Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

140 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
of the Land of Israel by the Arabs to the Crusades. Aware that he had to prepare
his readers for a new national historical sequence, Dinur prefaced the sources
with a long exposition on his novel chronology:
I begin the period of "Israel in Exile" with the conquest of the Land of
Israel by the Arabs. Until that time, the history of Israel was mainly that
of the Jewish nation in its homeland ... It is not necessary to explain that
the true "exile" (in relation to the nation, as a mass-historical entity, not its
individual members) began only when the Land of Israel ceased to be a land
of Jews, because others arrived, settled in it permanently and claimed it for
generations ... True, tradition and popular perception do not distinguish
between our people's loss of power over the country, and the loss of the
land from under its feet. But from the historical viewpoint it is necessary to
distinguish between these two situations. They were not contemporaneous,
and are historically distinctive. 25
The chronological revision is significant and decisive, and may well be seen
as undermining Jewish tradition. It seems to have originated from two linked
causes:
1. The basic requirements of professional historiography prevented the first
two Zionist historians from asserting that the Jewish people had been
expelled after the fall of the Second Temple.
2. The urge to reduce the time in exile to a minimum so as to maximize
the national proprietary claim over the country. This consideration also
prompted Dinur to date the beginning of the rebellion against exile and the
"early zephyrs of modern aliyah" to the immigration of Judah he-Hasid and
his companions in 1700. 26
The way the Roman Empire gradually reduced the political power of the
kingdom of Judea was important, but not as important as the historical development
that actually led to the exile. The invasion of the country by desert
dwellers in the seventh century, and their seizure of Jewish-owned lands,
changed the country's demographic character. Emperor Hadrian's decrees
had, of course, expropriated lands in the second century, but the arrival of the
Muslims greatly accelerated the process and eventually led to the emigration
of the Jews and "the creation of a new national majority in the country." 27 Until
that time, the Jews had constituted the majority of the population, and Hebrew
25 Dinur, Israel in Exile, vol. 1, l, 5-6.
26 Dinur, Historical Writings, vol. 1, Jerusalem: Bialik, 1955 (in Hebrew), 26.
27 Dinur, Israel in Exile, vol. 1, 1, 6.