TELEVISION: Simon Schama's
The Story of the Jews is showing on PBS in the USA beginning next week. Adam Kirsch has a review in
Tablet:
Simon Schama Moderates a Moderate History of Moderate Jews ‘The Story of the Jews’ is the most important TV documentary about Jewish history since Abba Eban’s famous ‘Heritage’ series. Excerpt:
The difficulties begin with what might seem like the simplest question of all: Where does the story of the Jews start? The answer is much more elusive than it might appear. Do you begin with Abraham, the father of the chosen people and the first recipient of God’s covenant? Or with Moses, the lawgiver, who first instituted the religion and practices of Judaism? Or with Saul and David, who gave the Jews political existence in the form of the Kingdom of Israel? Any one of these potential starting points implies a whole interpretation of what Jews and Judaism really are. The question is complicated by the fact that none of these people can be confidently said to have existed at all: They are mythic figures, not historical actors. Yet how can you begin to tell the story of the Jews without them?
Schama's answer is to begin with the Judean exiles at Elephantine Island in Egypt in the fifth century BCE and their Deuteronomically unauthorized temple. Of course.
Not least important, for Schama’s purposes, is the fact that the Jews of Elephantine did something that the Bible absolutely and repeatedly forbids: They built their own Temple, far from Jerusalem, where they offered up sacrifices to God. Thus we have, in this historically rather unimportant Jewish outpost, a potent combination of symbols and significances. Judaism, Elephantine tells us, has always been just as much at home in Diaspora as in Zion; it has been an affair of ordinary people, as well as of sages and martyrs; it has resisted religious authority and invented many modes of worshipping God. It has even, for long stretches anyway, enjoyed harmonious and mutually enriching relations with its gentile neighbors. The Elephantine papyri are, for Schama, a life-giving anti-Bible, not “the epic of the treaty-covenant with Israel” but “the quotidian record of the lives of the expat Judeans and Israelites with whom we can keep company as naturally … as if we were living in their neighborhood.”
The series is also coming out in book form and I noted a review of volume 1
here. Links there deal with the BBC documentary and the Elephantine papyri.