"The Bible" Miniseries Samson Draws Criticism

"The Bible" Miniseries on the History Channel: Samson Draws Criticism

"Many people can not wrap their minds around a black man being in that role, when in reality there were people of all ethic groups living and traveling through that region at the time."

"No historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure'."

By Matt Lloyd, 
"The Bible" series episode 2 aired last night on The History Channel and the web is buzzing again. This second episode seemed to stir up more controversy than the first in terms of biblical accuracy. It seemed to be a real life version of the highlights of Sunday school class featuring the walls of Jericho coming down at the hands of Joshua, Samson and his hair and David bringing down the giant Goliath.  

The most talked about story on the web from episode 2 was Samson. He was played by African-American actor, Nonso Anozie, who was strong in stature and was a very believeable Samson. Unfortunately, many people can not wrap their minds around a black man being in that role, when in reality there were people of all ethic groups living and traveling through that region at the time. Regardless, that should not sour the meaning and wonderful description of the story. The other question people seem to have is in the bible, Samson was a man far from God's heart and following his fleshy desires more often than not. In the show's character, Samson was close to God.  

As for the story of David, it was well depicted. Some say David was already a armor bearer for Saul at the time he fought Goliath and not a mere farmer. Also, the whole process with Samuel picking David to be king was not shown. This does not simply mean inaccuracy but perhaps a shortage of time to go through each progression. King Saul's jealousy issues with David were very telling and humanly portrayed in episode two which was interesting to see played out.
  
All of the official ratings have not come out yet for last night's episode but if it was anywhere close to last weeks premiere of 14 million, then the series will do just fine. When Jesus comes across the screen in the final 3 episodes, more people will tune in to see how he is portrayed. source:  

Ancient Man and His First Civilizations

 How did Jesus and the Hebrews become WHITE?

How did the Hebrews turn White? Of course they didn't really; just in the imaginations, and then the histories of White people. Who for probably practical reasons, decided that Hebrews, and also the Blacks who originally lived in the Country's that they took over, should all become White for posterity's sake.

Seeing as how it only takes three generations to turn a Black person into a White person (and visa versa). No doubt there came a time when as Europe's formerly bi-racial populations, became more homogeneously White, White people decided that they could no longer acknowledge that all that they knew and had, was derived from the minds and labors of Black people - even down to their religious beliefs. The logic no doubt being that Whites could not progress to their full potential, if they were always looking up to Blacks, as the personification of knowledge and wisdom. So a change had to be made, and at some point, by somebody, that change began.

Of course, we have no way of knowing when this process of Whitinizing Blacks began, or who did it, or where it was first done. But we do have some materials by which we can track the process, somewhat.

But first, let us go back to see what Hebrews REALLY looked like. The earliest authentic pictures of real Hebrews that we have, date back to before Christ. They are Assyrian relief's showing Hebrews, and others that they conquered, in pictorial scenes detailing the battles fought, with associated text. These relief's decorated Assyrian palaces, and were no doubt used to gloat over their conquest of the Hebrews and others. Here we are using pictures of: Assyrian King Shalmaneser IIIs "Black Obelisk" (858 B.C.). Assyrian king Tiglath-pilesar III’s relief's of his conquest of a city near the Sea of Galilee (730 B.C.). Assyrian King Sennacherib’s relief's of the conquest of the Judean City of Lachish (701 B.C.). The four pictures below, are from those Assyrian relief's. (These relief's are stored in the British Museum, London England). source:

Song of Songs

I am black, but comely ... I am a wall, and my breasts like towers ... breasts like two young roes that are twins ...
The king hath brought me into his chambers ... Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine ... He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts ... By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth ... I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste .. Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits ... My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved ... I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone...
Let us get up early to the vineyards ... there will I give thee my loves ... Make haste, my beloved.
Read more at nudesforjesus

Sand began his work by looking for research studies about forcible exile of Jews from the area now bordered by modern Israel, and its surrounding regions. He was astonished that he could find no such literature, he says, given that the expulsion of Jews from the region is viewed as a constitutive event in Jewish history. The conclusion he came to from his subsequent investigation is that the expulsion simply didn't happen, that no one exiled the Jewish people from the region, and that the Diaspora is essentially a modern invention. He accounts for the appearance of millions of Jews around the Mediterranean and elsewhere as something that came about primarily through the religious conversion of local people, saying that Judaism, contrary to popular opinion, was very much a "converting religion" in former times. He holds that mass conversions were first brought about by the Hasmoneans under the influence of Hellenism, and continued until Christianity rose to dominance in the fourth century CE.

