Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

REALMS OF SILENCE 247
dome reminiscent of the Eastern pagoda. Jewish dress in Eastern Europe
did not resemble that of the Jews of France or Germany. The yarmulke—
also derived from a Turkic word—and the fur hat worn over it were more
reminiscent of the people of the Caucasus and the horsemen of the steppes
than of Talmudic scholars from Mainz or merchants from Worms. These
garments, like the long silk caftan worn chiefly on the Sabbath, differed from
the clothing worn by the Belorussian or Ukrainian peasants. But any mention
of these features and others—from food to humor, from clothing to chants,
all connected to the specific cultural morphology of their daily life and their
history—scarcely interested the scholars who were occupied in inventing the
eternal history of the "people of Israel." They could not come to terms with the
troublesome fact that there had never been a Jewish people's culture, but only
a popular Yiddish culture that resembled the cultures of their neighbors much
more than it did those of the Jewish communities of Western Europe or North
Africa. 133
Today the descendants of the Jews of "Yiddishland" live mainly in the
United States and Israel. The remains of millions of others are buried beneath
the slaughterhouses constructed by Hitler in the twentieth century When we
consider the tremendous effort that the memory agents in Israel have invested
in commemorating their dying moments, compared with the scanty effort
made to discover the rich (or wretched, depending on one's viewpoint) life
lived in Yiddishland before the vicious massacre, we can draw only sad conclusions
about the political and ideological role of modern historiography.
Like the absence of costly archaeological exploration in southern Russia
and the Ukraine to uncover the remains of Khazaria, the absence of sociological,
linguistic and ethnographic studies about the long-standing ways of life in
the townlets of Poland and Lithuania—work of innovative historical research,
not mere folklore 134 —is no accident. No one wants to go looking under
stones when venomous scorpions might be lurking beneath them, waiting to
attack the self-image of the existing ethnos and its territorial ambitions. The
133 To illustrate, in the United States it is possible to speak of "Jewish humor" because
almost all the Jews there originate from Eastern Europe. But the term is meaningless in
Israel, because there is no Jewish humor any more than there is Christian humor. There
may be Yiddish, or Maghrebi, humor, and so on. The height of absurdity was reached by an
American historian, presumably a fan of Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, who attempted
to find the sources of the humor that accounts for the mentality of diaspora Jews in ancient
texts. See Erich S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002, 135-212.
134 Some hesitant steps in this direction may be found in Antony Polonsky (ed.), The
Shtetl: Myth and Reality, Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.