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$Title{Israel
Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting}
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$Author{Richard F. Nyrop}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{jews
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$Date{1979}
$Log{See Immigration*0025402.scf
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Title:       Israel
Book:        Israel, A Country Study
Author:      Richard F. Nyrop
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1979

Chapter 1A.   Historical Setting

     On May 14, 1948, In the city of Tel Aviv, thirty-eight people signed and
proclaimed the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The
introductory paragraph affirmed that, "Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) was
the birth place of the Jewish people. Here they first attained statehood,
created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave to
the world the eternal Book of Books."

     The issuance of the proclamation was signaled by the ritual blowing of
the shofar (see Glossary) and was followed by the recitation of a biblical
verse (Lev. 25:10): "Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the
inhabitants thereof." The same verse is inscribed on the American Liberty Bell
in Independence Hall.

     Among the signers were many who believed that the Book of Books (known by
Christians as the Old Testament) contains-in the most literal sense-the
revealed word of God. These individuals asserted that the covenant between the
Divine Presence and Abraham was meant to endure to the last days and that,
according to that covenant, Abraham's descendants were the chosen people fully
and unequivocably entitled to the Land of Israel as it was in the times of
David and Solomon (see table B, Preface). The insistence of many Israelis that
the area generally known as the West Bank be referred to as Judea and Samaria
affirms that belief. The several religious groups and political parties-a
decided minority-that in the late 1970s continued to claim the right for Jews
to settle and occupy any part of the ancient kingdoms also based their acts
and beliefs on biblical texts.

     Many more signers, however, regarded the biblical stories as vitally
important ethnohistory, but they rejected the notion of the Jews as a chosen
people. Nevertheless among the signers agnostics, atheists, and true believers
alike shared the conviction of prime minister designate David Ben-Gurion that
the experiences of the Jews were unique, and uniquely tragic, in human
history, and they were determined to create a Jewish state and a homeland.

     The secular modernists among the founders of modern Israel rejected
genetic or religious claims of superiority of the Jewish people, but they were
nonetheless proud of their cultural heritage, which had produced such
arresting figures as Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, Maimonides, Spinoza, Marx, Freud,
and Einstein. Although Ben-Gurion and most of his early associates were
products of East European societies, they were sharply aware of the impact
of the King James Version of the Bible on the literature of the
English-speaking world. They manifested an understandable pride in the
knowledge that such sections of the Bible as Psalms "are at the head of the
world's lyric poetry," that epigrammatic phrases from Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes permeate the English language, and that Thomas Carlyle described
the Book of Job as "one of the grandest things ever written with a pen . . .
nothing [exists] of equal literary merit."

     Legally the establishment of Israel resulted from a United Nations (UN)
resolution that provided for the partitioning of the area known as
Palestine-from 1920 until 1947 a British Mandate territory-into an Arab state,
a Jewish state, and a small region that included Jerusalem that would be under
the control of the UN. For sixty years the Arab inhabitants of the region had
resisted, sometimes violently, the slow growth of the Jewish population. In
1897 in Switzerland the First Zionist Congress had launched the Zionist
movement, which had as its goal the establishment of a Jewish homeland. In the
aftermath of the congress a small but steadily increasing number of Jews,
almost exclusively from Europe and mostly from that area of Czarist Russia
known as the Pale of Settlement (see Glossary), migrated to Palestine in a
series of movements known as aliyot (literally, a going up-see Glossary) (see
Zionism: The Founding Fathers, this ch.). In the late 1920s and again in the
late 1930s the land purchases of the Jewish immigrants and their general
prosperity and expansionist policies provoked several Arab riots in which a
few hundred Jews and several thousand Arabs were killed.

