Jill Hicks-Keeton: Andrew, thanks for this truly fascinating book. I learned a lot—which I suspect will be every reader’s experience given the chronological and geographical span you cover. You compellingly analyze the phenomenon of groups’ “becoming Israel” in different times and places, even as they each take advantage, as you show, of the segmented structure of the twelve tribes tradition. Could we start by having you summarize your argument and what you mean by “becoming Israel”? Also, why is the book not titled Becoming Israel?
Andrew Tobolowsky: Thank you, Jill! So nice of you to say. As you know, I’ve always been a big fan of your work, too. So first, yes. We’re talking about my recent book, The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and it is about people who have claimed to be ancient Israel—or had that identity claimed for them—from biblical times to the present. More specifically, it is about how all these groups used the same tradition, the tradition of the twelve tribes of Israel, to fashion Israelite identities for themselves. So it’s called what it’s called because it’s about the power of this one tradition—which is what I mean when I say myth, not a false story but a powerful cultural tradition—among many different groups, starting with biblical Israel.
Actually though, Becoming Israel was my title for the book. The other was suggested by the marketing department, but I like it – among other things, it reminded me of Patrick Geary’s The Myth of Nations, which is also about how groups fashion identities from inherited traditions. Still, to me, “becoming Israel” is the heart of the book—the study of how and why so many groups were able to use the same tradition to construct different visions of Israelite identity and the Israelite past, or, to become Israel in different ways. My innovation here was to include biblical Israel alongside the others, which have historically been studied quite separately, and I did this for two reasons. First, scholars increasingly recognize that the biblical vision of Israel is a Judahite vision—which is to say, like all the rest, it was created somewhere other than the original Israel, and a little bit after the heyday of that Israel. But second, regardless, what we now know about the fluidity of ethnic identity quite generally tells us that even the original Israelites must have “become Israel” more than once over time. And I wanted to show how the same mechanisms, inherent to the segmented, genealogical structure of the twelve tribes tradition, that allowed so many different groups to latch on to it are also the ones that allowed the constant, dynamic redescription of Israelite identity within any one context.
JHK: How did you select the cases you analyzed? What did you have to learn that you did not already know as a scholar based in antiquity?
AT: Those are great questions. I don’t know that there was always a rhyme or reason to it. It seemed obvious to talk about the Samaritans because they really make the point I’m making right off. We now know that they almost certainly are the descendants of the original Israelites of Israel—which they’ve always claimed, so you might say hey, okay, they’re the real Israelites. But in fact, Samaritan Israelite identity, like Jewish identity, is a reflex of earlier versions that emerged in a particular historical context and, actually, through competition with each other. So, it helps us see, maybe there is more than one “real” ancient Israel, in the sense of descent, and either way, both are constantly making new visions of Israel, which opens the door to put these in conversation with other people engaged in the same business.
Then a lot of the rest just kind of happened. The Mormon chapter came to me, to be honest with you, when I was applying for a post-doc that promised to train people in the study of Mormonism as a secondary focus, and the Beta Israel are just really interesting and little known. Then the medieval chapter—I mean you know how it is when you’re writing, you don’t really know what’s going to happen next for sure—started out as one that just bridged the gap between the different periods I was talking about. It originally had a lot of rabbinic and other material that I just couldn’t fit in. Even so, it’s a bit unfocused, more of a hodgepodge than the others. But in order to make the other chapters make sense I felt like I had to show how the tradition of the tribes entered the Christian imagination and spread with Christianity itself around the world. And something else really important happens in this period, which is that the apocalyptic import of the discovery of the tribes—the idea that their discovery would herald the end times—gets a lot more important, in the context of the Christian desire, of sorts, for the Second Coming. Plus, we also see one of the main mechanisms through which legends of the tribes were disseminated—European Christian intellectuals, and the occasional Jewish intellectual or traveler like Benjamin of Tudela and Menasseh ben Israel—saw the outside world through a framework shaped by traditions about the tribes and other groups mentioned in traditions about Prester John, Alexander the Great, and others. So whenever a new group was encountered, it made sense to try to match them to some story about what was supposed to be out there, including the tribes. That’s where you get the “Jewish Indian Theory,” among other things—the idea that Native Americans might be the lost tribes of Israel.
