Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

236 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
no significant research has taken place. Slowly and consistently, any mention
of the Khazars in the public: arena in Israel came to be tagged as eccentric,
freakish and even menacing. In 1997, the prominent Israeli television commentator
Ehud Ya'ari, who had for years been intrigued by the unique power of
the Khazars, produced a short TV serial on the subject, cautious but full of
fascinating information. 105
What caused this silent lapse in the Jewish Israeli memory? Aside from the
traditional ethnocentric conception that in some form dominates every aspect
of Jewish nationalism, there are two possible hypotheses. One is that the wave of
decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s drove the Israeli memory-merchants to avoid
the very shadow of the Khazar past. There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the
Zionist project, should it become widely known that the settling Jewish masses
were not the direct descendants of the "Children of Israel"—such delegitimization
might lead to a broad challenge against the State of Israel's right to exist. Another
possibility, not necessary in conflict with the former, is that the occupation of large,
densely populated Palestinian territories intensified the ethnic element in Israeli
identity politics. The proximity of masses of Palestinians began to seem a threat to
the imaginary "national" Israel, and called for stronger bonds of identity and definition.
The effect was to put the kibosh on any remembrance of Khazaria. In the
second half of the twentieth century, the connection with the orphaned Khazars
was steadily weakened, as the "Jewish people" gathered again in its original "homeland"
after two thousand years of wandering in the world.
The age of silence in Israel echoed in many ways the silencing in the USSR,
though in the land of Russian socialism it took place in the previous generation.
Between Artamonov's book in 1937 and the 1960s, hardly anything was published
about the Khazars, and those few publications were mostly devoted to their
repudiation and denigration. The existence of those strange Jews in the East
became, not surprisingly, an aberration from the historical logic of Marxism-
Leninism and the character of "Mother Russia" that was reborn under Stalin. The
proletarian internationalism of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s was replaced,
even before the Second World War, by assertive Russian nationalism. After 1945,
with the rise of the Cold War and the accelerated Russification of the non-Russian
territories, this became an even harsher and more exclusive ethnocentrism.
All the Russian and, later, the Soviet historians who had written about
105 The Kingdom of the Khazars with Ehud Ya'ari, television serial, Naomi Kaplansky
(producer), Ehud Ya'ari (narrator), Jerusalem: Israeli Television Channel 1, 1997. Quite a few
novels have been written about the Khazars, among them, the Serb author Milorad Pavic's
Dictionary of the Khazars (New York: Knopf, 1988), and Marc Alter's The Wind Of The
Khazars (New Milford: The Toby Press, 2003).