B'nei Yisrael

From Hobson's Choice

The bracketed [JE] follows a word links to entry in Jewish Encyclopedia; [JVL], for the Jewish Virtual Library.^[1]

Historical maps of Israel-Palestine (1, 2)

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Also known as the Jews; a people now distributed all over the world, but historically associated with ancient Palestine, Egypt, and Europe. "Children of Israel" (B'nei Yisrael; singular, Ben Yisrael) has certain advantages as a term of reference, since "Jew" is derived from the name of a single tribe; "Israel" is one of the epithets of Jacob ben Isaac, the canonical patriarch of the Mosaic peoples ("Children of Abraham" would include the Arabians also). While B'nei Yisrael are associated with Judaism, one of the world's major religions, many do not practice that religion; likewise, one's Jewish identity is regarded as comprising something more.

This article mainly concentrates on Jewish Europeans and the historical events that molded B'nei Yisrael identity into something uniquely ambiguous and complex.

1 Biblical Origins of B'nei Yisrael Identity
2 In Europe
3 Notes
4 See Also
5 External Links

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Biblical Origins of B'nei Yisrael Identity

In order to introduce the concept of Jewishness, it is necessary to make a few perfunctory references to the biblical origins of the B'nei Yisrael. The Book of Genesis describes the Covenant with Abraham [JVL], as well as the career of his grandson Jacob (AKA Israel; JVL); Jacob was the father of 12 sons, whose names are those of the 12 tribes of Israel. According to the biblical account, the Hebrew nation comprises the descendants of these 12 sons. Of the 12, one (the Levis) did not have a territory because they constituted the priestly caste; Moses , the semi-historical founder of Judaism. Another tribe, that of Yehudah (Judah), settled in the vicinity of modern-day Jerusalem and consequently would become associated with the greatest number of Hebrew speakers. Politically, the Judaeans were the most powerful; their tribe was the core state of the 12th century BCE empire of Israel. In Germanic languages, Jude or its near-cognate, "Jew" (English) or "Juif" (French) are derived from the tribal name of "Yehudah."

The traditional self-identification, then, was B'nei Yisrael ("Children of Israel"); in the Gospels, the term "Ioudaioi (Ίουδαϊοι)" (Greek) may have referred to a political faction that yearned for the restoration of the ancient Kingdom of Israel under the Judaean microstate. At that time, tribal particularism was a reliable sign of caste snobbery, and the Jesus of the Gospels was, at the beginning of his career, determined to weaken this caste division in religious or social affairs. At its peak, Hebrew hegemony had extended over a vast region of the Levant; it was a two-tiered empire in which the non-Judaean tribes occupied the intermediate tier. The collapse of this hegemonic structure was the context of the Book of Isaiah, and can be understood only in light of it.

So we might say, from one line of thinking, that "Judaism" is a misleading name, either for a religion (which is "Mosaic") or an ethnic group. The B'nei Yisrael of Northern Europe (Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Romania, and Germany) are known as Ashkenazim ; those from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa are known as Sephardim ; in addition, there is a category known as the Mizrahim , which includes B'nei Yisrael communities in South Asia and the Caucasus ; and Beta Israel (Ethiopia). I will attempt to explain in this post how the B'nei Israel in Europe/North America represent a melding and blurring of many different categories, including race, class, ethnicity, and confession.

Not only can a large book be written on the complicated divisions of the B'nei Yisrael community itself, with each claim being called into question—several such books have been written. One of the interesting aspects of the Jewish community is how it defies definition. Are Jews an ethnic category? If so, it is a very unusual one; there are very large variations in the regional phylogeny of the many European Jewish communities, yet ethnic particularism has to be very sensitive to small differences in phylogeny in order to validate social distinctions based on ethnicity. In other words, the apparent difference between (say) a Jewish Lithuanian from Riga, and her gentile neighbor is very small, compared to the physical differences between the same Lithuanian and a Jewish Netherlander. Yet 19th century antisemitism was based on ethnic particularism, which means that adherents were supposed to ignore the big differences among members of different Jewish communities across Europe, while paying enormous attention to the tiny differences between the member of a Jewish community and her gentile neighbor.^[2]

Part of the reason for this paradox is that ethnicity and descent were perceived in a different fashion than they are today. The word "ethnicity" has implications of historic origins, but also of a gene pool. People of the same ethnicity have extremely similar genotypes. Their DNA is almost exactly the same. But moving backward in time, the concept of a common gene pool was not only unknowable, but irrelevant. Ethnicity was associated with both descent and allegiance. The different "races" of Europe had inherited their more or less elevated social status as an entail .^[3] Moreover, ethnic identity was constructed socially on the basis of selective reporting of family trees. People affiliated themselves with the dominant clan, sometimes through myth of a common ancestor, sometimes through patient research, and sometimes through persistent repetition.

