AAARGH
Hebrew University Professor Nachman Ben-Yehuda of the Sociology
Department dropped a cultural-historiographical bombshell on the
Jewish State of Israel when he wrote:
"HOW DOES ONE develop a sociological interpretation for an
important belief system that turns out to be based on a series
of deceptive and very biased (even falsified) claims? Moreover,
what should one do when this belief system turns out to be not
only an important building block for the development of receptive
young minds but also a cornerstone of an entire nation?
"The so-called Masada mythical narrative is such a belief
system: a fabricated moralistic claim. The startling discovery
of its falsehood descended upon me in 1987. However, while the
sociological interpretation presented in this book is based on
an Israeli experience, it would be a grave mistake to assume that
such a mythology and deviant belief system constitutes a cultural
idiosyncrasy, typical of Israel only. On the contrary, such myths
and deviant beliefs are characteristic of many cultures. Hence,
the sociological lesson embedded in this particular tale has wide-ranging
ramifications, as we shall see later." [P.3]
BACKGROUND.
Who is the Israeli academic who would write such aseeminglyoutrageous
statement as quoted above? Has he written with similar boldness
in the past?
In 1993 the State University of New York Press published his Political
Assassinations by Jews. A Rhetorical Device for Justice [ISBN
0-7914-1165-6] in which he focused on how Jews killedfor the most
partother Jews. He placed this in a particularly Jewish cultural
matrix and described how this specific form of murder had been
conceptualized so as to become an alternative system for moral
justice. He also authored Deviance and Moral Boundaries
and The Politics and Morality of Deviance.
For several years now I have enjoyed informative, humane, and
spirited correspondence with Professor Ben-Yehuda and I hold him
in the highest regard on all levels.
THE HISTORICAL MASADA OF KING HEROD THE GREAT.
For most of us, the fortress in the Judaean desert toward the
south end of the Dead Sea [itself some 1290 feet below sea level]
about 80 miles below Jerusalem and on the western side of the
Sea, and this site has been made famous in a Hollywood style film
of that name, but perhaps most of all by Israeli archaeologist
Yigael Yadin in his 1996 book Masada. Herod's Fortress and
the Zealots' Last Stand [New York: Random House.] His excavation
on site began in 1963 with a large team and government sponsorship.
Built by King Herod the Great between B.C. 36-30, it was a marvel
of engineering, defense, and luxuriant living for escaping the
hot summer weather of Jerusalem, his capital. At the beginning
of the year 66 A.D., a group of Jewish Zealots took over the Roman
military garrison at Masada and held it throughout the rebellion
against the Romans [66-70 A.D.and it became the final holdout
for these Zealots after the rest of Palestine had been restored
to Rome's control. By late Fall or Winter of 72 A.D., the Roman
Governor Flavius Silva marched on Masada with his Tenth Roman
Legion, some auxiliary troops, and thousands of prisoners of war.
The Roman siege ended April 16 th in
the year 73 A.D.
The number of men, women, and children atop Masada is placed at
967. [P.37] Joined by the Sicarii [Jewish rebels who used knives
for their assassination of Romans and fellow Jews who would not
rebel with them], the Zealots and Sicarii discussed their options
in the face of the inevitable Roman storming of the fortress.
Speeches were made and a decision agreed upon by the men that
all would be killed and then each other down to the last rebel
who would commit suicide himself. Ben-Yehuda terms this "collective
suicide."
As it turned out, seven survivedfive children and two women. The
murdering took place on April 15 th .
When the Romans entered, they found only silence. When the two
women heard noise, they came out of hiding and told the Romans
what had happened.
Today, Masada is a most impressive tourist site with lodging and
eating facilities, an electric cable car to convey tourists who
do not choose to walk up and down "the Snake Path."
[The tram up took about five minutes, but it took me about an
hour to walk down again in 1994. The site is basically closed
on the Sabbath.]
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK.
Part One is "The
Puzzle and the Background" and in this section Ben-Yehuda
demonstrates his own existential experience with discovering
the myth itself and his struggle with facing the truth of having
been deceived for so many years. He writes of his denial,
his anger, his resentment, and then his motivation
to learn the full story. In short, this professor of sociology
experienced what untold numbers of serious thinkers over the
years have experienced about all sorts of deceptions served up
by governments, organizations, religions, and individuals, but
with Ben-Yehuda, his own effort to revise the Massada Myth away
from its mythic elements and arrive at a complete picture of
how and why the myth became so widely accepted, is filled with
implications for other Israeli promoted ideas and myths. Thus,
the question must be asked: What other myths are Israelis
believing about their "history" that may require radical
revising in the future?
