Why I stopped being Jewish

As Sand looks at more and more of these accepted historical ‘facts’, their validity fades before our eyes and we realise the world has been duped into believing, in effect, a fairy tale that has fuelled world history and continues to affect the daily lives and fate of the Palestinians. It is the belief in the promised land that has resulted in Israel continuing to defy international law by occupying Palestine land and allowing, and often encouraging, so-called Israeli settlements to spread beyond its borders, thereby destroying any hope of even a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. There is an even more dramatic myth that Sand explodes.

As a Jew, I knew that even if I no longer believed in the religion, I was still a descendent of the Israelites, that is, I could trace my family origins back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I was part of an ethnos whose membership was hereditary. However, I had often wondered about the great divisions among the Jews. I knew that the vast majority of Jews in the world were the European Ashkenazi (of which my family was a member) but there were also the Sephardic Jews who were Middle Eastern in appearance. Despite the great difference in our separate physiognomy, we were all supposed to be related. I had also heard that there were African Jews in Ethiopia and even Chinese Jews. This had in fact already begun to stretch the bounds of my credibility in terms of our common heredity.

It is only through Shlomo Sand’s careful scholarship that I have come to understand what the real story is. Sand documents that Judaism was in fact an early militant religion whose beliefs were spread through proselytisation and conquest. For example, in the eighth and ninth centuries there occurred the conversion of the Khazar kingdom in the north Caucuses and this explains the origins of the many millions of Jews who have lived in such regions no constituting modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Similarly, Judaism spread through conquest and conversion along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa and this explain the origin of the Berber Jews of Morocco. Of course, over time, many of the peoples who had adopted the Jewish faith were subsequently conquered by, and/or converted to, Christianity, and then later many of these Christians and many remaining Jews were in turn conquered by, and/or converted to, Islam.

Hence I have come to realise that I am not in fact descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Rather, my ancestors were Jewish converts and that, as a descendent of Ashkenazi Jews, I am not Semitic. Indeed, if one is looking for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then the place to look is in Gaza and other areas of Palestine where the descendants of the original population of this region continue to live. There is a dreadful and cruel irony that the European Ashkenazi Jews, who promoted Zionism, usurped this heritage for themselves and have managed to evict the real descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph.

Sand documents how this lack of a common genetic heritage of Jews is shown by the very DNA analysis that the Zionists hoped would prove a common Jewish descent. The fact that there is no common genetic heritage shared by Jews throughout the world, in fact confirms the historical record that many, indeed the majority, of the ancestors of the world’s Jews entered the faith through conversion. Even demographically, one would be hard put to explain how the diaspora of large number of Jews throughout the world could have resulted from the progeny of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph. Sand examines in detail how Zionist scholarship has explained away the Jewish diaspora by means of such concepts as ‘The Wandering Jew’ and has dealt with awkward demographic realities of vast numbers of Jews far from their promised land by resorting to such arguments as the claim that Jewish extreme fecundity is a result of Jewish hygienic practices.

What is really chilling in Shlomo Sand’s study is his close description of the way the Israeli establishment and its Zionist supporters throughout the world have harnessed vast resources to counter the research of the academics he cites. Historical home truths that have been analysed in many books over time have been conveniently ignored, or when that proves impossible, have been disparaged, derided and written off. Indeed, the newly-published English language edition of Sand’s book, has a supplementary chapter ‘Afterward: A Reply to My Critics’ which documents the strength of the pro-Israeli and Zionist lobby both in Israel and abroad that resists engaging in honest scholarship in order to protect what Sand calls the ‘mythistory’ that provides the continuing rationale for Israel as a Jewish state, rather than a multicultural democracy for all its citizens.

This book has freed me from a misguided belief that that I was in some way genetically related to all God’s ‘chosen people’. What I have learnt is that I can engage with the whole world though a common humanity in order to create a better world for all.