As with the Rroma, the decisive (and tragic) component of Medieval life was the high degree of political regimentation of economic activity. Ancient monographs on economy, such as that of Kuan-Tsu (China, 500 BCE), strongly recommend tying households to the land and firmly restricting the growth of cities in order to prevent upheaval and exploitation; princes of the era, especially in Central Europe, usually succumbed to the temptation to promote cities and concomitant German settlements (huffen), but the settlements themselves assigned almost military discipline to the formation of crafts and professions. As a consequence, massive inflows of aliens tended to trigger a domino effect: the advancing column of refugees would suffer a steady deterioration in their economic prospects as princes ordered them to move on. In the case of Western Europe, migrations were virtually guaranteed to have a political consequences; maintaining power was no simple matter for the pre-nationalist princes, especially with the drastic economic crises of the 14th century.

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In Europe

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The arrival of the B'nei Yisrael in Europe occurred far earlier than that of the Rroma; Sephardi settlements in Spain, Italy, and the rest of the Mediterranean littoral date back to the time of the Apostle Paul [JE]; however, after the collapse of Diocletian's regime (313), conditions for the B'nei Yisrael worsened considerably. Contemporary sources suggest that the Christians of the day were no longer identified as a sect of Judaism, although nailing down when the B'nei Yisrael and Christian communities ceased to regard the other as a rival sects is unclear. At the time, religion was actually a modality of political thought and action, and there seems to have been a drastic abandoning of the revolutionary character of primitive Christianity with its political embrace by Constantine. The official status of Christianity was an unmitigated disaster all around, but especially for the evolution of Christianity itself.

The moral squalor of the politically-empowered Church is a source of enduring embarrassment; within a few years it was dominated by landlords and their acolytes, who had inherited the grotesquely dysfunctional Roman imperial economy. Theodoric (454-526) and Charlemagne (742-814) accepted Jewish settlements, although they restricted occupations open to the B'nei Yisrael; other states regarded the B'nei Yisrael with suspicion. The intensely personal politics of the time meant backing the wrong horse was disastrous; and the B'nei Yisrael were treated like a hostage population in the states where they lived, obligated to advertise their extreme devotion to a tolerant ruler. Naturally, rulers found they could manipulate their hostages to (a) carry out unpopular orders, and (b) take the blame for failed policies. Conversely, the status of the B'nei Yisrael was frequently re-negotiated, with the principals being the sovereign and community leaders. The latter were obligated to make snap decisions about the fate of their extended clans in private discussions, trading privileges for survival, or tribute for privileges.

This led to a severe stratification within the B'nei Yisrael community, and intense resentment within. It also fostered suspicion of the Jews as collective actors, engaged in a constant play for time. Not tied to the soil, or capable of developing land tenure or membership in the guilds, the early shtetl population was treated as a unit, whose treatment by the authorities was contingent on either the political expediency for the prince, the security of the that prince's grip on power, or the behavior of individual members. Long before the Israeli government took up the habit of collectively punishing the Palestinian Arab population in the Occupied Territories, the B'nei Yisrael population was itself the target of collective punishment by European warlords.

The B'nei Yisrael condition in Muslim societies, particularly European Muslim societies (viz., Andalusia) was so much better as to make comparison meaningless. Yes, it is true that non-Muslims enjoyed conditions of lesser citizenship; but these conditions in practice were usually mild by comparison with, say, anywhere in Christian Europe. In some cases, the extremely isolated frontier regions of the Muslim world imitated the violent confessional partisanship of Europe, but this was rare.^[4] The cosmopolitan expression of Islam was welcoming and intellectually curious, long after its political and religious energies ere dissipated.

The golden age of Islam (632-1012) occurred too late to deflect the migration of Gallic B'nei Yisrael deep into Germany. Andalusian Spain was a huge population center, as was Egypt; but the trend was for large inflows into Rhenish Europe. According to contemporary accounts, the paths taken by Crusaders included the Rhône Valley of s.e. France and the Danubian Plain (Pannonia); in 1095, when the crusading mobs crossed Europe to fight the Fatimids, they first undertook to massacre the B'nei Yisrael. There is reason to believe that B'nei Yisrael were assumed to be "almost Muslim," or natural allies of the Muslims. No doubt this was because initially, when the absurd notion of attacking the Fatimid Caliphate was first mooted, the notable B'nei Yisrael of Genova and elsewhere spoke out against it. It was, after all, a logistical impossibility (and indeed, the initial movement of religious hysterics perished en masse). The unscrupulous Peter the Hermit, incapable of swallowing or forgiving disagreement, naturally declared the B'nei Yisrael to be the enemy. An easy method of tracking the location of B'nei Yisrael settlements in 10th century Europe was to locate the waves of pogroms that raged across Europe. This accompanied a major shift of power in Europe away from the urbane, cosmopolitan and civilized rulers of small states in southern and Rhenish Europe, to the huge Norman slave states. The Norman rulers occasionally mimicked the older practice of exploiting the B'nei Yisrael [*], but eventually succumbed to the contradictions of huge, backward states based on the exploitation of serfs with the existence of cosmopolitan shtetls (e.g., France). Richard I expelled the B'nei Yisrael of England in 1290; they migrated mainly to France, where they were conclusively expelled in 1394; this directed the migration southeast, to Italy, or to the northern Holy Roman Empire. The political collapses and the Black Death (blamed on B'nei Yisrael) touched off 350 pogroms in Germany alone, stimulating renewed migration into Poland-Lithuania. As a result, by 1500 Poland (itself a gigantic empire extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea) became the B'nei Yisrael homeland for the next 400 years. In 1492, the new Spanish state launched the biggest expulsion of European history, that of the Andalusian Muslims and Jews. A vast number fled to the Ottoman territory, where they were settled as refugees in the military frontier with the Holy Roman Empire (in Wallachia); many of the B'nei Yisrael fleeing pogroms in Germany avoided Poland (allied with Germany as it was) and settled in the Ottoman territory of Moldova. Turkish vassals (who were themselves Romanian Orthodox) had a spotty record towards their B'nei Yisrael subjects, but Romania would remain the second largest home for European B'nei Yisrael.