JHK: Your book prompted me to think in a meta way about what it is we are all doing when we write scholarship on the topics of interest to AJR. I suspect that many readers of your book are likely to want to call what you’ve done a “reception history” or “history of interpretation” (subgenres for the true believers: “inner-biblical interpretation” + “post-biblical exegesis”). This is understandable given what genre categories still tend to dominate the imaginations and lexicons of our fields of scholarship that treat literature in, around, and after the Bible. There are folks who work on “Bible,” the logic goes, and folks who work on varieties of reception. In the study of ancient Judaism and Christian origins, this binary has been proven unhelpful over and over again. The separation of Bible from Bible-reception is troubling in the first instance because it’s not “good” history. That is, it does not capture what the ancients thought they were doing when writing. But it is further not compelling because it trades on prioritizing imaginary origin points and meanings which later “interpreters,” or “receivers,” are conceived to follow or adapt with more or less fidelity to or deviation from the proposed mythic origin.
Calling your book a reception history, I think, takes the teeth out of what it stands to contribute methodologically. The “reception history” paradigm reproduces assumptions embedded in the scholarly task you want to move beyond—what you call “description.” Your favored task is “redescription.” Could you tease out the distinction here? Do you (or how do you, if you do) envision this book as something other than a history of reception?
AT: Wow, very insightful! Yes, exactly, on all fronts. A big part of what I wanted to do was point out that these post-biblical Israels are really doing the same thing with the same traditions as biblical authors. I found this especially important because the study of biblical constructions of Israel is so often kept apart from the study of other Israels. Biblical scholars never really talk about later traditions of Israel, of course, but even people who study other Israels treat the biblical narrative as the sort of inert source of later adaptations, not a similar act of identity making. So, we don’t learn very much about how you make—or remake—Israels, and we rob ourselves of comparisons we could use to see how people make claims through how they model Israel.
So I lay out the paradigm argument you’re talking about in the first chapter. In Hebrew Bible scholarship today, there are people who think the biblical vision of Israel is “invented”—that Judah didn’t originally think of itself as Israel but came to over time. And of course, there are also people who think that the Judahites were “always” Israel, which is the majority position. I think the former is treated as the radical position and the latter as the standard one. But in fact, I think they’re both outdated when considering the current scholarship on memory and identity in other fields. Everybody makes and remakes the past and themselves all the time, so that’s going to be true even if the Judahites always thought of themselves as Israelites. And that’s what I’m talking about. There are people who are interested mainly in the question of whether the biblical vision of Israelite identity—or the Samaritan vision, or the Beta Israel, etc.—are descriptions of identity. In other words, what they’re interested in is whether biblical authors are accurately describing a real phenomenon, or not – a real or invented vision of Israel. They’re not that interested in how invented visions of Israel are created, or how they work, or whether there’s really a meaningful difference between real and invented visions without a primordialist vision of identity. And as I said above, we now know that even identities that are based on real events and unbroken genetic descent are perpetually reworked over time. So even for scholars who arrive at the conclusion, no, biblical Israel never existed, it is an invention, that tends to be where they stop. But whatever the history of an ethnic concept, you still need to study how it was used by the next people who came along and how it changed over time, and that’s why I say we shouldn’t think of any given account of identity as description; we should always think of it as redescription.
And when you turn that lens onto the idea of “reception” generally, this is I think the problem you’re referring to. The Mormons, or whomever, don’t think “this is what we’re doing with biblical traditions to create a vision of Israel.” They think “we’re Israel, these are our traditions” The people who work at the Museum of the Bible that you talk about in your work believe themselves to be working biblically. That’s how it is! So it's not that I don’t think reception history is a useful external frame for a category scholars talk about—which is to say, from the outside what we see looks like people receiving traditions that didn’t originally belong to them and doing something interesting with them, appropriating them in some way. But that’s now what it looks like from the inside—a lot of the times, these groups themselves begin with the premise that these traditions belong to them.
JHK: You call this history “a continuous story,” which in turn makes the discontinuities all the more obvious—and tantalizing. Israel as lost versus gone, Israel as encountered imaginatively versus actually, Israel as a site for fear of others and desires for oneself, Israel as a blank slate and as a mirror. Sometimes two Israels exist and sometimes people become Israel more than once. I appreciate so much that plurality in your model becomes an opportunity for curiosity and analysis rather than a set of options whose accuracy must be assessed. At several points as I was reading your book, I could not help but wonder what would happen if you told the same story backwards—from now to then—since part of what you are doing is showing how attention to later Israels helps us see differently what is happening in the Hebrew Bible. Did you play at all with a reverse chronology, or metaphor of excavation? Could anything be gained by telling the story backwards?