This, I believe, is the
greatest value of this bookit opens an important door for a scientific-historiography
in Israel and by Israelis and Jews of the Diaspora to re-examine
and--if found necessary--to revise their dogmatically held concepts
about 1) the Land of Palestine, 2) their special, unique "Chosenness"
by YHWH, 3) the rightness of the establishment of the Jewish
State of Israel with its narrowly conceived Jewish-racialist
ethno-centric focus, 4) the ethnic-cleansing of the indigeneous
Semito-Palestinians, and 5) supporting ideologies such as the
Jewish Holocaust Story with its traditional content of enormity
and qualitative uniqueness.
Part Two covers "The
Masada Mythical Narrative" and goes into great detail of
development by Shmaria Guttman, youth movements, underground
Jewish groups prior to 1948, the Israeli IDF [= military], school
textbooks, media and tourism, children's literature and art,
and the mythical narrative itself today. Ben-Yehuda discusses
on pages 243f "the Masada Complex"" and "the
Masada Syndrome."
The first has to do with
suicide, a last stand, heroism, a siege mentality against enemies
everywhere, and more. An excellent example of it was given by
US Secretary of State William Rogers [page 244] of the Nixon
administration, who remarked that Israeli Prime Minister Golda
Meir displayed a "Masada complex" and that this was
a chief obstacle to real peace in the Middle East.
"The Masada Syndrome"
is similar in that it takes up the historical facts, wraps them
in a moral covering, and then challenges Israelis to die with
Samson and the Philistines [Judges 16:30 ] rather than give up
the Land.
Part Three is "Analysis,
Discussion, and Summary" and Ben-Yehuda emphasizes that
one of the "extremely important element[s] in myth is the
symbolic, awe-inspiring dimension." [P.261] For myself,
I see the Al-Qaeda Moslems to be so caught up in the myth of
Islam as absolutely true and Allah as personally directing
them that they give their lives freely without regard to personal
pain or loss. The Masada Myth has worked similarly for Israelis,
but for how much longer?
He writes that the myth
began its ascent in the early 1920s; peaked during the 1940s-1960s,
but saw a marked decline during 1970s and thereafter. Again,
from my own observation standpoint, the Masada Myth has been
somewhat replaced by the "Saddam Hussein is Hitler"
myth; truly this is awe-inspiring to millions who beat
the drums for a Bush-Sharon-Blair Axis to invade and remove this
"Hitler" who threatens "the entire World,"
as our media unceasingly inform us.
IS NACHMAN BEN-YEHUDA
A "REVISIONIST"?
It seems to me that my
first acquaintance with the term "Revisionist" may
have been in the 1980s when I read Alfred Lilienthal's fine work
The Zionist Connection II. What Price Peace? [Brunswick,
NJ: North American, 1978]. On page 190 Dr. Lilienthal refers
to "the Jabotinsky Revisioinist movement of the 1930s and
Menachem Begin's Irgun Zavai Leumi of the 1940s," and he
associated this with Gush Emunim [Hebrew for "bloc of the
faithful"], "a paramystical, ultrachauvinist movement
insisting that as thea Chosen People and through biblical revelation,
the Jews have the right to all of Palestine, and that Israel
must hold onto all the occupied territories, with the possible
exception of portions of the Sinai."
This Gush Emunim was drawn
from the extremely right-wing Likkud party, itself being the
successor of Vladimir Jabotinsky's "Revisionist movement."
Later, I read extensively
in works by Harry Elmer Barnes and found that he and certain
historians in the early 1920s had attempted to revise
the background of World War One so as to display more accurately
the contributing factors that brought about the World's first
great war that seems to have involved so many combatant nations
that it was properly called a "World War."
Then I became aware of
the Institute for Historical Review and its "Revisionist
History" journal The Journal of Historical Review
and related occasional conferences, usually held in Southern
California. The IHR promoted in its journal and conferences an
open, unfettered forum for speakers to offer data and interpretations
of the two great World Wars, the so-called American "Civil
War," the Jewish Holocaust Story and especially the problem
of the alleged homicidal gassing chambers in German built and
administered camps for detainees and prisoners and slave workers,
and many other topics of 19 th and
20 th century relevance.
Then I heard popular talk
shows using the term "revisionist" [or "Revisionist"?
since no one knows how a vocalized word is spelled!] as a sort
of "four-letter word" to brush off anyone and any idea
that the host did not 1.) either agree with, or 2.) did not want
to take seriously and thus allow for extensive time commitment
on the show. It is this latter and quite popular use of "revisionist"
that most Americans are perhaps familiar with. In Germany since
the end of WW2, "revisionist" has been used obviously
for the Hitlerian attempt to revise the Treaty of Versailles
[at the end of WWI] and to regain territories and esteem for
National Socialist Germany from 1933-45. But also in Germany,
"revisionist" and "Revisionismus"
have been used as a Keule [animal bone made into a club]
to beat down anyone who dissented from the orthodox German philosophy
of history imposed by the victorious Allies after 1945.