     The attempts by Nazi Germany before and during World War II to "solve the
Jewish problem" by killing all Jews increased the flow of Jewish immigrants
to Palestine and exacerbated Arab fears of the loss of their homeland to the
Jews (see The Holocaust, this ch.). Even those Arab governments and spokesmen
who shared the revulsion of most of the world for Hitler's crimes charged that
by creating a home for the Jews on Arab territory, European countries and the
United States were assuaging their feelings of guilt for failing to rescue the
Jews.

     The establishment of Israel caused four Arab-Israeli wars: the War of
Independence, 1948, the 1956 War, also known as the Sinai Campaign, the
Six-Day War of June 1967, and the October 1973 War, commonly referred to in
Israel as the Yom Kippur War and in the Arab states as the Ramadan War (see
Historical Background, ch. 5). During the War of Independence the armed forces
of four states-Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria-and small Saudi Arabian and
Yemeni detachments attacked on May 15; Transjordanian troops joined the
battle shortly thereafter. The cease-fire at the end of the 1948 fighting
resulted in cease-fire lines that became Israel's boundaries. The Sinai
Campaign was a war of attrition. The six-day war brought under Israeli
occupation the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan
Heights (see fig. 1). The 1973 war prompted negotiations between Egypt and
Israel by which part of the Sinai was returned to Egypt, and UN Buffer Zones
were established in the Sinai between Egyptian and Israeli forces. Similar
negotiations with Syria provided for the positioning of UN forces in a neutral
zone on the Golan Heights (see Problems of the New State: 1948-77, this ch.).

     During the 1948 fighting hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled
to surrounding Arab countries and to areas within Palestine that they thought
might provide a safe haven. Thousands more fled from the areas occupied by
Israel's armed forces during the six-day war. By 1978 there were an estimated
3.5 million Palestinian Arab refugees, most of them residing in the countries
bordering Israel. The related problems of the refugees and the
political-military organization supported by most of the refugees-the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)-complicate and imperil Arab-Israeli
peace negotiations.

[See Immigration: Jewish Immigration to Israel since 1948.]

     In 1949 what was described as the ingathering of the exiles-the raison
d'etre of Israel-escalated. In mid-1948 the Jews in Israel numbered about
650,000; thirty years later the figure was slightly over 3 million. In the
early 1950s the majority of the emigres were from the Arab states of the Near
East and North Africa. These groups of Arabic-speaking Jews-known as Sephardim
(see Glossary) or oriental Jews-were culturally and socially distinct from
each other, and they differed markedly from the earlier settlers from Europe,
the Ashkenazim (see Glossary). The members of the groups were united-and yet
potentially separated-by their individual notions of Jewishness and by
adherence to and reverence for Judaism's ancient culture and basic traditions
and experiences (see The Sephardim: A Disadvantaged Majority, ch. 2).

     In his book The Jewish Mind, Raphael Patai identifies six major
"encounters" that shaped and formed Jewish culture as it exists in the late
twentieth century. According to Patai, each of these historic events "brought
about a departure into new realms of cultural activity and the adoption of a
new language or its utilization as a medium for a new mode of expression."

     The first encounter of lasting significance was with the Canaanites,
whose language the ancient Jews developed into Hebrew and whose religious and
social rituals-including male circumcision-were adopted, adapted, refined and,
in some instances, discarded. Moreover the Jews took the Land of Canaan (the
promised land) as their own. This period lasted, with interruptions, from the
sixteenth through the fifth centuries. B.C.

     The second major event was the impact of Hellenism, which lasted from the
late fourth century B.C. to the mid-second century A.D. Although Hebrew
remained the "sacred language," Greek in part supplanted the colloquial
Aramaic, the language of Abraham, which had regained popular use in the
aftermath of the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century. Many aspects of
Hellenistic culture were absorbed to form a new Hellenistic-Jewish synthesis
that deeply influenced the traditional Judaic culture and even more deeply
influenced the development of a new religion, Christianity.