AT: Another great question, and one thing I’ve thought about a lot. Maia Kotrosits called this a book about, I think, “diasporic imaginations,” which is a great way to put it, too. Because it’s really about how much people can do with the traditions they inherit. Becoming Israel is a really unique phenomenon—you don’t find a lot of peoples around the world claiming to be British, or Greek, or whatever. But making modern identities out of stories we inherit from the past is really normal even now, and it has been normal probably since there have been stories. So I do think we usually have enough evidence to say that most of the people claiming to be Israel aren’t really descended from the ancient Israelites, but also that it’s time to acknowledge that doesn’t make that much difference—it’s the same activity performed, in this case, through the same traditions, whoever anybody’s ancestors were. And so, like I say, my innovation was to connect the study of ancient Israel to the study of other Israels by revealing the continuity of the kind of activity “becoming Israel” is from ancient times to the present—whereas mostly, the Hebrew Bible’s traditions are studied extensively by biblical scholars, who are not interested in post-biblical visions of Israel, and scholars of post-biblical visions of Israel are interested in the Hebrew Bible’s mainly as source material.
But I do think there are some ways in which telling the story of “becoming Israel” in a linear fashion can be counter-productive, in that it suggests a cause and effect relationship between early uses of the tradition and later ones that might be too strong. Starting by showing the range of things people have made out of these traditions in later periods might even make that point better. It would, for one thing, further emphasize the importance of thinking of biblical visions of Israel as something more than the source for other visions. I like to think that anyone who revisited biblical traditions with a better informed sense of how people make and remake visions of Israel, and imbue them with their hopes, dreams, and intentions, would see something new. My hope is that my book enables people to do that—it was always intended as a two-way comparison—but it would be more obvious if you came to biblical traditions last instead of first.
JHK: One of the most fascinating micro-stories you tell is that Mormons slowly turned a search for Israel into a discovery that they themselves were Israel. Would you indulge me in a thought experiment? If that story got its own movie—let’s call it “Becoming Israel”!—how would the trailer voiceover go?
AT: In 1827… Joseph Smith, Jr. discovered an ancient, forgotten testament… the story of a tribe of Israel that came to these shores 2500 years before, and of a war that almost wiped them out… But what if… they weren’t the only Israelites that were lost? What if Israel was all around us, even in our own communities? This is the story of Israel found.
JHK: It’s clear from your book that “becoming Israel” involves ideology but also that this phenomenon has made, and continues to make, material differences for people. Could you say a bit about those?
AT: Absolutely. “Being” Israel—or being regarded as Israel—can and has shaped people’s actual experiences in a lot of ways. Certain missionary attempts, for one thing, were given shape by the impression that the native Americans or the Beta Israel were lost Israelites. People live their lives in ways that are shaped by their sense of themselves as Israelites. There are also certain Black Israelite groups from America that have gone to Israel to try to gain citizenship (the African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem, for example. And there can be really negative consequences too. Some medieval Christian intellectuals thought the Mongols might be the lost Israelites returning and it fostered a certain amount of antisemitic violence.
But when I think of this kind of question, I always think of the Beta Israel in particular. In Ethiopia, the Beta Israel really identified as Israelites according to an indigenous tradition about Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and a coterie of Israelites he brought with him after visiting his father. That probably would not have gotten them access to Israeli citizenship, which most of the community enjoys today (there are many African groups that identify as Israelites that don’t have it). But at the end of the 9th century BCE, someone named Eldad the Danite showed up in what is now Tunisia and he said he came from Kush, which has long been identified with Ethiopia. His practices were investigated by a premier religious authority—the Gaon, or head of the academy of Sura—and pronounced adequate. Rabbinic law, kind of like American law, is supposed to work by precedent, so even before the Beta Israel community actually seems to have existed, there was already a rabbinic ruling that the Jews of Kush, or Ethiopia, are really Jews after all. And when Ovadia Yosef, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel at the time, ruled in 1973 that the Beta Israel were entitled to the Right of Return, that and one other medieval ruling were the ones he cited. And that’s how it works! People act in certain ways because of who they believe they are, they get certain rights only if they can convince others about who they are, and they can shape their lives in part around what they think a member of their community should be doing—especially if they think the end of the world is coming tomorrow. So it goes!
JHK: Thanks so much for this conversation, Andrew, and for the book. It’s such a helpful contribution and is a fun read to boot.
Andrew Tobolowsky is Robert & Sarah Boyd Associate Professor of Religious Studies at William & Mary.
Jill Hicks-Keeton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma.