Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

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REALMS OF SILENCE 243 Dinur, like Baron, needed the historical connection with the "born Jews" who were in Khazaria before it was Judaized. Nevertheless, the fact is that until the 1960s the assumption that the majority of the Yiddish people did not originate in Germany but in the Caucasus, the Volga steppes, the Black Sea and the Slav countries was an acceptable assumption, caused no shock, and was not considered anti-Semitic, as it was after the early 1970s. The statement by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce that "any history is first of all a product of the time of its writing" has long been a commonplace, but it still fits perfectly the Zionist historiography of the Jewish past. The conquest of the "City of David" in 1967 had to be achieved by the direct descendants of the House of David—not, perish the thought, by the offspring of tough horsemen from the Volga-Don steppes, the deserts of southern Arabia, or the coast of North Africa. In other words, the "whole, undivided Land of Israel" needed more than ever a "whole, undivided People of Israel." Traditional Zionist historiography had always maintained that the Jews of Eastern Europe had come from Germany (before that, they had spent "some time" in Rome, to which they had been driven from "the Land of Israel"). The essentialist view of the exiled, wandering people, combined with the prestige of a "civilized" country such as Germany, overshadowed the lowly status of Europe's backward regions and created a winning product (just as the Jews from the Arab countries tend to describe themselves as Sephardic, so the Jews of Eastern Europe prefer to see themselves as Ashkenazi). Although there is no historical evidence showing that Jews migrated from western Germany to the Continent's east, the fact that Jews in Poland, Lithuania and Russia spoke Yiddish supposedly proved that the Eastern European Jews were originally German Jews—Ashkenazi Jews. As the vocabulary of the language spoken by these Jews was 80 percent Germanic, how did it happen that Khazars and all sorts of Slavs, who had previously spoken Turkic or Slavonic dialects, ended up speaking Yiddish? Isaac Baer Levinsohn (also known as Rival), described as the father of Jewish enlightenment in Russia, stated in his book Testimony in Israel, published in 1828: "Our elders told us that some generations earlier the Jews in these parts spoke only this Russian language, and this Ashkenazi Jewish language we speak now had not yet spread among all the Jews living in these regions." 126 Harkavy, too, was convinced that before the seventeenth century most Eastern European Jews spoke Slavic dialects. Polak, who gave much thought to this issue, proposed several hypotheses, 126 Isaac Baer Levinsohn, Document in Israel, Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1977 (in Hebrew), 33n2.
244 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE some more persuasive than others. A less than convincing suggestion was that a large part of the Judaized Khazar population, especially those who lived in the Crimea, were still speaking an ancient Gothic language that had been common in the peninsula till the sixteenth century, and resembled Yiddish much more than the German that was current at that time in the German lands. A more plausible suggestion was that the Germanic colonization that spread eastward in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bringing with it large German-speaking commercial and artisanal populations, led to the spreading of their language among those who acted as mediators between these economic powerhouses and the local nobility and peasantry, which continued to speak their Slavic dialects. 127 Some four million Germans had migrated from eastern Germany into Poland, where they created Eastern Europe's first bourgeoisie, and also brought the Roman Catholic clergy with them. The Jews, who came mainly from the east and the south—not only from the Khazar lands, but also from the Slavic regions under its influence—took on certain functions in the division of labor that formed with the first signs of modernization. Becoming tax collectors and prosperous minters of coins (silver coins bearing Polish words in Hebrew characters have been found), as well as humble carters, woodworkers and furriers, the Jews filled intermediate positions in production and mingled with the cultures and languages of the diffèrent classes (they might also have brought some of these skills from the Khazar empire). Koestler described this historical scene in vivid terms: One can visualize a shtetl craftsman, a cobbler perhaps, or a timber merchant, speaking broken German to his clients, broken Polish to the serfs on the estate next door; and at home mixing the most expressive bits of both with Hebrew into a kind of intimate private language. How this hotchpotch became communalized and standardized to the extent to which it did, is any linguist's guess. 128 Later a limited immigration of Jewish elites from Germany—rabbis and Talmudic scholars, young and old—completed the process, further establishing the new language of the masses and apparently also modifying and consolidating their rituals. These religious elites, seemingly invited in from the west, enjoyed a prestige that many wanted to emulate and share, hence the expansion and consolidation of the German vocabulary. Yet such a pivotal word as "to pray"—a key concept in the ritual imaginary—was retained in its Turkish 127 Polak, Khazaria, 256-7. 128 Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, 176.
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The Invention of the Jewish People
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English edition published by Verso
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Contents PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LAN
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Preface to the English-Language Edi
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PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDI
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2 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPL
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CHAPTER TWO Mythistory: In the Begi
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CHAPTER FOUR Realms of Silence: In
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Acknowledgments I am deeply gratefu
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316 INDEX Aulus Plautius, 171 Ausch
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3l8 INDEX La Création des identit
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320 INDEX 251-54, 259, 261-62, 265-
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322 INDEX 41-43, 46, 48-49, 52, 59,
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324 INDEX Jews and Arabs in Pre- an
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326 INDEX Marr, Wilhelm, 83 marriag
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328 INDEX Netherlands, 21, 46-47, 2
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330 INDEX Sarah, 110, 153 Satires (
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332 INDEX xenophobia, 50 Yaari, Ehu
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Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

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