Jewish origins

Sand argues that it is likely that the ancestry of most contemporary Jews stems mainly from outside the ancient Land of Israel and that a "nation-race" of Jews with a common origin never existed. Just as most contemporary Christians and Muslims are the progeny of converted people, not of the first Christians and Muslims, Judaism was originally, like its two cousins, a proselytising religion. Many of the present day world Jewish population are descendants of European, Russian and African groups.

According to Sand, the original Jews living in Israel, contrary to popular belief, were not exiled following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Sand argues that most of the Jews were not exiled by the Romans, and were permitted to remain in the country. Many Jews converted to Islam following the Arab conquest, and were assimilated among the conquerors. He concludes that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Sand writes that the story of the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. They portrayed that event as a divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel. Sand writes that "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."

Jewish peoplehood

Sand's explanation of the birth of the "myth" of a Jewish people as a group with a common, ethnic origin has been summarized as follows: "[a]t a certain stage in the 19th century intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace."

In this, Sand writes, they were similar to other nationalist movements in Europe at the time that sought the reassurance of a Golden Age in their past to prove they have existed as a separate people since the beginnings of history. Jewish people found theirs in what he calls "the mythical Kingdom of David". Before this invention, he says, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not a common ethnic background. source:

DNA analysis

In June 2010, an article in Newsweek titled "The DNA Of Abraham's Children" addresses through genetic analysis the centuries-old assertion, which the article claims has been revived by the book, that modern European Jews are descended from Khazars, a Turkic group, and not from the Middle East: "The DNA has spoken: no." A New York Timesarticle on the same studies notes they "refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book The Invention of the Jewish People that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times."  Michael Balter, reviewing the study in the journal Science, says the following:

… Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University in Israel argues in his book The Invention of the Jewish People, translated into English last year, that most modern Jews do not descend from the ancient Land of Israel but from groups that took on Jewish identities long afterward. Such notions, however, clash with several recent studies suggesting that Jewishness, including the Ashkenazi version, has deep genetic roots. In what its authors claim is the most comprehensive study thus far, a team led by geneticist Harry Ostrer of the New York University School of Medicine concludes today that all three Jewish groups—Middle Eastern, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi—share genomewide genetic markers that distinguish them from other worldwide populations.

Ostrer said, "I would hope that these observations would put the idea that Jewishness is just a cultural construct to rest." However, geneticist Noah Rosenberg of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says that although the study "does not appear to support" the Khazar hypothesis, it "doesn't entirely eliminate it either." 

Shlomo Sand has contested the claim that his book has been contradicted by recent genetic research published in Nature journal and the American Journal of Human Genetics. In a new afterword for the paperback edition of The Invention of the Jewish People, Sand writes:

This attempt to justify Zionism through genetics is reminiscent of the procedures of late nineteenth-century anthropologists who very scientifically set out to discover the specific characteristics of Europeans. As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased! And it is all the more repulsive that this kind of research should be conducted in a state that has waged for years a declared policy of "Judaization of the country" in which even today a Jew is not allowed to marry a non-Jew.

In 'The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses' published in the journal, Genome Biology and Evolution, by Oxford University Press, Dr. Eran Elhaik, claims to present a complete analysis of the comprehensive genetic data published in preceding studies. He states that "My research refutes 40 years of genetic studies, all of which have assumed that the Jews constitute a group that is genetically isolated from other nations". According to his study’s findings, European Jews genome is mostly Western European. "[They are] primarily of Western European origin, which is rooted in the Roman Empire, and Middle Eastern origin, whose source is probably Mesopotamia, although it is possible that part of that component can be attributed to Israeli Jews,” he told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz by phone from Maryland.

On the publication of Elhaik's study, Haaretz approached historians and geneticists for comment, but only received a reply from Sand, who was highly critical of 'geneticists looking for Jewish genes.' The discipline, he stated, seems 'crowned with a halo - as a precise science that deals with quantitative findings and whose conclusions are irrefutable,' and yet he regards geneticists as deficient in anything more than a high-school level of history, just like his knowledge of their discipline. Geneticists, he claims adapt their scholarly findings to the received historical narrative that that there is one Jewish nation. To search for a common gene to define a people or nation, as the Germans once did to argue for their ethnic blood ties, is dangerous. It is an irony of history that whereas in the past those who defined the Jews as a race were vilified as antisemitic, now assertions to the contrary are taken as antisemitic.  As in historical research so in genetics, he argues: 'It is very easy to showcase certain findings while marginalizing others and to present your study as scholarly research.'

Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University – Shlomo Zand (Dept of History) – gets bad peer review of book by Israel Bartal who reduces the work to fiction.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/999386.html

Inventing an invention

According to Shlomo Sand, everything you ever thought you knew about the Jewish people as a nation with ethno-biological origins is false. Israel Bartal, however, says Sand didn't do his homework

_{By Israel Bartal
06/07/2008}

Mattai ve'ekh humtza ha'am hayehudi?
(When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), by Shlomo Sand
Resling (Hebrew), 358 pages, NIS 94.

The first sentence of "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" reads: "This book is a historical study, not a work of pure fiction. Nevertheless, it will open with a number of stories rooted in a collective memory that has been adulterated with a considerable degree of imagination." I recalled these words when I found myself utterly astounded by the statements of the author of this learned, fascinating study, concerned with the "period of silencing" in the "Jewish-Israeli collective memory," a period that, to quote Sand, gave rise to a total avoidance of "any mention of the Khazars in the Israeli public arena."

This assertion, according to which an entire chapter in Jewish history was deliberately silenced for political reasons, thrust me back to my days as a ninth grader, in the late 1950s. I recalled the Mikhlal Encyclopedia, an almost mythological reference text that nearly every Israeli high school student relied on in those years, the flagship of what is termed "mainstream Zionism," in the lean Hebrew of 21st-century Israel. My ears still reverberate with the introduction to the encyclopedia's entry on "Khazars": "A source of consolation and hope for the scattered Jewish communities of the Diaspora during the Middle Ages, the story of the Khazar kingdom today has the ring of pure mythology. Nonetheless, that story is one of the most wonderful chapters in Jewish history."

Sand suggests that it was "the wave of decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s [that] led the molders of Israeli collective memory to shield themselves from the shadow of the Khazar past. There was a profound fear that, should the Jews now rebuilding their home in Israel learn that they are not direct descendants of the 'Children of Israel,' the very legitimacy of both the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel's existence would be undermined."

With considerable trepidation, I returned to my yellowing copy of volume IV of the Mikhlal Encyclopedia. Could I perhaps have been mistaken and could it be that my teachers in the Socialist-Zionist city of Givatayim wanted to brainwash me with an ethno-biological perception of my parents' origin?

When I reread the entry on the Khazars, my mind was put at rest. It was not the Zionist education to which I, as an Israeli teenager, was exposed that tried to make me forget the fact that the members of gentile tribes converted to Judaism in the Khazar Kingdom; instead, it is the author of this book about the "invention of the Jewish people" who has invented an ethno-biological Zionist historiography.

Here is what was written about the conversion of the Khazars, a nation of Turkish origin, in the Zionist Mikhlal Encyclopedia that the State of Israel's Zionist Ministry of Education recommended so warmly during that "period of silencing": "It is irrelevant whether the conversion to Judaism encompassed a large stratum of the Khazar nation; what is important is that this event was regarded as a highly significant phenomenon in Jewish history, a phenomenon that has since totally disappeared: Judaism as a missionary religion.... The question of the long-term impact of that chapter in Jewish history on East European Jewry -- whether through the development of its ethnic character or in some other way -- is a matter that requires further research. Nonetheless, although we do not know the extent of its influence, what is clear to us today is that this conversion did have an impact." Sand, a professor of modern European history at Tel Aviv University, comments further on the silence of the historians: "Israel's academic community developed a violent attitude toward this issue.... Any mention of the Khazars in the public arena in Israel was increasingly considered eccentric, a flight of fancy, even an open threat."

Zionist historiography, he claims, concealed the possibility that the millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews were actually descendants of the Khazars and that even today Israeli historians deny the existence of an early Jewish nucleus that was augmented by immigrants who moved from Ashkenaz (present-day northern France and western Germany) to Eastern Europe.

These claims are baseless. Sand, for example, does not mention the fact that, from 2000 onwards, a team of scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem labored on a monumental task: the production of a three-volume study on the history of the Jews of Russia.

In the first volume, which will shortly be published in Hebrew by the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History (another "Zionist" institution), considerable attention is devoted to the question of the origin of the East European Jews and to their link with the history of the Khazar kingdom.

Sand repeats the method he employs vis-a-vis the place of the Khazars in Jewish historiography in connection with other topics as well, presenting readers with partial citations and edited passages from the writings of various scholars. Several times, Sand declares what his ideological position is. Like him, I am not one of those who support the injustices committed by a number of Israeli government agencies against minority groups in this country in the name of arguments pretending to represent "historical values." However, critical readers of Sand's study must not overlook the intellectual superficiality and the twisting of the rules governing the work of professional historians that result when ideology and methodology are mixed.

Sand's desire for Israel to become a state "representing all its citizens" is certainly worthy of a serious discussion, but the manner in which he attempts to connect a political platform with the history of the Jewish people from its very beginnings to the present day is bizarre and incoherent.

Descendants of pagans

What is Sand trying to prove in this study? In his view, the homeland of the Jewish people is not Palestine, and most Jews are descendants of the members of different nations who converted to Judaism in ancient times and in the medieval period. He claims that the Jews of Yemen and Eastern Europe are descendants of pagans.

According to Sand, this historical truth was concealed by Zionist thinkers, who developed an ethno-biological ideology, and the so-called "Jewish people" was invented as late as the 19th century. Furthermore, he argues, the idea of a "nation" that was exiled from its homeland in ancient times and which is destined to return to it in the modern age so as to rebuild its independent state is merely an invented myth.

Sand also maintains that, in the era preceding the emergence of European nationalism, the Jews were an ethnic group, not a nation. In his eyes, the argument promulgated by the Zionists and by their successors in the Israeli political arena concerning our "right to this land" rests on a biological-genetic ideology; that argument became the "narrative of the ruling group" thanks to the fact that the "authorized scholars of the past" have concealed the truth concerning the real, impure origin of the Jews.

My response to Sand's arguments is that no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and biologically "pure." Sand applies marginal positions to the entire body of Jewish historiography and, in doing so, denies the existence of the central positions in Jewish historical scholarship.

No "nationalist" Jewish historian has ever tried to conceal the well-known fact that conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history in the ancient period and in the early Middle Ages. Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions. Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely.

Sand's references to "authorized" historians are absurd, and perpetuate a superficial pattern of discussion that is characteristic of a certain group within Israeli academe. The guiding principle in this pattern of discussion is as follows: "Tell me what your position is on the past and I will tell you the nature of your connection with the agencies of the regime."

The kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews' exile from their homeland is pure fantasy.

Sand points to three components in the structuring of the Jewish national past. First, the national historical narrative, especially the Zionist narrative, emphasizes the "ethno-biological" identity of those who belong to the imaginary Jewish nation.

Second, this identity is directly connected with a nationalist ideology that is a substitute for the religious link between Jewish communities in the Diaspora that has considerably weakened in the present era of secularization. Third, an aggressive political establishment that controls the dissemination of knowledge is concealing vital information on what really happened in the past, preventing the publication of sources that can serve as an alternative to the recommended national narrative, and censoring dangerous passages in published texts.

The central book of the Zionist "Jerusalem School," "Toldot am yisrael" ("History of the Jewish People," published in 1969), speaks extensively of the Jewish communities that existed in the Diaspora before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and whose total population exceeded that of the tiny Jewish community in Palestine. As one would expect from a work that reflects a profound knowledge of scholarly studies in the field, the Zionist "Toldot am yisrael" explains that the number of Jews in the Diaspora during the ancient period was as high as it was because of conversion, a phenomenon that "was widespread in the Jewish Diaspora in the late Second Temple period .... Many of the converts to Judaism came from the gentile population of Palestine, but an even greater number of converts could be found in the Jewish Diaspora communities in both the East and the West."

Choosing to ignore all this, Sand categorically states in his book that, "the mass conversions that created such huge Jewish populations throughout the Mediterranean region are scarcely mentioned in Jewish national historiography." Apparently, he is obsessed with the idea of proving that the Zionist historians (including Nahum Slouschz, who wrote about the North African Jewish warrior-queen Dahia al-Kahina) were "ethnocentric nationalists." It is irrelevant to Sand what these historians actually wrote: To hell with the facts -- the argument is what really counts!

