How did we get here — and from where?
The Origin of the Jews
Princeton University Press, £27.95
STEVEN WEITZMAN’S The Origin of the Jews is erudite but never turgid, extremely well written and utterly engaging. It is a brilliant book, not only in execution but also in conception. How is it brilliant in conception? As far as I know, it is unique.
It is not a presentation of a view about Jewish origins. Rather, it is what one might call a “second-level” book; it is about competing views about Jewish origins, about various views of what a search for the origins of anything really amounts to, and about the various means and methods available for carrying out that search.
The book is about both whether or not there is any “real” origin of the Jews at all and, if so, how one might recover it.
There is of course the historical account of the Israelites that most of us know, given in the Chumash. That account has no undisputed documentary “external” support or evidence outside the Torah. But where might scholars and researchers look for external evidence, either in support or in rejection of various elements of the Torah view?
Weitzman examines numerous approaches: genealogical research, archaeology, textual analysis, etymological studies, historical research, genetic studies (including studies of blood types) and even a Freudian approach to recovering the distant past through psychoanalysis.
Although research over the past century-and-a-half or so has produced a great deal of new evidence by employing these approaches, and has certainly been able to dismiss some theories about Jewish origins that are demonstrably false, none has been able to generate an alternative narrative that is full and coherent, able to replace the story in Genesis by engaging the emotional commitment of individuals and allowing the sort of group identity and cohesion that the latter encourages.
Weitzman’s pessimistic conclusion is that “there is no way in the foreseeable future to finally resolve the debate over the origin of the Jews”.
One of the most striking discussions in the book is on the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, proposed by Julius Wellhausen, a 19th-century German professor of oriental languages.
The Documentary Hypothesis claims that the Pentateuch was a compilation, perhaps at the time of Ezra, from four different documents, written by different hands at different times, and hence was not the work of a single author, Divine or otherwise.
Wellhausen advances a somewhat shocking racial theory, into which the Documentary Hypothesis fits, which Weitzman describes as antisemitic. Wellhausen’s racial theory argues that the various documents show that the Israelites or Jews, unlike other peoples who progress over time, did not develop like others but became a degenerate people, so that their history tells a story contrary to normal evolutional progression.
If one had reason to be suspicious of the Documentary Hypothesis in itself, this larger context of Wellhausen’s views offers another reason for suspicion.
Among its other virtues, Weitzman’s writing has a humility and softness about it that is rare in academic work, making the book a pleasure to read.
David-Hillel Ruben is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of London