HANUKKAH AND COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY:
Imagining a world without Hanukkah
Detour into science fiction helps illuminate what festival celebrates
By: Lawrence M. Pinsker (Winnipeg Free Press)
Posted: 12/20/2011 1:00 AM
Growing up as an avid science fiction reader, I fell in love with a particular sub-genre of the field called "alternate history," which asks how the world would have changed if some historical event had gone differently.
For example, both Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee and Winston Churchill's If the South Had Won the Civil War -- yes, that Winston Churchill -- ask readers to imagine life after the South won the American Civil War.
And Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and Keith Roberts' Weihnachtabend explore the world after Hitler and the Axis won the Second World War.
Hundreds of science fiction novels and short stories ask "What if the outcome had been different?" about other crucial moments in history as well.
For example, in Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna, the author asks how the world would have changed if the Hebrew exodus from Egypt had ended not in liberation from bondage but in the deaths of Moses and the other Hebrew leaders.
In Silverberg's alternate history, the Hebrews continue as a sparse slave population in Egypt. They never reach the Promised Land, so there is no ancient Judaea with a capital in Jerusalem whose citizens wage war against Roman authority and whose descendants are scattered throughout the empire as punishment for their rebellion.
The term "Jew" never even arises, because there is never a geopolitical entity called Judaea. Instead, the Hebrews quietly cultivate their particular ethical and theological genius only within their tiny ghetto in Egypt.
Without the dispersal of a captive Jewish people throughout the Roman Empire, Rome's political and cultural philosophies are neither challenged nor changed in an encounter with the fruits of independent Jewish thought concerning human ethics and morals.
[...]
I've read some of these, but I don't recall seeing Silverberg's book. He's an excellent writer and I'll have to look it up.
Which brings us to another such pivotal moment in history, one celebrated by the Hanukkah festival observed in Jewish homes beginning this year tonight, Dec. 20, and continuing for eight days. The Hanukkah candles are lit to commemorate the victory of Judah Maccabeus and his siblings over the armies of Antiochus Epiphanes IV.
We may miss the connection between this war and the history of later western religion. What would the world have been like if those small bands of shepherds and townspeople in ancient Judea had not heard the pleas to defend religious freedom spoken by a family of priests from the village of Modin?
What if they had not rebelled against a totalitarian empire, and instead accepted the systematic destruction of their rights to worship as their religion required, to teach about the universe as they understood it, and even to follow dietary commands as instructed by God?
We forget that there once was a time when the ancient kingdom of Judea was a unique spiritual oasis in the midst of the corrupt, warring remnants of Greek culture left by the death of Alexander the Great.
[...]
This is an idealized perspective on ancient Hellenism and the Maccabean revolt, but the reflections that follow are interesting nonetheless. For a more harshly critical perspective, along with some of my own reflections, see
here. My own work on counterfactual history favors the microhistorical approach rather than one that tackles the broad sweep of history. See
here and links.