Sand bends over backwards to prove that the great Jewish historians (such as Simon Dubnow, Salo Baron and Benzion Dinur), who, in their works, linked Jewish nationalism with liberalism, radicalism and socialism, were simply racists. Here's what he writes, for example, about Israeli historian Haim Zeev Hirschberg (1903-1974), who studied the Jews of North Africa: "His continual attempts to prove that the Jews were a race of people that had been displaced from its ancient homeland and which had been condemned to wander from country to country as an exiled nation ... dovetail beautifully with the directives of mainstream Zionist historiography." According to Sand, Hirschberg never managed to liberate himself from a "purifying substantive ideology." Does this sound familiar? When and where did you last read that Zionism was a racist movement?

Scattered communities

I will now refer briefly to the connection between the book's conceptual underpinnings and the author's main historical argument, namely, that, prior to the modern period, the Jews constituted only a group of "scattered religious communities." Sand defines national identity in the spirit of the ideas of the French Revolution. Not only does he reject the concept of an ethnic identity that is not dependent on the existence of a political entity confined within clearly defined borders, he even rejects an identity whose possessors' claim is founded on a cultural or political entity that is not subject to control or management by the agencies of the central regime. In his view, such identities are merely "invented identities" and he does not believe that pre-modern identities can survive in the modern era. In fact, Sand advocates the position that was heard in the French National Assembly in December 1789: "The Jews must not be allowed to constitute a special political entity or to have a special political status. Instead, each Jew must on an individual basis be a citizen of France." However, whereas the champions of the Emancipation in Paris did recognize the non-religious essence of the pre-modern Jewish nation, Sand does not.

I was unable to find in Sand's book any innovations in the study of nationalism. The author is stuck somewhere between historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner -- a generation behind what is happening today in the field. As far as I can discern, the book contains not even one idea that has not been presented earlier in their books and articles by what he insists on defining as "authorized historians" suspected of "concealing historical truth." "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" is a marvelous blend of clearly modernist arguments, drawn from the legacy of 18th-century European Enlightenment, with a moderate, but disturbing (because of its superficiality), pinch of Foucaultian discourse from a previous generation.

Moreover, the author's treatment of Jewish sources is embarrassing and humiliating. What serious reader who knows the history of modern Hebrew literature can take seriously the views expressed in a book that defines "Bohen tsadik" (Investigating a Righteous Man), a satirical (fictional!) work by the Galician intellectual and supporter of the Haskalah Yosef Perl (1773-1839), as something that was written by a person named Yitzhak Perl and which "contains 41 letters from rabbis that relate to various aspects of Jewish life"? Who would attest to the accuracy of facts in a research study where it is stated that historian Joseph Klausner (1874-1958) -- a scholar who never was (despite his burning ambition to do so) a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and who, instead, served there as a professor of Hebrew literature -- "was in fact the first official historian of the 'Second Temple period' at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem"? Does such sloppiness reflect the author's attitude to the subject of his research? Or, perhaps, because everything is an invention anyway, it does not really matter whether the "imagined object" is black or white?

The lugubrious Israeli combination of aggressive one-dimensional conceptuality and blatant disrespect for details (a characteristic mix among writers at both ends of the political spectrum) will undoubtedly captivate the hearts of the public relations executives of the electronic media. However, we, the skeptical historians, who are buried between mountains of books and piles of archival files, can only continue to read what has really been written and to write about what has really been read.

Prof. Israel Bartal is dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University. His book "Cossack and Bedouin: Land and People in Jewish Nationalism" was published by Am Oved in its Ofakim series (Hebrew).

source:

Did Jesus Claim to be God?

The Messiah proclaimed by Christianity is really a contortion of the True Hebrew Messiah Who was an orthodox Jew, addressed as Rabbi by His contemporaries, went to synagogue daily, ate kosher, went to cheider, spoke Hebrew, shook the lulav on Succoth, and probably had payot (sidelocks) behind his ears. This Halachic Oral Torah confirming Jewish Tzadik has been high-jacked by Christianity which presented Him as a Torah rejecting Christian. Christianity only started more than 2 centuries later as a vehemently anti-Jewish religion which persecuted the Jewish believers in the dungeons of Rome.
Read more at http://natzrim.blogspot.com/2013/01/did-jesus-claim-to-be-god.html#PZ4FhmFYFEgCCIrF.99