Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE INVENTION OF THE EXILE 141
was still the dominant language. 28 The arrival of the new settler-conquerors
altered the country's cultural morphology and put an end to the presence of
the Jewish people in its land.
It is true that there was no deliberate policy of expulsion, but that does not
mean that exile was undertaken voluntarily—God forbid. Dinur was worried
that if it were accepted that the Jews left their country of their own volition,
it would undermine their renewed claim to it in modern times. He struggled
with this grave issue for years, and ultimately reached a more satisfactory
historical summary:
Every Jewish habitation in the diaspora began with exile—that is, as an
outcome of compulsion and force ... This does not mean that the Jews came to
most of these countries after the fall of Jerusalem as prisoners of war, fugitives
or deportees. The road from the devastated Jerusalem to their final settlement
in any given generation was extended and protracted, with numerous sojourns
along the way lasting a long time. But because they arrived as fugitives seeking
shelter, and as the fall of their country was famous and its circumstances
were known to all, it was natural that people in the countries to which these
fugitives came were satisfied with knowing the original circumstances which
had led them thither. Sometimes the Jews themselves sought to stress the
Jewish aspect of their exile, by playing down their connection with their
previous place of exile and stressing the first, or primary, cause. 29
Thus, even if the exile following the destruction of the Second Temple was a
vague myth, it was justified, because it was followed by other expulsions and
wanderings. The long exile is like a shadow cast by the destruction, hence its
chief significance: to encompass all future exiles. Dinur willingly accepted the
Christian, and subsequently anti-Semitic, myth about the Wandering Jew who
finds no rest. He therefore defined the Jewish identity not as belonging to a religious
minority that lived for centuries among other, dominant religious cultures,
sometimes repressive and at other times protective, but as the identifying profile of
an alien ethnic-national body that has always been on the move and is destined
to keep wandering. Only this conception of exile gave an organic sequence to
the history of Jewish dispersal, and only in this way could it clarify and justify
"the return of the nation to its birthplace."
Dinur gave the secularization of the Jewish exile its strongest and clearest
historical expression. It was essentially revolutionary, and altered not only
the Jewish time-structure of the exile but also the underlying significance of
28 Dinur, Historical Writings, vol. 4, 14. This assumption about the language has little
ground to stand on.
29 Ibid., 182.