became an unquestioned discourse—an integral part of twentiethcentury
historical research.
Baron also resorted to the biblical outlook in dealing with the history
of Jews in later periods, not as the story of religious communities existing in
symbiosis or conflict amid various religious and popular cultures, but as the
narrative of a mobile, exceptional people. The American Jewish scholar was
well aware of the epistemological dissonance caused by the depiction of the
Jewish past in a nationalistic way, and admitted:
To insist that "peculiar" destinies of individuals and nations "happen"
precisely to those individuals and nations with an innate disposition for them
may seem to be reaching out too perilously into the realm of metaphysics.
Under the same circumstances, however, many other peoples would certainly
have perished and disappeared from history. That the Jews survived is largely
62 Ibid., 34.