دانلود کتاب اسرائیل و وارثان آن در اواخر دوران باستان

This little study you hold in your hands, or, as it may be, view on your screen marks my second attempt to map a “world full of Israels.” The first, a book called The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel offered a whirlwind tour, a survey of a fascinating and still much neglected phenomenon: the presence for thousands of years now of many different groups, all around the world, who identify as the people Israel. On this return trip, I intend a more leisurely pace focusing narrowly on the competition over the identity and legacy of Israel between Jews, Samaritan Israelites, and Christians, specifically in the era known to scholars as Late Antiquity, generally defined as a period that began around the turn of the third century CE and continued into the seventh or eighth. Indeed, within that span, I will largely focus on the first half, and on that level the project of this piece is, if not simple, then at least straightforward. Yet the first book was not only about Israels but about the phenomenon of ethnic identity itself. One important point I wanted to make is that the mere existence of so many different groups identifying as the “same” group, quite independently of each other, is more of a challenge to typical ways of thinking about ethnic identity than many realize, which is to say, as unique groups with particular and well-defined characteristics. Similarly, and more to the point of this study, I think we tend to imagine ethnic groups building their identities around a single, cherished repertoire of traditions that is specifically and intrinsically theirs, passed down through the generations, and that if they refashion themselves, it is largely by telling these stories in new ways. But here we see a wide variety of groups adopting, as I say, the same identity, using the same traditions as each other, and traditions that were also neither theirs originally nor uniquely theirs in any sense at all. Instead, they are traditions that were once the special property of the ancient Israelites and Judahites alone, now appearing in a book that is, to some extent, the common property of many groups: the Hebrew Bible. And if the members of a group, or different groups, can go to bed thinking of themselves as one thing, and wake up thinking of themselves as Israelites, and use traditions that are not “theirs,” maybe a lot more is possible, as far as ethnic phenomena are concerned, than we often suppose. Indeed, it turns out that “becoming Israel” is by no means an otherwise unexampled phenomenon. In the ancient world, and even into the medieval period, there were a number of different individuals and groups who all claimed descent from the heroes of the TrojanWar. Stories that make this claim include the Aeneid, a Roman story about Trojan founders. And I understand that, even in more recent periods, Nazi ideology stressed a strong connection between Nazi Germany and various classical forebears, especially ancient Greece. In breadth, depth, and historical duration, however, “becoming Israel” is indeed unique and as a result offers a unique opportunity to learn something new about ethnic identity itself. Certainly, in studying how so many different groups construct the “same” identity from the “same” traditions in different times and places, we can learn a lot about how many different shapes the same identity can really take and how many different things the same traditions can really be used to do.