Authors: Jean-Christophe Attias, Esther Benbassa, Esther Benbassa
ISBN-13: 9780804741668, ISBN-10: 0804741662
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Date Published: December 2002
Edition: 1
Professor Jean-Christophe Attias holds the chair of the History of Rabbinic Culture at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne. Professor Esther Benbassa holds the chair of Modern Jewish History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne. Her books translated into English are: Haim Nahum: A Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Politics (1995); The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present (1999); and, with Aron Rodrigue, A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe (1998) and Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries (2000).
What has the land of Israel meant for the Jewish imagination? This book provides a lively and readable answer, covering Biblical times to the present. Its aim is to pierce the mystery of the images of Israel, to grasp their meaning and function, to trace their origins and history, and to resituate in historical terms the fertile mythology that has peopled and continues to people the Jewish imagination, interposing a screen between a people and their land. Describing the real, however, is not sufficient to disqualify the myths. The authors believe, with the famous French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, that: Things are not so simple. Myth is not opposed to the real as the false to the true; myth accompanies the real.”
Today, Israel is an undeniable fact and no longer has to legitimize its existence. It is in the midst of living through the crises of adulthood. The authors simply want to reconstitute and trace the genealogies of these contemporary crises. Only upon a clear understanding of this present and this past can a future be constructed.
Acknowledgments | ||
Translator's Note | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | The Promised Land | 7 |
"In the Beginning," Ambiguity | 9 | |
A Heritage Deferred | 12 | |
Exile and the Desert | 16 | |
The Memory of an Initial Expropriation | 20 | |
A Dismembered Land | 24 | |
Sedentary People, Nomadic God | 27 | |
If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem... | 30 | |
2 | The Holy Land | 34 |
New Horizons | 34 | |
A Partial Reappropriation | 37 | |
The Center and the Periphery | 41 | |
Living Without the Temple | 46 | |
A "Deterritorialized" Judaism? | 50 | |
The Legal Land | 52 | |
Holy Land, Holy People | 56 | |
3 | The Land of Dreams | 60 |
Other Times: The Land's Middle Ages? | 60 | |
Stars and Climates | 65 | |
The Heart of the World | 69 | |
Divine Land | 71 | |
The Land as Metaphor | 75 | |
A Taste of Paradise | 79 | |
Nearby Lands, Distant Lands | 82 | |
4 | The Exiled Land | 87 |
Land and Liturgy | 88 | |
The Land and the Law: Rabbinic Hermeneutical Exercises | 94 | |
The Duty of Alwah or the Duty of Exile? | 98 | |
The Forbidden Land | 102 | |
Encounters with Palestine | 107 | |
Voyagers and "Geographers" | 110 | |
Nostalgia | 116 | |
5 | The Rediscovered Land | 121 |
"Here" and "There" | 121 | |
The Christian Rediscovery of Palestine | 131 | |
Palestine Revisited by the Jews | 137 | |
Ancient Land, New Land(s) | 142 | |
6 | The Recreated Land | 152 |
To Whom Does the Land Belong? | 152 | |
The Cult of the Land | 157 | |
The Symbolism of Pioneering | 160 | |
The Myths to the Rescue of the Land | 168 | |
The Land of Historians | 179 | |
Negation of Exile, Negation of Self | 187 | |
7 | The Impossible Land | 195 |
A Culture of Rootedness | 195 | |
Interminable Exile | 199 | |
The Return of the Promised Land | 208 | |
The Coming of Post-Zionism | 212 | |
The Wandering Israeli | 224 | |
Epilogue | 231 | |
Afterword | 237 | |
Chronology | 241 | |
Notes | 250 | |
Select Bibliography | 270 | |
The Authors | 287 | |
Index of Names of Persons and Organizations | 288 | |
Index of Place-Names | 292 |