Jewish Conversion: A“Hidden” Tradition

Reading The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand

Exile as Proof of Choseness

“This clear-cut prohibition affected Jews throughout the ages, instilling an acceptance of exile as a divine ordinance not to be broken. It was forbidden to hasten the end and rebel against God’s spirit.” —Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People

Throughout the book, Sand quotes many different historians, particularly of the 20th century but also earlier ones, most of whom are Jewish, who have attempted to make a consistent and coherent narrative that “justifies the Jews.”

Many of these historians keep changing their mind, even as they are spinning some facts and leaving others out, as they weave and re-weave the narratives they hope will serve their implicit agenda.

Sand’s method includes summing up different historians’ arguments in their own voice, as if he were reiterating an accurate reading of history, as a means to demonstrate just how ideologically driven these histories are, how unbacked by evidence.

Zionism—as the latest and the most concrete example—was driven from the start by the idea of the Jews as a chosen people repeatedly exiled throughout a millennia-long history.

Thus, even if the exile following the destruction of the Second Temple was a vague myth, it was justified because it was followed by other expulsions and wanderings. The long exile is like a shadow cast by the destruction, hence its chief significance: to encompass all future exiles (p. 141).

The maddening paradox of Jewish identity is encompassed here: exclusivity as the chosen tribe of the One God, which is the basis for the “right” to seize whatever lands God promises, is both a cause for a constant pariah-status (hence enteral displacedness and wandering), and what reinforces the exclusivity and specialness of the Jews.

To find and inherit the Promised Land, the Jews must first be exiled; yet, if they were not constantly being exiled—if they integrated with the society in which they ended up (which would to some degree require entail a renunciation of their religious laws)—they would not need a perpetual promised land.

The constantly recurring impetus to move on, and thus to spread further afield, then ensures Judaism’s reach extends, into ever more areas of the planet. The Jews’ experience of constant rejection, then (due to so-called anti-Semitism), becomes the means by which Yahweh’s chosen people “conquer” all nations.

Conversion: The Missing Piece

In almost all the narratives reduced by the proto-Zionist and even Zionist historians, conversion is mentioned as one reason for the vast presence of Jewish believers throughout the ancient world before the fall of the Second Temple. But this decisive factor was sidelined, as we’ve seen, while the more dramatic players of Jewish history dominated the field: expulsion, displacement, emigration and natural increase. These gave a more appropriate ethnic quality to the “dispersion of the Jewish people.” It is generally assumed that Judaism has never been a missionizing religion, and if some proselytes joined it they were accepted by the Jewish people with extreme reluctance. “Proselytes are an affliction to Israel,” the famous pronouncement in the Talmud, is invoked to halt any attempted discussion of the subject. [Footnote:] In the late 20th century as the Jewish “ethnic” identity grew stronger in the western world, there were again attempts to play down the history of proselytizing and to deny entirely the missionary aspect of Judaism. [However,] The second Isaiah, the book of Ruth, the book of Jonah and the apocryphal book of Judith all called for Judaism to accept gentiles, and even for the whole world to adopt the “religion of Moses” [emphasis added] . . . . Every monotheism contains a potential element of mission. Unlike the tolerant polytheisms which accept the existence of other deities, the very belief in the existence of a single god and the negation of plurality impels the believers to spread the idea of divine singularity that they have adopted. The acceptance by others of the worship of the single god proves his might and his unlimited power over the world. Despite the isolationist caste tendency implanted in the Jewish religion in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, which would return in response to the harsh strictures of the triumphant Christian church, it was not as exceptional [i.e., exclusivist] in propagating monotheism as many think. Heterodox voices in the Old Testament calling on the gentiles to acknowledge Yahweh are found not only in Isaiah but also in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zephaniah, Zechariah and the book of Psalms (p. 150-52).

The passage from Esther, 8:17—“And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them”)—establishes beyond any doubt that Jewish conversion was a thing, well before the Bible existed.