David Tidhar in Palestine Police, 1920s.
The state of Israel, like the Zionist movement in all its forms—political, cultural, artistic, religious—was an astounding collective creation. The famous names are known, as are the slightly less famous. But what about all the others?
In 1974, a strange letter from northeastern India landed on the desk of Israel's then Prime Minister Golda Meir. It was sent by a group of Indians claiming to be descendants of the biblical tribe of Menashe.
Are Jews a "nation" or a "people"? The Hebrew term ‘am means both. Both terms, moreover, have been subjected to disapprobation in our time—although not nearly to the extent of "race," a term that Jews themselves stopped using nearly a century ago. How, then, are we to think about the mounting genetic evidence that points to Jewish biological continuity over time?
Safed (Hebrew: Tsfat) is a picturesque town of 32,000 souls nestled in the hills of Galilee. It is also home to a hardline branch of the Islamic Movement looking for ways to undermine Jewish sovereignty.
Hanna Rovina in "The Dybbuk," 1920.
Many an enlightened reader of the New York Times must have indulged in yet another condescending laugh at the Catholic Church upon seeing a November 12 report about a conclave of bishops in Baltimore; the purpose was to discuss the urgent need for priestly experts in the task of expunging the devil from possessed parishioners. Among those chuckling, no doubt, were many Jews.
Aryeh Tepper
At a Yemenite synagogue in Jerusalem, a group of men sit down at 5:30 every Saturday morning to study the weekly Torah portion. The custom is hardly extraordinary; but the curriculum is.
Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left: born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.
Aryeh Tepper
The stagnation of Jewish tradition is hardly a new story. In a sense, it's a modern Jewish trope. In the 19th century, both the Reform and Conservative movements emerged as responses to this perceived atrophy. Leading Orthodox rabbis, some of whom agreed with the reformers' critique, devised their own attempts to revive the tradition—if, naturally, along more traditionalist lines. Unfortunately, none succeeded in arresting the decline.
On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.
Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.
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