Jewish history goes missing in university courses on Zionism

For most of Jewish history, Jews were the subjects rather than the agents of imperial and colonial ambitions.

This is especially true for my own area of research, late antiquity. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jews (In Hebrew, Yehudim; in Greek, Ioudaioi; ie “Judeans”) in Roman Palestine continued to live in their ancestral homeland but had to accommodate to Roman and Byzantine Christian imperialist rule. They looked back at periods of self-government — the monarchic period, when Jerusalem became the capital and the First Temple was built, and quasi autonomy under the Hasmoneans and Herodians — but also to centuries of Hellenistic and Roman imperialism with more or less tolerant foreign rulers.

Nevertheless, late antiquity was a flourishing period in which the major Jewish institutions emerged: the rabbinic movement, synagogues with figural art, and local educational centres.

These new developments are commonly understood in the context of Graeco-Roman culture and competition with Christians at a time when the rabbinic Land of Israel was “colonised” and became the Christian “Holy Land”.

Scholars of ancient Judaism apply post-colonial theories to the study of Jews in Roman-Byzantine Palestine. For example, rabbis are seen as subalterns — that is, local elites in a colonial setting. The increased building of synagogues in the fourth to sixth centuries, at a time when Byzantine law prohibited this practice, is considered a form of defiance and resistance against the Christian rulers. The colonial situation may even be reflected in Jewish liturgical poetry. Steven Fine has argued that the piyyutim can be understood as “the ‘hidden transcript’ of a Jewish community that was colonized”.

Another academic, Walter Mignolo, has argued that modern Eurocentrism is a consequence of “what might be called the ‘Constantine Legacy’ through which Christianity was allied with empire”.

Byzantine emperors combined the political “tyranny of the Roman Empire” with a new and exclusive ideology that propagated dogmatic Christianity as the only true religion.

This combination of political power and religious-cultural imperialism, which not only privileged Western Christianity but also tried to impose it on its subjects, is what the Byzantine Empire shared with modern European colonial regimes.

From ancient to modern times, Jews lived as a “colonised” minority in both the Middle East and in the Europe territories in which they were allowed to settle. This situation continued in the 15th to 18th centuries, the heyday of European colonialism.

In contrast to the European colonial regimes, the early Zionists lacked political power and the desire to impose their own culture and religion on others. In fact, the goals of these students and intellectuals at eastern and central European universities can be considered anti-colonial.

Derek Penslar has suggested to view “Zionism as an act of resistance by a colonized people”, a resistance born out of disillusionment and despair over European antisemitism and the lack of social acceptance.

Early Zionist writers were eager to establish connections to the anti-colonial Jewish past. They revived the history of the Maccabean revolt (167-164 BCE) and the Maccabean family’s resistance against the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV, whose persecution was meant to erase a distinct Jewish identity. They also made the rebels of the two Jewish revolts against Rome (66-70 and 132-5 CE) their role models. In one of his poems, Hayyim Nachman Bialik calls the “sons of the Maccabees” the “seed of saints” who “sanctified My name”.

In its June 1939 proclamation, the Irgun identifies with “the Maccabees [who] are ready to fight in order to reconquer the Land of Israel for Israel and their children”. The name of the anti-Roman rebel leader Bar Kochba was used by a Jewish student organisation in Prague that attracted Max Brod and Franz Kafka and hosted the German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who gave eight lectures there between 1909-19 (published as his Reden über das Judentum in 1923).

It is clear that early Zionists, both of the cultural and political spectrum, considered themselves moving in the footsteps of the ancient Jewish heroes who resisted the Hellenistic and Roman suppression of Jewish religious, cultural, and political autonomy.

They saw the liberation of Palestine from the British and the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland not only as an escape from European antisemitism but also as the continuation of a forcefully interrupted 3,000-year old Jewish history in the Middle East.

Representatives of other liberation movements, such as the Irish republicans, recognised certain analogies between their own and the Zionists’ fight against the British. Aidan Beatty has pointed to the “long and oddly intertwined history” of Irish nationalism and the Zionist movement.

If university degree programmes neglect pre-modern Jewish history and focus on the last 150 years only, simplistic and erroneous assumptions are inevitable.

Students can easily get the impression that Jews who moved to late Ottoman and British Mandate period Palestine were European “aliens” in an all-Arab environment, eager to suppress and dispossess the “natives”.

Such an approach not only negates 3,000 years of Jewish history in the Middle East, a history that also includes Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and Persia from ancient times onwards, but also leads to misunderstandings and a simplistic use of the “colonial”/”anti-colonial”, “native”/”foreign”, “powerless”/”imperialist”, “victim”/”perpetrator” dichotomies. 

Historical traditions have always had a powerful impact on past and present ideologies. The contemporary Middle East can be understood properly only if the study of Jewish history and culture from ancient times onwards becomes an integral part of Middle Eastern Studies and the study of Global History.

Unfortunately, at British universities that lack dedicated Jewish Studies departments (such departments exist at UCL and at the University of Oxford only) the study of Jews and Judaism is often separated from the (political) study of Israel and the (contemporary) Middle East (that may include Islam) and delegated to Theology and Religious Studies and Divinity Schools.

Rather than properly understanding Judaism as the history, literature, art and culture of the Jewish people, Judaism is reduced to a religion and often referred to as a “faith” by students. This Christianising approach to Judaism contributes to the Eurocentric view of Zionism as a form of European colonialism.

The integration of Jewish history into Middle Eastern Studies and History programs is much more common in the US. At Columbia University in New York, for example, Classical Jewish Civilization is taught in the History Department. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations comprises Jewish and Arabic Studies. Such programmes can serve as models for the disciplinary integration of Jewish Studies in the UK.

Only when Jewish history in the Middle East is studied alongside Islamic history and the emergence of Zionism is studied in the context of European antisemitism can simplistic propositions be avoided.

Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at Soas