Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

150 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
"ALL NATIONS SHALL FLOW UNTO IT"
In almost all the narratives produced by the proto-Zionist and even Zionist
historians, conversion is mentioned as one reason for the vast presence of
Jewish believers throughout the ancient world before the fall of the Second
Temple. 47 But this decisive factor was sidelined, as we have seen, while the more
dramatic players of Jewish history dominated the field: expulsion, displacement,
emigration and natural increase. These gave a more appropriate ethnic
quality to the "dispersion of the Jewish people." Dubnow and Baron did make
greater allowance for conversion, but the stronger Zionist writings played it
down, and in the popular historical works—above all in the textbooks, which
shape public consciousness—it all but vanished from the picture.
It is generally assumed that Judaism has never been a missionizing religion,
and if some proselytes joined it, they were accepted by the Jewish people
with extreme reluctance. 48 "Proselytes are an affliction to Israel," the famous
pronouncement in the Talmud, is invoked to halt any attempted discussion
of the subject. When was this statement written? Did it in any way reflect the
principles of the faith and the forms of Jewish experience in the long period
between the Maccabee revolt in the second century BCE and the Bar Kokhba
uprising in the second century CE? That was the historical period in which the
number of Jewish believers in the Mediterranean cultural world reached a level
that would again be matched only in the early modern age.
The period between Ezra in the fifth century BCE and the revolt of the
Maccabees in the second was a kind of dark age in the history of the Jews.
Zionist historians rely on the biblical narrative for the time leading up to that
period, and on the Books of the Maccabees and the final part of Josephus's
Antiquities of the Jews for the end of it. Information about that obscure period
is very sparse: there are the few archaeological finds; the abstract biblical texts,
which may reflect the time at which they were written; and Josephus's short
47 Graetz devoted a special essay to this issue, in which he even accepted that the
Jews conducted a campaign of proselytizing. See "Die jüdischen Proselyten im Romerreiche
unter den Kaisern Domitian, Nerva, Trajan und Hadrian," in Jahres-Bericht des judischtheologischen
Seminars Fraenkel'scher Stiftung, Breslau: 1884.
48 In the late twentieth century, as the Jewish "ethnic" identity grew stronger in
the Western world, there were again attempts to play down the history of proselytizing
and to deny entirely the missionary aspect of Judaism. See Martin Goodman, Mission and
Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994. Not surprisingly, this book, the final version of which was composed in "unified"
Jerusalem, was highly regarded by Israeli scholars. A similar outlook was expressed in the
book by two French scholars, Edouard Will and Claude Orrieux, Prosélytisme juif? Histoire
d'une erreur, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992.