     The third of Patai's encounters originated in the seventh century A.D.
when an Arab merchant in Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula began to preach a
third monotheistic religion, Islam (meaning submission to God). This man,
Muhammad, identified himself as the last in the chain of prophets that began
with Abraham and included Moses and Jesus. Muhammad repudiated any suggestion
that he (or Jesus) was in any way a divine figure, claiming only that he was
a messenger who was being used by God to correct errors that had perverted the
message of the earlier prophets. The stark and rigorous monotheism preached by
Muhammad was for a short time rejected by his fellow tribesmen, but within a
few years the new creed captured the imaginations and emotions of the
peninsular Arabs. They readily accepted Muhammad's assertions that they were
descendants of Abraham through his son Ismail (Ishmael) and that Abraham and
Ismail had established the chief spiritual shrine of Islam, the Kaaba, in
Mecca.

     The energies of the newly converted Arabs took them onto the world stage
in a frenzy of religious, political, and military expansion. Most of the world
Jewish population still lived in the lands conquered by the Arabs, and the
Jews shared the experiences of the intellectual expansion of the Arabs. The
first known grammar for Hebrew, Kitab al-lumah, was written in Cordoba in the
early tenth century. It was written in Arabic, in emulation of similar Arabic
studies. Arabic became the language for most Jews-intellectuals and commoners
alike. The Jews of Muslim Spain-the progenitors of the Sephardic
Jews-dominated the religious and intellectual life of world Jewry, which
reached its apogee in the person of Moses Maimonides. His codification of
Judaic law remains unrivaled, and the impact of his personality and works gave
rise to the saying that "From Moses to Moses there was only Moses," meaning
from the Moses of the Exodus to Moses Mendelssohn-the main precursor of the
Jewish Emancipation or Enlightenment, known as haskalah-there was only
Maimonides.

     The fourth decisive encounter with a foreign culture was that experienced
by a tiny minority of the world's Jews in Renaissance Italy. Beginning in the
fourteenth century, in Patai's opinion, Italian-speaking Jewry was swept along
by the effervescence of the Renaissance while retaining its Jewishness. "This
experience provided a precedence for Jews in northern Europe in the eighteenth
century who wished to partake of the challenge of the secular world in which
they lived and yet to retain their private personal identity as members of the
Jewish community and tradition."

     The fifth encounter occurred during the eighteenth century in Eastern
Europe-mostly in present-day Poland and the Ukraine region of the Soviet Union
where nearly four-fifths of the European Jews lived. Apparently in reaction to
contacts with messianic, mystical, and emotionally charged sectarian movements
among the Christians of the region, an equally emotional, mystical, messianic
movement developed among the Jews. Known as Hasidism (and its members as
Hasids), the movement represented a distinct departure from the halakah
(Judaic religious law-see Glossary) and Talmud-based religiosity dominant in
Judaism since antiquity (see The Orthodox Community and Its Political Role,
ch. 2). Related to the development of Hasidism was the rapid spread and
increase in the use of Yiddish, a language based on medieval Rhineland German
with numerous Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and other additions. A vast secular as
well as religious literature in Yiddish emerged in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, first in Eastern Europe and then among American Jews. The
secular founding fathers of Israel not only disassociated themselves from the
Hasidic movement but also discouraged use of Yiddish and Ladino, the language
of Sephardic Jews, describing them as foreign tongues.

     The sixth, and in Patai's judgment the last, great encounter involved the
"voluntary subordination of the [European] Jews in the eighteenth century to
modern Western Culture." This resulted in the Jewish Enlightenment, known as
haskalah, during which Jews adopted the language of their country of residence
and entered the mainstream of that country's social, political, economic, and
cultural life, becoming not only participants but leaders, particularly in the
worlds of science, arts, and letters. For a variety of reasons, this
assimilation of Jews progressed more rapidly and completely in Germany and the
United States than elsewhere and continues in the United States today. With
total assimilation, Jews are absorbed into the national society, and Patai
observes that "From the standpoint of Jewish survival, this encounter was more
crucial, more transfigurative and potentially fraught with more dangers than
any of the preceding five."

