Apropos going back to where you came from

When you have a chance and you find yourself in Madrid, take the train to nearby Toledo, a former imperial city and capital of Castile-La Mancha, a UNESCO designated world heritage site and a medieval town famed for its swords and a particular kind of marzipan. It is also famed for its pre-expulsion co-existence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, though the manner in which Judeo and Morisco heritages have been Christianized is perhaps even more poignant and an object lesson in more or less benign forms of Christian supersessionism. (A long story in its own right.)

When you get to the Sinagoga del Tránsito (so named for the "transit" of the Holy Virgin), a stunning piece of medieval architecture, don't fail to spend time at the Sephardic heritage museum housed in the former women's gallery of the original synagogue where you can see a documentary from the 1920's where someone went around the Mediterranean (mostly the Balkans) to document the plight, poverty and cultural achievements of the Sephardic diaspora with the aim of persuading these Jewish communities to pack up and return--to Sepharad!

Sinagoga del Tránsito, Toledo (Spain)

Detail from the Women's Gallery of the Sinagoga del Tránsito

This little-known initiative, pre-dating the rise of Nazism but contemporary with modern Zionism, though quirky and of little real impact, nevertheless struck me as quite powerful. It brought home in a manner unmatched by history books or wikipedia the distinctly Sephardic heritage of Jews who had migrated with the Romans, who had settled in Visigothic and Umayyad Spain, and who contributed to the vibrancy of a multi-cultural, multi-religious, perhaps typically mediterranean society (if one is still allowed to use this term). And even after that relatively golden age came to a repressive and violent end through expulsion, forced conversion and inquisition, Sephardic culture continued to maintain its distinctive characteristics (including its languages) in the Ottoman realm and its heirs, especially across the patchwork of south-eastern European countries. (Think: Sarajevo or Saloniki.) Can these Jews go back to where they came from?

Hardly. Part of the sadness of the twentieth century is the realization that one cannot go home again. Part of the promise of the twenty-first century is that home is where (and what) we want it to be.

The Jews are tempted to regard the Land of Israel as their ancestral homeland. They are so tempted because, in some sense, it is. But the Land of Israel is also, of course, the homeland of the Palestinians. It *is* Palestine as much as it *is* the Land of Israel. That's because the land as such is just land, but it *is* ontologically and for us what it means to us, what we associate with it. It is Land of Israel or Palestine because of our memories and attachments, because of our pasts. Two very different sets of memories (and then some) are attached to the same patch of land. To imagine that we can go back home means to imagine that we can make the land of today into the land of the past, that we can merge reality and imagination. Part of the quarrel that is internal to the Zionist movement or what has become of it is the question of the role of land in the Zionist imagination of the past as compared to the role of the land in the Zionist imagination of the present. This quarrel is to some extent as old as Zionism itself, though it was repressed by Herzl in the interest of other pragmatic goals. From the beginning there were those who argued for Zionism as an answer to the plight of the Jews (the Sephardic project documented in El Transito being an alternative answer) and others who believed that an answer to this plight could only be found in the ancient homeland.

But history can be misleading. Revisiting the quarrels of the past raises the false hope that we can renegotiate the past. The Land of Israel, not in its completeness but in part, has been redeemed, a state has been created, society and economy exist and thrive. It turns out that this society is more mixed, less unambiguously Jewish, and more complexly Israeli than one may have imagined or wished for. That's because time does not stop and history is unpredictable, because people act in unforeseen ways. We can't even go home to the Israel of the 1950s or 60s any longer, a time that in hindsight looks like a period of innocence. Israel's muscular society came at a price. The redemption of the land came at the cost of the partition of Palestine, the flight and expulsion of over half a million of its population, and the harassment, indignity, and administrative erosion of Arab life in what remains of historic Palestine. But we can work for a future that is sufficiently capacious for everyone. Let's start by imagining Jerusalem not as a site of biblical phantasy but as a New Toledo, a place of a plurality of societies, without supersession and expulsion. It's worth a try.

"Why don't you go back where you came from?"

That's what a thirteenth-generation Yankee finally said after a long altercation I had with him this morning near Leverett Pond, part of the Olmstead-designed Emerald Necklace, one of Boston's amazing green spaces. It began with me walking my dog off leash and allowing her to chase the resident Canadian geese across the ball park, as she does every morning. One of the geese was flight-impaired, easy prey. As my dog pounced and I called her off, this gentleman started yelling at me, as people sometimes do when they have a chance to berate an obvious "outlaw," which is how the altercation started. I tried to ignore him, focusing on my dog instead who, well-trained and obedient animal that she is, was beginning to back off the goose. As the man continued yelling at me for being a bad person and calling my dog a murderer, the goose saw its chance, lifted its limpid body off the ground and took off toward the water. At that point I was doing everything I could to prevent my dog from taking off after her while fending off the continued verbal abuse. So, I admit, I called the elderly gentleman stupid. After all, if he wanted the goose to get away, he should have left me to do my job. Instead he distracted me by calling me names.  In turn, I asked him to stop talking to me and, yes, I called him a stupid man. That wasn't nice. It wasn't effective either. And after some more back and forth it climaxed in the said suggestion that I should return to whatever foreign country I had come from.

