Thanks for this. I didn't know any of that about Hebrew. Did Jesus speak Hebrew or was it dead by then.

Hebrew wasn't dead by then, but Jesus was more likely to have spoken Aramaic.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic#Languages_during_Jesus.27_lifetime

MJ, 

After all, unlike Yiddish, Hebrew had completely disappeared as a spoken language 2000 years ago.

That is not quite right.  Hebrew consistently remained in use in the liturgy and study of the Jews through the exile.  However, with the rabbinate essentially being the Jewish government in exile through much of the history between Jewish states, the Hebrew language was officially considered too holy for profane use.  Although, it should also be noted that Medieval Spanish poets like Judah Halevi and Solomon ibn Gabirol composed some very juicy secular works in Hebrew.

MJ,

Theodor Herzl rejected the idea of Hebrew as the lanuage of the Jewish state because it was long dead by his time (1860-1904).

OK.  And he lost.  Herzl was secular and pretty much assimilated.  He would not have come from a place where Hebrew was used much (and I don't believe he left behind much evidence that he was conversant in Yiddish, either).  I understand that Zionism drew heavily from secular and assimilated Jewry, but even Yiddish couldn't be read by anyone unfamiliar with the Hebrew alphabet (aleph-bet).

"In that, Chabon is not alone. Israel is an increasingly hard sell to those under 50, and particularly to young Jews of college age."
----------------
Speak for yourself. You are absolutely one sick individual, rosenberg, no different than hamas, hezbollah or any nazi. The left is morally depraved, and self-hating, pathetic, weak Jews like you are our own worst enemies. Instead, it is Israel's enemies that should not exist, and certainly a fake state known as "palestine" has no right to exist, and these people have no rights to the land whatsoever.

Ironically, if they'd settled in Alaska, they'd have a GOP senator feeding them pork.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Gotta love that meaningless "self-hating." What is the opposite? Who exemplifies it-- you? Here is something you need to see, which I posted yesterday on another thread here:

Interesting article in the Forward about the Petra Conference. Snippets:

“What does it mean?” asked Wiesel, one of Israel’s most prominent supporters, after Olmert said that terrorism must stop before negotiations can begin on the terms of peace negotiations. “You are negotiating to negotiate further?” asked the famed Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, drawing laughter from the audience.

[Wiesel also] contrasted Olmert’s insistence that all the Palestinian factions agree to make peace with Israel with the fact that not all Israeli political parties agree to establish a two-state solution leading to Palestinian statehood.

* * *

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned the opening session of his parliament last week that “weak governments in Israel are capable of launching aggression.” Syria, he said, “should be cautious.”

Employing the same logic used by Israel in its resistance to negotating with the Palestinians, Assad said the Israeli government’s weakness prevents it from implementing a peace agreement.

* * *

Three of Israel’s four main intelligence agencies — Military Intelligence, the Shin Bet security service and the Foreign Ministry intelligence service — say that Syria’s calls for renewing the peace process are sincere and that Israel should respond.

“Syria’s call for dialogue with Israel is authentic,” Ilan Mizrahi, chairman of Israel’s National Security Council and former deputy chief of Mossad, told the Knesset Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee last week.

Only the Mossad, the overseas intelligence service, maintains that talks with Syria would do more harm than good. So far, however, Israel has dismissed repeated Syrian appeals for new talks.

http://www.forward.com/articles/foxman-wiesel-upbraid- israel-for-pace-of-peace-ef/

MJ,

No one in the entire world, other than a few scholars who used Hebrew solely to discuss theology (as priests might use Latin) spoke Hebrew.

Come on, MJ.  Hebrew became the language of the national movement because it was the common language to both major Jewish communities -- Ashkenazim and Sephardim.  I am not arguing that Hebrew was used in mundane conversation, but any Jew who davened and read from the Torah knew what they were saying.  And once again, if you were illiterate in Hebrew, you were illiterate in both Yiddish and Ladino as well since all three languages employ the same alphabet.

bar_kochba132,

Had the Zionist movement adopted Herzl's idea of a Jewish state in Uganda (actually Kenya), it never would have gotten off the ground, and even if it had, the Africans would have had a legitimate claim that the Jews were alien colonialists, Rhodesia-style, unlike the situation in Eretz Israel.

It was a British idea, not Herzl's.  While Herzl argued in favor of the Uganda option in the Zionist Congress, I believe he accepted its defeat.

Sorry Zionista, you doint know your Zionismo.

