The Origin of the Jews

The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age

Steven Weitzman

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400884933
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Jewish Theology

The first major history of the scholarly quest to answer the question of Jewish origins The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? While many think the answer to this question can be found in the Bible, others look to archaeology or genetics. Some skeptics have even sought to debunk the very idea that the Jews have a common origin. In this book, Steven Weitzman takes a learned and lively look at what we know—or think we know—about where the Jews came from, when they arose, and how they came to be.Scholars have written hundreds of books on the topic and have come up with scores of explanations, theories, and historical reconstructions, but this is the first book to trace the history of the different approaches that have been applied to the question, including genealogy, linguistics, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and genetics. Weitzman shows how this quest has been fraught since its inception with religious and political agendas, how anti-Semitism cast its long shadow over generations of learning, and how recent claims about Jewish origins have been difficult to disentangle from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He does not offer neatly packaged conclusions but invites readers on an intellectual adventure, shedding new light on the assumptions and biases of those seeking answers—and the challenges that have made finding answers so elusive.Spanning more than two centuries and drawing on the latest findings, The Origin of the Jews brings needed clarity and historical context to this enduring and often divisive topic.

CHAPTER ONE

Genealogical Bewilderment

LOST ANCESTORS AND ELUSIVE LINEAGES

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile—there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.

—HENRY WIENCEK

ORIGINS ARE OFTEN DESCRIBED as lost or hidden away, a buried treasure to be sought after, a secret to be penetrated or a lost memory to be retrieved, as demonstrated by book titles like The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Hidden History: The Secret Origin of the First World War, or Philology: The Forgotten Origin of the Humanities. One of the key insights of modernity was the realization that we live in a world where the origin of almost everything is veiled from us: the origin of the world, the origin of life, the origin of the reasoning that impels us to inquire into origins.

This is where scholarship has an important role as an agent that can help to reconnect us to our hidden origins. Where people once turned to religion and myth to satisfy their curiosity about origins, many of us now turn to science and historical scholarship for answers about how things truly began, and these fields can claim some major advances. Darwin’s insight into the origin of species involved the uncovering of a common ancestry hidden in the background of living species that earlier scientists had supposed to have originated independently of each other. To hypothesize a Big Bang at the beginning of the cosmos, an event that took place fourteen billion years ago, scientists had to work backward from what they could see of the universe today, from the distances between heavenly bodies and the speeds at which they were moving, and it took another feat of detective work to figure out that the continents all originated from the breakup of a supercontinent hundreds of millions of years ago. The origin of the Jews also lies in the realm of the unseen, and if scholars have had any success in uncovering it, it is because they enlist the same techniques used to uncover the origin of species, language, and religion, methods by which the mind traverses gulfs of time and discerns invisible causes.

The irony here is that if anyone bears responsibility for “losing” the origin of the Jews, it is probably the modern scholar. It was the critical study of the Bible that called the biblical account into question in the first place and questioned the continuity between the ancient Israelites and later Jews. In the same period geologists, biologists, and scholars of the ancient Near East greatly expanded the length of the past, making it much murkier and harder to penetrate, and the critical study of creation myths and foundation legends showed that such stories often conceal the truth of how things originate. But having introduced the problem, modern scholarship also promised a solution by introducing new ways of searching for the origin of the Jews. The following chapters survey these various approaches, examining a range of methods and theories that come from different disciplines but that all have the goal of finding origins that are lost, hidden, or forgotten.

