“Ze’ev Herzog, a professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, caused a storm in 1999 when he admitted that archeology had failed to find evidence that an ancient Jewish nation ever existed:

‘This is what archeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.’

In fact, Herzog’s research, and that of other archeologists suggest that when a historical entity called Israel briefly did emerge, it was pagan and Jerusalem was not its spiritual center.”

“Another controversy flared in early 2008 when Shlomo Sand, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, published a book in Hebrew called When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? According to a sympathetic review by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, Sand debunks Israel’s official history that today’s Jews are descendants of the Jewish community in Palestine 2,000 years ago, a community that was supposedly exiled by the Romans in 70 AD. He argues instead that most of the Jews and Christians in the region converted to Islam several hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Palestine. Interestingly, this view was shared by at least two of Israel’s founding fathers, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi and David Ben-Gurion. They believed that many modern Palestinians were descended from the regions Jews. In the 1920’s the pair even dabbled with a plan to convert the native Palestinians back to Judaism….”

“How, then does Sand explain today’s widely dispersed Jewish Diaspora if there was no exile? These Jews, he argues, are in fact the descendants of non-Jews who converted to Judaism, thereby explaining the great ethnic diversity to be found among the modern Jewish population. In Sand’s view, Judaism was a proselytizing religion that competed for converts with the new upstart faiths of Christianity and Islam. It had most success among pagan populations*, particularly the Berber tribes located in north Africa, the Arabs of southern Arabia and Turks of South Russia, who converted from the fourth century AD onward. [my emphasis: I was first confronted with this “fact” in the research of Merlin Stone, presented in her book When God Was A Woman, back in the 1970’s.]

The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread”, Sand observed in an interview.”

“Most damagingly to the Zionist idea of a Jewish ‘return’, Sand argues that Askenazi Jews, the first immigrants to Palestine following the pogroms in eastern Europe and today’s ruling class in Israel have no historic connection to Palestine. Sand and other scholars believe they were originally Khazars, a Turkic people who created a kingdom 1,000 year ago in what is now southern Russia. The Khazar king, says Sand, converted himself and his subject to Judaism. In partial support of this theory, Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv University argues that Yiddish—generally assumed to be a Germanic tongue—is, in fact, a Slavic language.”

Below are the articles from the BBC on-line and Israel Newspaper Ha’aretz from which Cook quotes:

Israel digs into the past

Israel: The promised land?( BBC on-line, Dec 23, 1999)


By Paul Adams in Jerusalem

Picture one of the Bible's great scenes: Moses, aged 120, looks out over the Promised Land.
For 40 years, he has led his people, the Israelites, on an extraordinary journey from slavery in Egypt across the desert wastes of the Sinai.

All these events are contradicted by archaeology


Professor Ze'ev Herzog, Archaeologist

With a glimpse of the ancient city of Jericho, the old man dies. His chosen successor, Joshua, goes on to capture the city and conquer Palestine.
What if this never happened?
Jericho - the first walled city on earth - still stands. Archaeologists have poured over its dusty ruins since the 19th century, unearthing evidence of at least 23 levels of occupation.
The ruins have revealed a history of prosperity, decline and conquest.
No proof
Despite all of the digging, they have never found any proof that Jericho's fabled walls "came tumbling down" as described by Joshua himself.
Not only that, there is nothing to support the great, miraculous story that precedes the fall of Jericho.

Moses glimpsed the ancient city of Jericho - or did he?

There is no sign of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the slavery in Egypt, or anyone wandering in the desert.

Professor Ze'ev Herzog is an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University who has participated in excavations up and down the country.
"All these events are practically contradicted by archaeology," says Professor Herzog.

"Basically, these events did not happen on a national level. Some of these events could have been the local experience of a few families that were later nationalised into one coherent description."
For decades, Israeli archaeologists have attempted to prove that the Bible justified the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.
Digging for evidence was a national obsession and part of the state-building process.

Time to reassess

There is ample proof that the Jewish people occupied the land almost 3000 years ago.
However, their arrival was probably a migration, rather than a conquest. Professor Herzog says it is time to stop looking for what is not there.
"After so many years of development of Israeli culture, we are now mature enough to look at the evidence in a more critical way, and not accept the legendary parts of the Bible as historical ones", he says.

Controversy

It is hardly surprising that Professor Herzog's conclusions - which coincide with efforts to re-evaluate Israel's modern history - should spark controversy.

Rabbi Spiro is concerned that the history of the Bible is being "undermined"

Rabbi Ken Spiro, who brings Jewish students from around the world to Jericho, acknowledges that the archaeological evidence is slight, to say the least.

He argues,"lack of evidence does not mean evidence of lack."
He also believes that what Professor Herzog and others are doing is dangerous.
"When you undermine the historicity of the Bible and the veracity of the claim that the Bible is essentially accurate, you are basically saying that it is fiction and that we have no more right to be here than anyone else."
For Jewish settlers, who base their right to occupy Palestinian land on the Bible and evidence of an early Jewish presence, Professor Herzog's findings are particularly problematic.

A large audience assembl
ed recently at the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut to debate the evidence.
The Tel Aviv professor received a polite welcome, but this was the lion's den.

Symbols of the Old Testament are everywhere in Israel

Noam Arnon represents the small, militant Jewish community living in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron.

He says that the Jewish patriarch Abraham will be remembered long after Professor Herzog is forgotten.

'This country is the land of Israel'

"To doubt, or debate some minor facts in the Bible will not change the minds of the people here that this country is the land of Israel and their mission today is to fertilise it and to settle it," says Mr Arnon.

"... an attempt to prove that Zionism is wrong and Israel is wrong."


Tommy Lapid, Israeli member of parliament

Some critics go further and smell a political conspiracy to discredit Israel.
The outspoken member of parliament, Tommy Lapid, dismisses Professor Herzog's theories as Jewish self-hatred. He says,
"There is an underlying political motive of very left-wing attitudes towards Zionism."
"The attempt to prove that the Bible is wrong is really an attempt to prove that Zionism is wrong and Israel is wrong."
The debate over what is Jewish historical fact and what is legend is sure to continue.

An invention called 'the Jewish people'
By Tom Segev ( Ha’aretz feb 29, 2008)

Israel's Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Zand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened - hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.

According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.

If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, "And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them."

Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.

The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers. According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.

Prof. Zand teaches at Tel Aviv University. His book, "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" (published by Resling in Hebrew), is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a "state of all its citizens" - Jews, Arabs and others - in contrast to its declared identity as a "Jewish and democratic" state. Personal stories, a prolonged theoretical discussion and abundant sarcastic quips do not help the book, but its historical chapters are well-written and cite numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time.