Personally, I like Bartcop's proposal to move Israel to Oklahoma.

Sorry Zionista, you doint know your Zionismo.

Whatever, MJ....  Gut Shabbes!

Update:  Please understand, MJ, I am not knocking the overall thesis of your essay.  But I take issue with your assertion that, at the time of Herzl, Hebrew had "completely disappeared as a spoken language 2000 years ago."  Seriously, do you think Zionist leadership adopted Hebrew as the national language because they figured that reestablishing a Jewish state wasn't difficult enough without trying to resurrect a "dead language" too?

It was my understanding that the Jews in the diaspora felt Hebrew to be the language of the sacred so not to be used in daily conversation. With the reestablishment of the Israel there was reason to bring back into use to language of Israel. However, it is very likely the language for many Jews in the ancient world was either Greek or Aramaic.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

You mean to the lands of the concentration camps, the pograms or the various second class status?

Besides the actual country of Israeli forbearers is israel and Judea.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

must...not...do...this...

Well, as long as you bring up Ahab, there is the Rest of The Story, as Paul Harvey might put it. You see, the White Whale, a bull, had a lesser known mate. He wanted to take serious revenge on the whalers, so came up with a dastardly plan.

"While I get their attention, spouting in front, you hold your breath, swim underneath, and let loose a blast from your blowhole. That will capsize the boat."

"I like it. What next."

"Well, next, we eat the crew."

"fugeddaboutit (she was from the Bronx). I agreed to a blow job, but I will not swallow the seamen!"

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

MJ,

I think your primary point about the occupation being the major attribute of what people think of Israel is right on the mark. I don't know but what it may be too late to change that in any significant way. 40 years ago Israel was perceived as embattled. Now, Israel is perceived by most people as powerful and an oppressor. I can't imagine what or how much of it would be necessary to change that perception at this point in time. I'm all ears though!

I think the only workable rule about who gets to return where is that title to land expires after about a generation. Otherwise, youngsters are to be evicted from the only land they've ever known, to create yet a new injustice.

The alternative -- or better, contrary -- notion is that land belongs to the people who owned it as of some sacred moment in time: 1945, or 1833, or somewhen BCE. On a planet with a history of landgrabs in all sorts of places on numerous occasions, what on earth are we to allow? Only selective attention can lead to endorsing a sacred moment doctrine for returns. Remember the Falklands?

I'm no linguist, but it seems to me that one can sense the common Aramaic root in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. The Arabic letter that corresponds to the Hebrew aleph, for instance, for instance, is 'alif.

While double checking to make certain I had remembered this correctly, I ran across some additional info, which fleshes out some of what you've said, on a fascinating site I happened upon, Omniglot:

The earliest Hebrew script was derived from a Phoenician script. The modern Hebrew script was developed from a script known as Proto-Hebrew/Early Aramaic. The earliest known writing in Hebrew dates from the 11th century BC.

Hebrew is a member of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. It was the language of the early Jews, but from 586 BC it started to be replaced by Aramaic as the everyday language of the Jews. Since then it has continued to be used as a liturgical language and to some extent as a spoken vernacular.

In the late 19th and early 20th century the Zionist movement brought about the revivial of Hebrew as a widely-used spoken language, and it became the official languge of Israel in 1948. Today about 5 million people in Israel speak Modern Israeli Hebrew. A further 2-3 million people speak the language in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, Panama, the UK and USA.

Fascinating stuff... 

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb

I think there's plenty of non-religious archaeological evidence for the existence of a historial Israel and Judea.

It is the claim of a divine right to that land that is founded solely upon religious belief - on both sides. All three sides, really. The Crusaders felt they had a divine right to that land, too, and they established a kingdom there that lasted around 200 years, much longer than modern Israel has been around. Do descendants of Baldwin have a right to some portions of Israel, Gaza, Jordan and Lebanon? Israelis lay claim to the land based on their mythical conquest of it - it wasn't theirs to start with, it belonged to the Canaanites. So whose historical conquest has the greater validity in the eyes of the law? Whose conquest was illegal and whose is justified?

Stupid, silly questions. But I'm not the only one.

It's an interesting argument with some troubling corollaries, to claim that the actual existence of Israel is more alternative-reality-ish or sci-fi-ish than Chabon's Yiddish Alaskan territory. It's certainly true that Herzl's Zionism is part of the mad utopianism of turn-of-the-20th-Century Jules Verne scheming. And most of those nutty ideas, obviously, wound up on the ash heap of history -- Marxist Communism et. al. They were attempts to make the complex, messy, slow-moving material of human societies conform to the simplistic grand narratives of intellectuals. Usually, they ended up not having solid enough foundations in the real concerns of average people, not having enough of a dedicated constituency, to work.