This and the next chapter are devoted to methods that frame the search for origin as a research for roots, for distant ancestors. The root is one of the oldest and most pervasive metaphors for origin in use today; it depicts whatever is being understood as a tree or plant that branches out from something buried in the ground, and implies the existence of something flowing from the root into the trunk and branches—identity, culture, DNA—that connects every-thing together into an organic whole. As Christy Wampole has pointed out in a recent study of the metaphorical thinking involved, the root captures a number of the qualities that people associate with origins. It is often seen as the most stationary and enduring part of the tree; it is considered older than the rest of the tree, the part from which everything else arises; and at the same time it is the most inaccessible part of the tree, connecting it to the ground and feeding its growth but all in a way that is invisible. As it happens the root is not older than the rest of the tree, and the comparison is misleading in other ways. Scholars have made various attempts to challenge the analogy, but it continues as one of the most productive metaphors for thought, structuring how scholars conceive of the relationships among species, languages, human populations, and much else, and it captures the subterranean character of origins that is our focus here: our sense of origin as something buried underground, something important for understanding what the tree has grown into but cannot be seen, and something that has to be dug out to be understood.

In the next two chapters I will focus on two of the methods scholars use to uncover the root of the Jews—genealogy and etymology. In both cases the Jews are conceived as an organic and inter-connected whole, a tree with many proliferating branches and stems that grow in different directions but that all arise from a firmly situated root composed of the ancestors from which the Jews descend. The search for origin is the effort to follow the structure of the tree backward to this hidden root. Both genealogy and etymology are about establishing connections between then and now, but they are also about tracing the flow of something through these connections, something transmitted through the tree’s invisible vascular structure, from the ancestors to their present-day descendants. In what follows I explore what scholars have been able to learn about the origin of the Jews in these ways but also think about the limits of this way of conceiving origin; why it is difficult from a practical, methodological perspective to establish the connections needed to relate Jews to their ancient ancestors; and why it is that, at a deeper, conceptual level, some scholars think it is never really possible to trace something back to its roots.

The Search for Ancestors

The present chapter begins this survey by focusing on genealogy, the study of family lineages. Genealogical inquiry is arguably the oldest of the approaches I examine in this book—it lies behind the Book of Genesis itself—but my focus is on its role as a modern form of origin research, a mode of critical historical inquiry marked by careful, skeptical approach to documents, and by increasingly sophisticated ways of collecting, searching, and analyzing data. Genealogical research in this sense might well be the most popular method by which Jews today investigate their origins. I once happened to stay in a Jerusalem hotel hosting a conference by the Inter-national Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies, which is an umbrella organization comprising more than seventy local and national organizations from fourteen different countries. It felt like a much more inclusive affair than the academic conferences I normally attend, involving not just professional scholars but hundreds of hobbyists and people on various kinds of personal quests to understand their family histories. There are recognized genealogical experts, but to an outsider at least there is not as sharp a line between professionals and amateurs as there is in other academic disciplines, which makes genealogy a less snooty field than others but also raises questions about who to believe and what counts as reliable research.

The difficulty of distinguishing the reliable from the unreliable in genealogical research is a challenge that we will have to struggle with as we consider what this kind of research might tell us about the origin of the Jews. For me, however, it is not a reason to simply dismiss this kind of research since, for better or worse, far more Jews use the methods of genealogical research to investigate their origins than any of the other methods described in this book, with the exception of the field of genetics (treated in chapter 8).

One thing that is clear is that we cannot simply rely on the genealogical information in the Bible as a starting point for our inquiry. The authors of the genealogies recorded in the Bible also seem to have worked from a careful examination of sources—oral traditions in some cases, written documents in others—but their genealogical claims have not held up very well under the lens of critical analysis. Scholars in the twentieth century noted that the genealogies transmitted in other tribal societies are often quite fluid, undergoing changes to reflect evolving social and political relationships, and they believe the same is true of biblical genealogies as well—that much of their information was probably adapted to reflect changing social conditions in ancient Israel. (It is also possible that the authors of biblical narratives simply invented some of the genealogical information they report in order to advance their story in some way.) Here and there, in fact, we even have direct evidence of genealogical tampering.