     By establishing and living in a Jewish homeland, the Jews in Israel would
seem to have resolved the issue of assimilation. The problem of Jewish
identity is not necessarily answered, however. Some observers argue that
another "great encounter" is under way in modern Israel between Ashkenazim and
Sephardim and between secularists and Orthodox, which will affect the basic
nature of Judaism and the Jewish state.

     In the late 1970s Ashkenazim and their descendants continued to dominate
all secular aspects of the government, the society, and the economy (see
Political Setting: Elite, Values, and Orientations, ch. 3). In 1977 Begin won
an unexpected victory in the national election to the Knesset (parliament)
over the Ashkenazi-dominated Israel Labor Party coalition (see Multiparty
System, ch. 3). Although Begin's victory resulted from the support of
important segments of the Sephardic community, in mid-1978 Begin, a Polish
Jew, headed a cabinet that was dominated by Ashkenazim. Almost without
exception such important government organizations as the armed forces and the
civil service and such key national institutions as the Histadrut (see
Glossary) and the Jewish Agency (see Glossary) remained under the control and
management of Ashkenazim. In the late 1970s the social, cultural, and
economic cleavages between these two major groups continued to pose a critical
and potentially explosive problem. In the opinion of many observers, the
divisiveness of this issue is, in the long run, more threatening to the future
of the state that the hostility of the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters
(see The Law of Return, ch. 2)

     Another, and at times related, divisive issue concerns the separation of
church and state. More specifically, the argument centers on the extent, if
any, to which halakah, as set forth in the Torah (see Glossary), the Mishnah
(see Glossary), and the huge body of Talmudic writings, should bow to the laws
and powers of the secular government. The members of a small ultra-Orthodox
minority take such a literal view of halakhic admonitions and Talmudic and
later interpretations that they reject the very existence of the state. To
oversimplify, they believe that a Jewish state cannot be formed until the
arrival of the Messiah (see Ancient Israel, this ch.).

     The members of a much larger grouping of Orthodox Jews (although a
decided minority of the Jews in Israel) generally accept the state but insist
that the letter of all biblical laws be observed (see The Constitutional
Framework, ch. 3). Members of these Orthodox groups, for example, find
unacceptable and invalid the religious observances of Conservative and Reform
congregations in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. This minority
has imposed its will not only on such matters as government observances of the
Sabbath (Shabbot, the day of rest) and kosher food but also on such issues as
marriage and divorce as they relate to the larger, more emotional issue of
"Who is a Jew?"

     Support for the positions taken by the Orthodox groups in limited; yet
because they possess a frequently decisive swing vote in the Knesset their
political power is considerable, and open opposition is infrequent. On the one
hand, the secularists hope that the Orthodox institutions will "wither away"
after a prolonged exposure to modern, secular influences. On the other hand,
they hesitate to challenge the Orthodox leaders because to do so might create
an unbridgeable chasm within the Jewish community-both in Israel and in the
Diaspora (see Glossary).

Ancient Israel

     The ethnohistory set forth in the five books of the Torah and the other
narrative sections of the Old Testament begins with myths and legends. The
stories of creation, the temptation of and sin by the first humans, their
expulsion from an idyllic sanctuary, the flood, and other folkloric events are
common to Middle Eastern and other early societies. With the appearance of
Abraham, however, the biblical stories introduce a new idea-that of a single
tribal god. Over the course of several centuries this notion evolved into
mankind's first complete concept of monotheism. Abraham looms large in the
traditions of the people and the foundations of their religion. Whether Jews
by birth or by conversion, each male Jew is viewed as "a son of Abraham."