In Israel's case, the dream succeeded. But it succeeded because it was pitched to a constituency -- European Jews -- which was under such intense stress, squeezed by the pressure cooker of European nationalism, that it needed some kind of way out. The growing persecution of European Jews drove enough of them to grasp at even a nutty scheme like this one; and it had just enough of a foundation in reality -- the existence of a small Jewish community that had never left Palestine, the willingness of the British to consider colonial sponsorship -- to work.

But even so, the "revisionist" generation of Israeli historians has shown pretty conclusively that Israel would never have come into existence without the immense demographic push of Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. And the Holocaust, obviously, was the product of another of these absurd sci-fi utopian turn-of-the-20th-Century ideologies, one of the ones that crashed and burned most spectacularly. It's a bit disturbing to contemplate how the success of Zionism's mad dream derives from that early 20th-century environment rich in mad dreams, most of them with disastrous externalities that outweighed whatever was valuable in them.

Accumulating Peripherals

What strikes me that no one really considers the situational element. Just how long would a Yiddish-centered Jewish society have stayed that way, given the social environment of Semitic language speaking Palestinians and a desert-type environment, which Yiddish is hardly adapted to? Modern Hebrew was a vital element of the adaption process- and of breaking with the Gentile societies that had been left.

To me, the Yiddish revival and such is mostly an effort to stay connected with the Jews of past, mostly of the Jewish Pale- the historical groups, the many lost to the killings and camps, and the remainder that Stalin's efforts greatly dispersed and substantially assimilated. Which is a worthy endeavor in many respects, yet...wasn't the point of the founding of Israel to supercede that world, rather than revisit it?

The closest comparison to pre-Zionism Hebrew might be Sanskrit, which was a common Hindu/Buddhist religious language, but was not the spoken daily language anywhere in India. There is even question about whether it was ever the ordinary daily language anywhere.
Being Irish, I am fascinated by the ability of the immigrants to Israel to revive Hebrew.

BTW Chabon is a wildly enthusiastic Obama
supporter. Can't think of any political candidate in his experience who has so attracted him. As he told Brian Lehrer it's partly because he's known Obama's "fantastic wife" for many years , since college I think he said.

I'm reading the book but I reserve judgement. Bought it to while away the time while waiting for the annual concert at PS 29 in Brooklyn . So far it's a bit labored as he overdescribes the Sitka megalopolis in which his "yids" live . More than he would if he'd set the story in a factual city . His editor should have caught that, hard to do for yourself I expect.

I've always been an easy sell for this genre:
like Philip Roth version of a 1936 President Lindberg- which didn't overdescribe ,or Len Deighton's SS GB.

Jeff,

It is often harder to phrase a good question than a good answer, and you pose very good questions that I appreciate. My thoughts on the matter is that it is useful to think not just in terms of the I-P conflict, but worldwide and culture-wide, to see if common principles evolve.

Complicating what might be fair in the abstract is the reality of 21st century economics, international law and practice, and feasibility. Clemenceau is attributed with the outburst "must every little language have its own country?" In more modern contexts, is there a lower bound on size and resources, definitely looking at them together, below which nation status is not viable?

How does one fit the traditions of nomadic peoples, or at least peoples that have no historic tradition of land ownership? Issues like this come up with not just the Bedouin, but with assorted North American aboriginal groups, the latter ranging from highly organized agrarian societies to totally nomadic hunters. The USSR broke up, but to what extent should minorities in Russia, such as the Chechens, have autonomy or national status? Are some of the Pacific island-states too small, for example, to have full votes in the UN? What about Greater Kurdistan, a recognizable ethnic group and conceptual homeland spread across several nations?

Fair representation in the UN certainly differs from 1945. The permanent membership of the Security Council, for example, reflects the winners of WWII, not current power relationships. From an economic standpoint, the Group of 7(now 8) is worthy of consideration. There are interesting proposals to have a rotating membership with a country, from each continental region, have the power of a Permanent Member. Still, is the latter the right way to approach India or Brazil?

In the latter case, when there is an ongoing conflict, would it be feasible to give such status to India without giving it to Pakistan and possibly Bangladesh? If Israel came up in the rotation, are other countries or special cases like the Palestinian Authority things that also must be considered?