That orthodox German philosophy
of history comprises 1.) the sacred story of the innocent
Six Million Jews exterminated by Germans in homicidal gassing
facilities of a uniquely ghastly nature erected in [allegedly]
several countries; 2.) the intent of Germany to exterminate physically
the Jews of Europe and then on all Planet Earth; and 3.) the
historic truth that Germans have been and still are preponderately
"anti-Semitic" and must be carefully watched and controlled
by the Allies and Israel and by Jews themselves living in Germany
and all other countries.
Therefore, when one asks
if the author of the book The Masada Myth is a "revisionist"
or a "Revisionist," one must define the term in order
to avoid a vague generality and also avoid a specifically harmful
label to a professor at Hebrew University in Jeursalem.
Definition offered
by one or more contemporary German scholars. In Theses & Dissertations
Press' first book, DISSECTING THE HOLOCAUST: The Growing Critique
of `Truth' and `Memory' [Edited by Ernst Gauss, 2000. 608
pages], one can read on page 6 the support for a mind-set of
scientific revisionism as follows:
"The Natural sciences
[like other scholarly disciplines, Ed.] are extremely conservative
and dogmatic. Any corroboration of a paradigm is welcome, whereas
any innovation or revision will long meet with resistance; the
instinct for preservation (including self-preservation!) is stronger
than the search for truth. Therefore, new findings usually gain
acceptance only when sufficient numbers of researchers vouch
for them: then the dogmatic status quo topples and a `scientific
revolution' occurs, a new paradigm replaces the old[] The bottom
line is that no student, no researcher and no layman should believe
any facts to be `conclusively proven', even if the textbooks
present them as such []"
This powerful statement
comes from Professor Dr. Walter Nagl in his book Gentechnologie
und Grenzen der Biologie [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1987. Pp. 126ff.] and it is this concept so powerfully expressed
here by Nagl that so-called "Historical Revisionists"
I am acquainted with employ when they research and write and
publish books and articles such as Dissecting the Holocaust
and Vierteljahreshefte fuer freie Geschichtsforschung
or The Revisionist.
It is Professor Nagl's
definition of "revision" [-ist, ism] that I have in
view when I seek to answer the question: Is Nachman Ben-Yehuda
a "revisioinist" [or "Revisionist"]?
"The proof is
in the pudding",
as one says, and if one rereads Ben-Yehuda's page 3 statement
about the Masada myth, then one is most likely to conclude
that he is clearly a "revisionist" in his intellectual
commitment to historiography as well as in his method of research
and writing. Whether or not he may be called a "Revisionist"
is not for me to decide.
CONCLUSION.
If I may offer an illustration of the profound insight and courage
of this Professor in Jerusalem, I would refer to his first book
that I became aware of: Political Assassinations by Jews. A
Rhetorical Device for Justice. I remember well, upon contemplating
this provocative title, asking myself this question: What would
be the Jewish reaction in general or in governments and academia
and the media if a German published a book entitled Political
Assassinations by National Socialists. A Rhetorical Device for
Justice?
The axis of Planet Earth would most likely have been dislodged
from its position in space, I suggest, as a result of the uproar
and tumult and rage that would certainly have followed such a
book's appearance by a German!
Readers everywhere must ask themselves this question: What makes
a non-Revisionist into a Revisionist? And the answer has to
be: new data, new methods of evaluating data, and a willingness
to revise long standing orthodoxies. That is the principle
that Professor Nagl lives by and, I suggest, every historiographer
"worth his salt" must live by the same principle or
be judged by later generations to have been a Feigling
[= coward].
I conclude with registering my complete agreement with Professor
Pat Lauderdale of Stanford University who praised The Masada
Myth on the book's cover:
"The Masada Myth is both scholarly and a passionate
book, analyzing with great
clarity the relationship between deviance and mythology. The careful
descriptions
and provocative ideas will create new controversy, one that is
timely and important
for our understanding of what has become the new world dis-order."
Multitudes of serious readers wonder when a Norman Finkelstein
or Ruth Bettina Birn or a Nachman Ben-Yehuda will research and
write and publish a book with a title such as "The Jewish
Holocaust Myth. Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel",
because the time has come for serious scholars outside the present
realm of "Historical Revisionists" to produce such a
book. Jews and Goyim deserve such a work that will provoke and
create new controversy, as Pat Lauderdale above wrote, and a book
that will advance "our understanding of what has become the
new world dis-order."
Just perhaps, Planet Earth might be able to keep its course at
23.5 degrees of axis if such a book were produced. For me, I am
willing to take that chance!
Robert H. Countess, Ph.D.
boblbpinc@earthlink.net
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