     It was with Abraham that God, known as Yahweh, made his first covenant
or treaty. In essence, Yahweh promised to protect Abraham and his descendants,
to wage wars in their behalf, and to secure for them the Land of Canaan, an
area roughly approximate to modern Israel plus the occupied West Bank. The
texts make clear that other people also had gods, sometimes several gods, but
that Yahweh was the unique deity of Abraham and his descendants and that
Yahweh's power extended only to them. Moreover, as Roland de Vaux has
observed, in the subsequent wars of conquest and defense "it was Yahweh who
fought for Israel, not Israel which fought for Yahweh. Yahweh was fighting for
the life of his people, and the people associated themselves with this action
by an act of faith and by conforming to a definite ritual."

     Abraham, his wife Sarah, and their servants and retainers were
Aramean-(Aramaic-) speaking people who migrated to the Land of Canaan from
Mesopotamia. Abraham is depicted as a wealthy seminomad who possessed large
flocks of sheep, goats, and cattle and enough servants or retainers to mount
small military expeditions. The Canaanite chieftains urged Abraham to settle
and join with them. Abraham did remain in the land, but when it came time to
select a wife for his and Sarah's son Isaac, the wife was secured from their
relatives living in Haran, near Urfa in modern Turkey. This endogamous
practice was repeated by Isaac's son Jacob, who became known as Israel because
he had wrestled with God (Genesis 32:28).

     By his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and their two serving maids, Bilhah
and Zilpah, Israel fathered twelve sons, the progenitors of the twelve tribes
of Israel, the "Children of Israel." These sons married foreign women-all but
one of them probably Canaanite women-and it was with the birth of their
offspring that the extended family began to speak the language now known as
Hebrew, but known among the Jews for many centuries as Sefath Kenaan-the "lip"
(language) of Canaan (see fig. 2).

     The term Hebrew apparently came from a word common to the Canaanites and
many of their neighbors. The word was habiru (hapiru or apiru), which was used
to designate a social class of wanderers and seminomads who lived on the
margins of and remained separate from sedentary settlements. The term ibrit
(Hebrew) was first used by Jews during the first century A.D. The term Jew
derives from the name of one of the tribes, Judah, which was not only one of
the largest and most powerful of the tribes but also the tribe that produced
David and from which, according to biblical prophesy and postbiblical legend,
a messiah will emerge.

     Sometime late in the sixteenth or early in the fifteenth century Jacob's
family-numbering about 150 people-migrated to Egypt to escape the drought and
famine in Canaan. The circumstances surrounding the Egyptian interval are
surrounded by considerable mystery. The biblical texts state that the Jews
were in Egypt for four generations yet they also indicate a period of 400
years, and they present a census of 600,000 men at the time of the Exodus. The
Egyptian archives, which contain detailed commentaries on a wide range of
state and social affairs, contain only fragmentary references to the presence
of Jews in the land and no mention at all of their departure.

     The Book of Exodus, however, describes in detail the condition of slavery
of the Jews in Egypt and their escape from bondage (see table 2, Appendix A).
A series of miracles are described that made possible the escape, and the
origins and rituals of the Feast of the Passover are set forth.

     Under the leadership of Moses and his brother Aaron the people wandered
in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula, reportedly for forty years. During this
period occurred the single most important event in their history: the receipt
of Yahweh's Law. Most prominent were the Ten Commandments-which in the first
commandment noted the existence of other gods-and the related,
all-encompassing admonition "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"
(Lev. 19:18). The five books of the Torah were unquestionably composed and
redacted centuries later, but the halakah began to take shape during this
nomadic sojourn in the desert. The laws-especially as later explained,
interpreted, and expounded in the Jerusalem Talmud (completed ca. A.D.
390-A.D. 425) and the more influential Babylonian Talmud (completed ca.
A.D. 500-A.D. 650)-encompass every detail of life. In the words of the
biblical scholar Ernest Renan, the halakah forms "the tightest garment into
which life was ever laced."