As I mentioned, Jeff, sometimes the most important thing is not the answer, but the question. I hope I have introduced some questions that may usefully reflect on I-P.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Actually, I'd call myself eclectic. I'm certainly a Unitarian sympathizer, but in my own meditations, the core is probably neodruidic with strong Jungian overlays and dashes of Zen and Stoic thought.

I like the signs in Heaven. Now, your example immediately makes me think of the sign allegedly at the end of the Oregon Trail:

OREGON----->

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

You have to address this question in AT LEAST one more way to understand what happened here. Here's the deal: it is 1946. There are 1.5 million Jews in displaced persons camps in a half-starved Europe that just got through trying to exterminate them. Where should you put them? The US will accept a couple hundred thousand. Britain far fewer. The Jewish community in British-run Palestine will take as many of them as it can get; but putting them there will entail the creation of a Jewish state, and the Palestinians will be infuriated. But the Palestinians don't have a state either. How about a compromise: give the Jews a state on the territory where they will be a majority, and the Palestinians a state on the territory where they are a majority?

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Accumulating Peripherals

Jewish assimilation and alienation of parts of the Jewish people from its mainstream are nothing new. This can already be seen in the Biblical period of the Judges, which predates the Monarchy of Saul, David and Solomon. In the Second Temple period, various sectarian groups like the Sadducees, Essenes, Dead Sea Sect and others tried to form new versions of Judaism. Later there were the Karaites.
They all failed.
Like you said, the current Israeli reality is "messy". If progressive Jews don't like what is going on in Israel, they are welcome to make aliyah (immigrate to Israel) and work to change things. I as a "right-wing-pro-Judea/Samaria settler -Religious Zionist" would welcome them with open arms.

The fact that Eretz Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, particularly Judea and Samaria is VERY germane. The Balfour Declaration and League of Mandate Nations granted to Britain which incorportated the Declaration were based on these facts. That is why the Jewish state is in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) and not where some in the Zionist movement wanted to place it ("Uganda", in reality Kenya) which would have been nothing more than a colonialist-settler state like Rhodesia.

Howard: You raise the issue of

...nomadic peoples, or at least peoples that have no historic tradition of land ownership

If by this you are intending to refer to the occupants of what is now Palestine prior to the exodus of the Jews, I think that characterization may be in error. I've recently been reading about archaeological research, for instance, which puts the first settlement of what is now Jerusalem at around 3500 B.C., long before the Hebrews arrived. One other fascinating detail, which I cannot vouch for, as I haven't deleved into the issue far enough, is that there are claims that even the name "Jerusalem" is derived from a Phoecian-Caananite name for the city:

The original inhabitants of Jerusalem were Phoenician Canaanites. Jerusalem was originally a village built on a hill. The name "Urushalim is first found on Egyptian statues, circa 2500 B.C. "Urushalim", in fact is a word of Canaanite derivation; the prefix "uru", meaning "founded by", and the suffix "salem" or "Shalem," Phoenician Canaanite god of dusk. This evidence is reinforced by archaeology and by tablets found in Elba, Syria, dating back to 3000 B.C., on which the god Shalem being venerated in a city called Uruksalem is mentioned. The old name of the city Urushalim figures also in the Egyptian texts called Texts of Proscription of XII dynasty 'ws'mm pronounced in Akkadian language Urushalim city of god.

In the 14th Century B.C., King Abdi Hepa, king of the Phoenician Canaanites, wrote to the Pharaoh Akhnaton and implored him to rid Jerusalem of new invaders. He described a group of people known as the "Habirus", as having already conquered Rushada, and advancing on Jerusalem. In the Bible, the story of Abraham mentions Melchizedek, the King of Salem (King of Jerusalem) and Priest of the Most High God (El Elion), who offered bread and wine to Abraham.

In 1000 B.C., King David, conquered Jerusalem, and established it as his capital. At the time of his conquest, the city was known as "Jebus" but he renamed it Jerusalem, once again.

Whether or not the origin of the name as outlined above is accurate, it appears that most archaeologists agree that there was a significant Bronze Age indigenous settled population in the area prior to the advent of the Jews. 

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb

Actually, I was deliberately not thinking of the I-P area, or even (at first) the Middle East. To validate the concept, I'd see if the proposal worked for North American Plains Indians, and Inuit and related groups. Eventually, I'd try it out on the Bedouin, starting as far west in Africa as possible, and then more southerly groups such as the Baqqara Arabs and Beja of Sudan and the Horn of Africa.