I was perplexed. Ludicrous. Really? The best repartee I could think of at that point was to ask him how long he had been in the country, which is when he lopped back his Yankee pedigree. Not easy to top that. All I could say as I walked off was that we all come from somewhere. Not brilliant, but still true.

I've heard it before. It's the sentence of last resort. Why don't you go back where you came from? The obvious implication being that we have a choice. The other implication is that you're here on the suffering of others who have better, longer claims. And it is they who lay down the law. And if you don't like it, you can always go home again. Except if you can't.

Back in the day, Europeans were eager to send Jews back where they had come from, namely, Palestine, even though Jews had settled along the Rhine before most Germanic tribes became sedentary. Palestinian Arabs in turn have argued that Jews should go back where they came from, by which they mean Europe. Setting aside that Jews were not welcome in Europe even after the horror of the death camps was revealed, not all Jews are from Europe. In the late forties and early fifties, half a million Jews were expelled from Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world in retaliation for the Arab flight from Israel and Israel's refusal to let them return. Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin cannot go back either. Millennial communities were destroyed in a few years by expulsion and genocide and there is no way for them to be rebuilt. The Jews cannot go back because there's no "there" to go back to. Sorry. Palestinian refugees, though deserving of compensation, cannot be repatriated either. For that, too, we are sorry.

What about the other implication of the sentence of last resort? We've been here longer; we have the better claim. We make the laws--or have divine law on our side--and you better live by our laws, or else you will need to leave or be punished. This was the status of the Jews of the Holy Land under Muslim rule for many centuries. Banished from Jerusalem by Hadrian in 135 CE, a limited number of Jewish families were readmitted to Jerusalem by the early Muslims of the seventh century CE. As one of several protected people (ahl al-dhimma) they were exempt from the spoils of war and subjected to burdensome poll taxes (burdensome because they were not based on productivity and wealth but on heads of household). But they (or a token few of them) were allowed to return and welcomed back.

And now? With the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem, following the 1967 conquest, Jerusalem's populations are under Israeli civilian jurisdiction. But the annexation of East Jerusalem remains contested. Though Israel's parliament has declared Jerusalem (i.e, the extended municipality, an area of 126 km squared) the eternally undivided capital of Israel, this claim is contested and not internationally recognized. It is a unilateral declaration that bumps up against international law, the Geneva Convention, various resolutions of the UN General Assembly, the right of the Palestinian Arabs to self-determination, and the claims of the Arab and Muslim world to sovereignty over East Jerusalem and its Muslim holy places.

Because the legal status and the future of Jerusalem are contested, history and archaeology are contested as well. The better claims always seem to be rooted in who was here first: a competition between the nativists. We've been here first! According to Arafat, the late chairman of the PLO and first president of the PNA, the Arabs of Jerusalem are descendants of the ancient Jebusites, a biblical fantasy people. In contrast, traditional Arab and Muslim sources never doubted the ancient Jewish claim to the city but made it dependent on divine providence. To prove Jewish antiquity we need neither archaeological forgery nor window dressing. Even though the Torah itself vitiates against all nativism, Jews once emerged from this city and they are back. From a purely historical perspective, let alone theology, no one has a better right to be attached to this city. But does this give us the right to eclipse the Arab and Muslim history of this city? Does it give us the right to impose our law on those who have been here and ruled the city for over a thousand years? It was the Muslims who readmitted the Jews to their holy city. Have we no sense of gratitude? Can the legal status of Jerusalem, its land use and the rights of its communities, be single-handedly determined by a Jewish state that acquired this land by force, an acquisition and annexation not recognized by international law? Perhaps it can, for those are the laws of the jungle. Might is right. But should Israeli administration seek to undermine and delegitimize the Arabs of Jerusalem? Is it a good idea? Even a Jewish idea? Even if we can, does this mean we ought?

The gentleman who called me an outlaw and my dog a murderer was wrong on both counts. A misdemeanor makes no outlaw, and the goose got away. But I should not have called him a stupid man. He acted stupidly, but did that give me the right to call him stupid? I have a foreign accent. Does that give him the right to send me packing? Perhaps we should stay away from calling one another names. Better call one another on our behavior. Tell me what I do wrong. Don't extrapolate from my actions to my character. Don't call me names. I won't call you names either. We may not be friends, but perhaps we can be neighbors, not just in Boston but even in Jerusalem. Does it really matter who was here first?