An intriguing example—if one is reading the text in Hebrew—is the genealogy of a corrupt priest in Judges 18:30: “Jonathan, son of Gershom, son of Manasseh.” The information seems straight-forward enough, but in the Hebrew text of Judges there is something odd about how the name Manasseh is spelled: the letter nun, corresponding to our letter n, is strangely suspended above the line, as if someone had tried to stick it in after the fact without fitting it in completely (see Figure 1). Remove this suspended letter, as many modern commentators are inclined to do, and the remaining consonants spell out the name Moses. The corrupt priest described in this story appears to have been a descendant of the prophet, and it would seem that some later scribe, embarrassed by this fact, tried to protect Moses’s reputation by changing his name to the name Manasseh through a belated insertion of the letter nun. This is a rare case where we can actually see genealogical tampering, but scholars suspect that much of the genealogical information we have recorded in the Bible may reflect similar revision or even outright fictionalization.

Modern genealogical research seeks to establish genealogies that hold up according to the standards of critical scholarship, cross-checking records and treating dubious sources with an appropriate level of skepticism in an effort to extract reliable information. As a result, genealogy has emerged as an increasingly respected mode of historical research, and many people, Jews and non-Jews, now turn to this kind of research to find out information about their ancestors—so many, in fact, that the endeavor has given rise to a lucrative genealogical industry led by companies with names like Ancestry.com, Geni.com, and Myheritage. (For a sense of how lucrative, note that, according to the consulting firm Global Industry Analysts, it costs people between $1,000 and $18,000 to find out their roots, and that in 2012 Ancestry.com was sold for $1.6 billion.) But as popular as it is, can this kind of research connect a Jew alive today to ancestors living thousands of years ago? There are Jewish families that can trace their lineages hundreds of years, to the time of the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and earlier, but can genealogy go even further into the past? Can it reach all the way back to the beginning, to the earliest forebearers of the Jews?

FIGURE 1. Tampering with a biblical genealogy? The outlined letters betray an effort to wedge the Hebrew letter nun into the name “Moses” in Judges 18:30, evidently in order to conceal the prophet’s role in the genealogy of a corrupt priest described in the chapter. The effort was not entirely successful, however, for the inserted nun remains partly suspended over the rest of the word.

Source: Image reproduced from https://archive.org/details/Aleppo_Codex under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 license.

There are certainly reasons to be dubious of such a possibility. Tracing the lineage of a person alive today all the way back to antiquity has been described as the ultimate challenge for genealogists. Many have tried to surmount the documentary challenges, but success remains elusive. Genealogists can trace certain individuals back to the Middle Ages; but the question I am broaching here is whether it is possible to follow a genealogical trail from the Middle Ages back to antiquity. Genealogists have not been able to do that even for the royal families of Europe, which have line-ages that can be traced as far back as Charlemagne in the eighth century CE but not to the ancient Roman Empire. And yet despite the challenges, some now claim to be able to establish this kind of long-term genealogy, purporting to document a lineage for certain Jews that not only goes back to biblical times but traces a line of descent to a specific individual: King David.

This is the goal, for example, of the Shealtiel Family World Association, an organization whose efforts to reconnect the descendants of the Shealtiel family, now reaching some twenty-five hundred people, include annual reunions and the publication of a newsletter, the Shealtiel Gazette. After learning from his father that their family descended from King David, Moshe Shaltiel-Gracian, an Israeli-born member of the family who lives in the Chicago area, undertook a twenty-year quest to reconstruct his family’s lineage. He claims to be able to prove a lineage for the Shealtiel family that runs through the Exilarchs, medieval leaders of the Babylonian Jewish community who claimed Davidic descent, back to the king himself. Another contemporary would-be Davidic descendent is Susan Roth, an actress, mystic, and founder of the organization Davidic Dynasty, which has sought to identify other descendants of David (such as the comedian Jerry Seinfeld according to Roth), and of the King David Private Museum and Research Center in Tel Aviv (the website of which, unfortunately, is now defunct). In the case of Roth and other Jews with Ashkenazic backgrounds, the link to David is not through the Babylonian Exilarchs but through the medieval French-Jewish commentator Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105) via the lineages of such famous rabbis from Central or Eastern Europe as the Maharal of Prague (ca. 1525–1609) and Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810). Many people have sought to trace themselves to King David—I have found a news report from the 1970s that suggests many Jews were interested in such a pursuit back then. What draws our attention to these two recent cases is not just their claim of Davidic descent but their use of the methods of modern genealogical research—the effort to find documentary support for their genealogical claims and even the use of DNA testing to confirm common ancestry among those who believe they descend from the king.