The collapse of Polish independence in the late 18th century, combined with the severe administrative decline of the Ottoman Empire, led to calamity for the B'nei Yisrael unfortunate enough to live in those countries.

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Notes

↑ Some readers might object to the Jewish Virtual Library because it includes significant polemics on behalf of Israel. Generally speaking, I have observed that all groups promoting pride or awareness of their particular group tend to at least downplay, if not actively defend, the historically ugly aspects of said group's partisans. Hence, if this article were devoted to Serbs, then I would naturally cite Orthodox Serb sources for the origins and traditions of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Needless to say, such sources would likely contradict journalistic accounts of Serb militia atrocities in Croatia ('91-92), Bosnia-Herzegovina ('92-95), or Kosovo ('98-99). Nor is this surprising; during the 1990's, Serbs generally tended to disbelieve accounts of the war in the international press, attributing them to a single malicious source. Hence, the gap in perceptions between those of Serbs and those of non-Serbs (or non-Greeks and non-Russians) was stupendous, and resentment festers.

Similar problems arise when discussing matters such as B'nei Yisrael perceptions of Israel and its violent history. Israel emerged as a result of the Final Solution; had the Weimar Republic survived, there would be no Israel. Attempts to blame the existence of Israel, or its consequences, on "Zionists" (AKA "bad Jews") suffers from many severe logical problems, most notably that it ignores major events in the history of the B'nei Yisrael (the Shoah) and relies on minor ones (the supposedly manipulative Jewish character). Another problem is the circular reasoning: once you have defined "Zionist" as a causal force, rather than the large picture of European history, you must either slip in through the back door the notion that "Zionists" are a byproduct of Jews in a particular country, or else have explained nothing. The emergence of a political demand requires an explanation.

Hence, Zionism must be seen as another consequence of Western cruelty to the B'nei Yisrael; the partisanship many B'nei Yisrael feel for Israel is no different than that felt by all other national groups who feel their nation's peculiar shortcomings are unfairly exaggerated or singled out for punishment. The creation of Israel amounted to the creation of a sort of foreign legion for Trans-European imperialism, and those B'nei Yisrael neo-conservatives widely believed to be the vanguards of the international Jewish conspiracy, are in fact merely white collar officers of that foreign legion. For a further discussion, see "Zionism and US Policy."
↑ Thorstein Veblen comments on this sardonically in his essay, "The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe" (1919).
↑ Veblen, in his book Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution , on p.7 objects to the characterization of the Europeans as comprising different "races." He objects to the idea that the different nations of Europe or their ethnic division may be truthfully characterized as "races," sharing distinct phylogenies. Veblen, although writing before the discovery of the genome, still recognized the hybrid character of the various ethnicities of Europe. Yet, because the main ethnic divisions were associated in history with different waves of invasion, conquest, and imperial privilege, the concept of race was not entirely irrelevant to Central Europe.
↑ An exception is the Arabian Peninsula; both the kingdoms of the Nejd and those of Saba (core states of modern day Saudi Arabia and Yemen, respectively) have ancient vendetti between B'nei Yisrael and (as it so happens) Muslim clans. In Yemen, the extremely nebulous political matrix meant that these feuds between, say, Himyaritic B'nei Yisrael clans and rival Hanif/Muslim clans, were private matters that did not usually affect large parts of Yemen—at least, not after the 6th century CE. In the Nejd, aristocratic memories of Dhu Nuwas probably explain the fierce judeophobia endemic to the region. Dhu Nuwas was a political adventurer who converted to Judaism for complicated geostrategic reasons, then undertook to defeat other power bases in the Peninsula with the assistance of the Persians. My source for this is a bootleg copy of the US Library of Congress's The Yemens: a Country Study, which is not online. I also read several surveys of religious minorities of South Arabia, which caused me to believe Dhu Nuwas' career is the cause of Nejdi judeophobia. It has all the earmarks of antedating Islam.