THE WANDERING JEW AND ISRAEL - A Bit of Background by Bobbie Ann Cole

 

Romans carry away Temple Treasures

As I study for my Masters in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I am learning that Jewish History is a big story of exile. You may be aware that, in AD70, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed its glorious Temple. They began carrying away the rebellious Jews, out of the land that had been their home since biblical times.

EXILE

The term ‘Wandering Jew’ was coined as Jews spread out across the Middle East and throughout Europe, from where they came to be constantly expelled:

·        1290 England

·        1340 France

·        1492 Spain

·        1497 Portugal…

Where Jews remained, they were marginalized. Why was this? On the one hand, they were the Christian’s inheritance, the writers and characters of the Old Testament. They should not be killed. But on the other, they had murdered Jesus. They should be suppressed.

CONVERT OR DIE

The Crusades, beginning in 1096, annihilated Jews as well as Saracens in the Holy Land. The Spanish Inquisition that began in 1497, enforced Jewish conversion to Christianity. Pogroms were a fun hobby of Russian Cossacks in the shtetels: ride in with sabres unsheathed and slice through as many Jews as possible.

We come to the Holocaust of the Second World War when the Nazis decided to systematically wipe them out.

RETURN TO ANCESTRAL JEWISH HOMELAND

It is hardly surprising that after the War, in 1947, a horrified United Nations decided that never again would the Jew have nowhere to run to. Throughout the twentieth century and earlier, Jews had campaigned for a homeland. Their idyll was Israel and Jewish pioneers had begun pouring into what was then Palestine, founding kibbutzim, working together to turn the desert green.

The vote for the creation of the State of Israel on November 29, 1947, coincided with the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls. More than 90% of these fragments and scrolls, dated to the last centuries BC and the first century AD, are in Hebrew, proving that this Land is indeed the ancestral Jewish homeland.  

PALESTINE

You won’t find the name Palestine in your Bible.

The Roman Empire began using it in the 2^nd century AD to denote the biblical areas of Israel and Judea. The people from the Middle East who drifted into the area became known as Palestinians.

FORMATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

The State of Israel came into being on May 14, 1948, when an Israeli government took over from the British Mandate that had been in place since 1917, the year when the British took over from the Turkish Ottoman Empire that had ruled Palestine for 300 years.

No Palestinian government was toppled. Palestinians had never been self-governing. 

Today, Arab MPs  sit in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament).  In Gaza and Arab areas of the West Bank, they vote in elections. Sadly, they voted in a party whose avowed aim is another Final Solution: the annihilation of  Israelis. 

In 1948, Israelis would have been content to live together in peace. However, many Palestinians chose to up sticks and go to live in camps in neighbouring countries. Others chose to become snipers, which sadly led to some of their hilltop villages being evacuated.

MY FAMILY

At the same time, all of Israel’s neighbours declared war: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. Soon, these countries would expel their Jews. This time, however, my Egyptian Jewish in-laws and all the other Jews had somewhere to run to. Conditions in nascent Israel were harsh. They spent six months in tents and got very sick. In fact, they decided not to remain.

The big point here is that this was their decision. Not someone else’s. There would be no more Holocaust. No more extermination. Not then. Nor now. Never again.

Bobbie Ann Cole is a Christian author, speaker, teacher and book coach living in Jerusalem.

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