Only after trying out things fairly far from the Middle East would I move to Saudi and Jordanian Bedouin.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I don't see why "self-identifying" with a place should give rise to any sort claim that should be recognized by others. And certainly there can be no sensible system of international rules or law that seeks to honor all claims grounded in this marvelous self-identification - especially when these etheral psychic and ritualistic connections purport to leap over millenia, and are composed of murky mixtures of historical fact and religious fantasy.

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine given to Britain which recognizes the Balfour Declaration is the legally operative document. It is still in effect. The UN Partition Resolution of 1947 creating both a Jewish and Arab state were based on it.

The divine right has gone from a religious claim to a racist nationalist claim and in fact the religious folks have backed off that claim:

AS RABBIS FACE FACTS, BIBLE TALES ARE WILTING By Michael Massing New York Times, March 9, 2002

Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses.
The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never
occurred. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho.
And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into
a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose
reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a
fledgling nation.

Such startling propositions - the product of findings by
archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25
years - have gained wide acceptance among non- Orthodox rabbis. But
there has been no attempt to disseminate these ideas or to discuss
them with the laity - until now.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the
1.5 million Conservative Jews in the United States, has just issued a
new Torah and commentary, the first for Conservatives in more than 60
years. Called "Etz Hayim" ("Tree of Life" in Hebrew), it offers an
interpretation that incorporates the latest findings from
archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient
cultures. To the editors who worked on the book, it represents one of
the boldest efforts ever to introduce into the religious mainstream a
view of the Bible as a human rather than divine document...

"Historical Israel and Judea" existed for at best 600 years out of the total 6000+ year recorded history of the region.

Whatever conquests happened 2000 years ago, ethnic cleansing that Israel is currently engaged in against non-Jewish residents of Palestine is indefensible and a mortal taint on humanity and the United States which has directly and indirectly become complicit in Israel war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Mythology.

There is no doubt that the stories people tell themselves and others play a substantial role in the commitments they sustain toward one another; and the creation, transmission and preservation of these stories are a major causal factor in perpetuating the social solidarity of a community.

But the efficacy of this social phenomenon does not depend in any essential way on whether and to what degree the stories told are true or false. A community that believed itself to be descended from an ancient race of Martians, and prayed fervantly for their eventual return to Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris, could tell stories that were just as effective is binding their community as the more historically accurate stories told by others.

But the claims of right based on these stories are only entitled to the legitimation granted by others if they are grounded in publicly verifiable assertions of real historical fact. If human beings ever settled Mars, I doubt they would lend much weight to the legends of the ancient Martian people, and Martianist activists - nor should they.

And in addition to verifiability, claims of entitlement to the restoration of some particular piece of property shouldn't be honored beyond a reasonable period of time. No sensible system of governance could be based on restoring long-lost lands to every "people" who harbored a craving for them. Everywhere in the world there are people who tell themselves weepy sob stories about long-vanished primordial ancestors, sacred epiphanies and transfigurations, dissipated national potency and lost kingdoms and homelands. The leaders of these communities cultivate and perpetuate such narratives to unify their communities by nursing a collective sense of loss and grievance; and they preserve the their own power in the process. But sorry; that doesn't entitle them to either "go back" to, or achieve political supremacy over, the purported mother country.

No modern Jews can say with any assurance how it is that their own particular ancestors came to leave historical Palestine or Judea, and inhabit other places around the world. Were they driven into exile, or sold into captivity? Or did they just emmigrate to other places in the Persian, Hellenistic or Roman empires in search of a better life? Or was it a combination of both, with different ancestors having different experiences? Do you know? If some ancient Steinglass sold or abandoned his lands or dwellings to seek a better life in Alexandria, Cypress or Iraq, what entitles you to get them back?

A continued presence isn't enough to ground a claim of right. By the 19th century, the Jewish population of Palestine had been reduced to a few thousand, and had for many, many centuries ceased to be the dominant political community in the region. There are many other peoples who have built enduring settlements and kingdoms on Near Eastern turf, extending back through millenia. I don't think the world community should treat any of them as more equal than others.

I'm not terrifically moved by claims of either Zionists or Palestinian nationalists to the ancient entitlement of "their people" to the Dome of the Rock, the Old City, or any other piece of real estate. I'm much more interested in more easily verifiable claims of recent habitation and forcible dispossession of individuals and families, whether they do or do not imagine themselves into a "nation". In the main, though, I'll take whatever solution is necessary to save lives and get that entire region to stop being such a pain in the global ass.