Erasure and Classification

I am sure many of you have seen these arguments online. Do Jews belong in the Levant? Did they arise in the Middle East? It’s gotten so bad that pro-Palestinians are claiming Jesus was a Palestinian, not a Jew. Never mind, there were no Arab tribes in the Levant in year zero. The nomads were there in the Arabian peninsula. They had yet to enter history, and boy, when they did, they did it with a bang. But that’s almost seven hundred years in the future.

So, apart from this kind of appropriation being disgusting, it’s something else. It’s the early stages of erasure. Germans tried this in the years leading to the administrative system of mass murder. During the night of the broken glass, Germans burned the Jewish Bible when they put to the fire Torah books. Some were ancient and had been central to German Jewish life for centuries.

The Torah is the law. It’s the story of a people. It contains allegories and stories from the Levant rewritten for this book. See the story of Noah. Yes, it did happen, though not exactly as the Bible describes it. Like the story of Troy, the Old Testament is filled with many Easter eggs of real human history. Or with links to older historical artifacts rewritten for it.

That’s one of the earliest stories confirmed. At this point, it also serves as a history of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. All these stories are embedded in Christianity, which is essential to the Christian story.

A Jewish boy was born in Bethlehem, meaning the house of bread; the city’s name is in Hebrew. It…