To scholars in other fields, this kind of research will seem preposterous, or at the very least, amateurish. It claims to be able to demonstrate what genealogists have failed to show for any other individual (with the possible exception of the pedigree of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, born in 551 BCE, whose descendants can be traced over some eighty generations into the present era). It is also at odds with biblical scholarship and its doubts about David as a historical figure. But even if we are inclined to dismiss claims of Davidic descent, we should not be too quick to dismiss genealogy as a way of seeking out the origin of the Jews, if only because it raises larger questions. The effort to trace individuals back to King David gives us an opportunity to explore what we know or can prove about the connection between present-day Jews and distant biblical ancestors, but even more importantly for our larger quest, it also gives us a way to reflect on the search for roots in a broader sense—the kind of insight that such research is capable of achieving, the challenges that it must overcome, and some of the hidden problems with conceptualizing the search for origin as a genealogical quest.

Genealogy, as Eviatar Zerubavel points out, is not just a particular method but “a way of thinking,” a form of cognition that structures our experience of time, social relationships, and personal identity. We may think of genealogical research as a hobby, but genealogical thinking—the kind that classifies the present by tracing lines of descent back to common ancestors—is actually essential to many forms of scholarly thinking. Somewhere in the background of this way of thinking, as Mary Bouquet has shown, is the European scholarly tradition of using the image of a tree—initially as a way of representing family relationships and the earthly genealogy of Jesus and then, later, in a secular and abstracted form, as a convention of scholarly taxonomy. The root or trunk of the tree signifies the ur-form—the earliest form of life, for example, or the earliest proto-language—and the branching out from there signifies increasing diversification over time. The “tree model” or “cladistic” model (from the Greek for “branch”) remains central to the scholarly search for origin. The theory of evolution is in part a genealogical inquiry that aims to uncover a common descent for human and nonhuman organisms. In the field of historical linguistics, genealogical thinking structures how scholars describe and explain the relations among languages, with related languages described as mother languages and daughter languages or put into other kind of kinship relations within a linguistic family tree that branches out from a trunk—a proto-language that plays the role of common ancestor. Text-critical scholars similarly organize variant manuscripts according to the tree model in an effort to reconstruct the ur-text from which all the texts descend. Although its origins go back to antiquity, genealogical thinking is at the heart of the modern search for origin.

Genealogy, not as a tracing of a family tree but as an underlying structure of thought, is also woven into some of the methods scholars use to investigate the origin of the Jews—the use of historical linguistics to trace the Israelites back to prebiblical ancestors and the use of genetics to trace a biological line of descent from present-day Jews to distant ancestors. If I begin with genealogy, it is not only because its history predates most of the other methods this book considers or because it is the most popular method by which Jews today investigate their ancestry, but also because it gives us a chance to reflect on the root as a metaphor that guides and sometimes misleads people in their search for their origins.

Genealogical Sleuthing

As we have noted, contemporary Jewish genealogical research has its own genealogy that goes back to the Book of Genesis, and it can be understood as a continuation of a kind of study that predates modern critical scholarship. Establishing a genealogical connection to King David was especially important because of the special status it conferred. In chapter 7 of 2 Samuel, God promises David that he and his descendants will form an enduring royal dynasty that will rule forever, and later Jews would come to believe that one of those descendants would be the Messiah, the savior figure who delivers Jews from their troubles. To be a descendant of such a line has always been a marker of high status within the Jewish community. To cast Jesus as a descendant of David, as do the genealogies that appear in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, is to assert that he is heir to the promises made to David—a direct successor—and thus qualified to be the Messiah. In later history numerous rabbis, nobles, and a few would-be messiahs would also claim Davidic ancestry, in some cases producing genealogical documents as proof. Contemporary claims of Davidic descent build on this tr...