     The conquest of Canaan under the generalship of Joshua took place over
several decades (see fig. 3). The biblical accounts depict a primitive,
outnumbered confederation of tribes slowly conquering bits and pieces of
territory from a sedentary, relatively advanced people who lived in walled
cities and towns. For a long time the various tribes of Israel controlled the
higher, less desirable lands, and only with the advent of David did the
kingdoms of Israel and Judah come into being with a capital in Jerusalem (see
table B, Preface).

     David, the son of Jesse from whose root the messiah (mashiah) is to come,
remains a dominant figure in Jewish lore. As presented in the texts, he
stands forth as one of the most dynamic personalities in the world's
literature. Historian Will Durant describes David as "the heroic slayer of
Goliath, tender lover of Jonathan and many tender maidens, half-naked dancer
of wild dances, seductive player of the harp, and able king of the Jews for
almost forty years ... an authentic man, bearing within him all the vestiges
of barbarism and all the promise of civilization."

     Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba and David's chosen successor,
raised the kingdom of its peak in terms of wealth and influence (see fig. 4).
He is the first biblical character for whom independent historical evidence
exists, and that evidence indicates that the biblical record of his reign is
reasonably accurate.

     Solomon's overwhelmingly important act was to construct the Temple. Built
on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the Temple served as the shrine and home for the
Ark of the Covenant. The Ark had been built in the desert on the explicit
instructions of Yahweh as the receptable for the stone tablets on which
Yahweh had inscribed his Law. During the sojourn in the desert and the
conquest of the Land of Canaan the Ark-housed in a tent-had been the focal
point of the community. The Ark was placed within the Holy of Holies inside
the Temple, and the belief grew that from that site the Divine Presence never
departed.

     The Book of Isaiah was composed, according to a literal reading of the
texts, in or about the eighth century. Biblical scholars believe, however,
that there were two authors whose texts were interspersed and that the second
author, writing in the sixth or fifth centuries, reflected and enunciated the
full, philosophical formulation of a single god. The unique and special
relationship between the Children of Israel and this Supreme Being remained
intact, but the nature and behavior of the Deity had changed. Whereas the
Yahweh who spoke with Abraham and Moses had been a warlike, angry, and jealous
god who rained destruction on those who opposed him or his people, the God
described in Isaiah is a gentle and loving god, who will make possible a time
when men "shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall
they learn war anymore."

     The second Isaiah also delivered the prophecy that from "the root of
Jesse" would emerge a messiah, or "annointed one." who would redeem the world,
Jews and Gentiles alike. David had been annointed, as had Saul before him and
David's son Solomon after him. By the second or first century B.C., however,
Isaiah's prophecies and the later ones of Daniel came to be viewed as
something more than prophecies concerning another great king. The belief
grew that a person of special selection by God would appear to establish an
earthly kingdom of eternal peace; Jerusalem, a new and glorious Temple, and
the Children of Israel would be at the center of this new universe. The
followers of Jesus placed him in the context of Isaiah's prophecies and
created a new faith.

     In the second century B.C. Simon the Just had proclaimed that "The
[Jewish] world stands on three things: on the Torah, on the [Temple] Service,
and on Charity." With the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in
A.D. 70 ritual Temple service was no longer possible, and the services in the
synagogues that were established in galut (exile) as places of prayer and
reading of the scriptures were at best a substitute. From that time to the
present the Law of Moses and the memory and longing for the Temple-the
repository of the Law and a dwelling place of the Deity-have remained the two
constantly unifying and sustaining forces of Judaism and the Jewish people.

     But as the centuries passed, these forces were increasingly supported and
buttressed by a longing and expectation that a messiah would appear to end the
galut, lead the Jews back to Jerusalem, and establish a kingdom of eternal
glory. This believe provided great succor for centuries but posed a serious
dilemma in the establishment of the Zionist movement and, because many
Orthodox Jews refuse to recognize the State of Israel, continues to create
problems in the society (see The Orthodox Community and Its Political Role,
ch. 2).