Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 59: Are Jews indigenous to Israel?

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

We’re trying something new at AHA: Short-from episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East. Our first question sent in by a listener: Are Jews really indigenous to Israel?If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Are Jews indigenous to Israel? If we take seriously the argument that they're not, then we have to ask where else are they indigenous to? So Jews of Germany or indigenous to Germany theoretically, Jews of Russia are indigenous to Russia, Jews of England or indigenous to England, in the actual partition talks it the United Nations in 1947 to establish a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine. this is the position taken by the Syrian delegate and the Lebanese delegate and the Iraqi delegate and generally the Arab world where they got up and they said hey, A, the Jews are not a people, they're a religion, you can't establish a state for a religion, that was said at the UN,

nothing is new under the sun in these arguments, and B, the Jews belong to all the places where they live. And the problem with that was very simple. They were never allowed to. Nobody, in all the long history of the Russian Empire, seriously contended or seriously acted or the actual legal regime of the empire literally allowed the Jews to be Russians

they were always a distinct ethnic national minority and treated as such and limited with the special limits because they were not Russians and that's true of Poland and that's true of Germany in France there was this whole you know after the revolution there was this whole concept of emancipation I give nothing to the Jews as a nation the French Revolutionary said,

but I give everything to the Jew as a citizen, as an individual, meaning emancipation, stop being Jews as a collective and just become citizens of France. Frenchmen of the Mosaic Persuasion was the phrase. Great, except that in actual practice, it never actually worked out that way. The French emancipation,

the idea of Jews being individuals with individual rights, were brought to the German-speaking lands, essentially by the Napoleonic conquest at the point of a spear, and failed to take roots socially. So the laws of the ghetto, the laws restricting Jews, the laws treating Jews as something other than German,

all those laws were abolished. Jews suddenly could go to university, live anywhere they wanted to live in Vienna or Berlin or Munich. And that very fact of sudden individualistic equality created mass-organized anti-Semitism. The societies in which Jews lived understood themselves, defined themselves, by understanding that they're above the Jews.

that live among them. The Jews were the underclass. And that had religious meaning, that had religious justification. And so if the Jews are the underclass and that underclass is suddenly equal, who am I? Am I still important? And if the Jews suddenly freed from the ghetto and from the laws of the ghetto are suddenly the top physicists of the German-speaking world, what am I the German?

And all of these social processes of massive, rabid, demonic anti-Semitism came into play because the Jews were liberated from that social underclass, that separateness, that statement, you are not in fact Germans, you are not in fact indigenous here. Jews are usually in Europe called the Oriental people. Jews are treated as something separate for all the centuries of their European life. But it gets even worse than that. The very Arab leaders in the 1940s who claimed at the UN that the Jews should not have a state in the land of Israel because they are not a people, they are not a nation. And one of their fundamental arguments was we in Iraq,

the Jews of Iraq, are Iraqis of Jewish religion. They're not Jews ethnically or nationally. They're Iraqis ethnically and nationally, Arabs ethnically, Iraqis nationally, and religiously only Jews. And the problem was that then they would get up at the UN, and this was the Syrian delegate, and he said literally, and if Palestine is turned into two states and there's a Jewish state in Palestine, that will have catastrophic consequences on the Jews of the Arab world, meaning they're definitely not an ethnicity, they're definitely not a shared national identity, no matter what they call themselves.

They're Iraqis nationally, but we're going to turn on them, brutally and violently, if for other Jews in another place you establish a state. Everyone always treated the Jews as a separate nation. They were never indigenous anywhere, according to anyone. And everyone agreed with the Jews' own story, for 2,000 years of indigenity in the land of Israel. It only becomes a propagandistic argument that that's not true.

That argument is only ever heard when the Jews actually try and make good on that point. We're indigenous nowhere. It is no longer safe not to be home, not to be able to stand and defend yourself. A million and a half Jews served in the Allied armies of World War II, but not one of them was senior enough to give the order to bomb the trains to Auschwitz. a million and a half Jews fought the Nazis but could not fight for Jews. When the Jews make that claim, suddenly they're not indigenous to that place. Suddenly they're indigenous to every single place that never thought they were indigenous.

By the way, if you think it's only the Germans and only the Russians, I hate to break it to you. It's also England. In 1829, the British Parliament is debating whether to expand suffrage to Catholics. And guess what? There's an argument about do we give Catholics the right to vote and to sit in Parliament. And one of the big arguments against giving Catholics the right to vote is that if we give Catholics, we, Protestant England, the right to vote, we're going to end up having to give Jews the right to vote.

And then comes the counter-argument in the parliamentary debate. Don't worry. Catholics might be a different religion from us Anglican Englishmen, but they're at least English, nationally English. You know what Jews are? A different nation. So the argument for giving Catholics a vote cannot ever be used as an argument for giving Jews a vote.

That is the debate in the British Parliament in 1829. Why is that interesting? They would, of course, go on to give Jews the vote as well. And poor people, and at the very end of the line, even women, shockingly. But why is this interesting? Because this tells us that they, in 1829, this is the parliament that would go on within a couple of years to abolish slavery for the first time in human history

and set the British Navy the task of enforcing the abolition of slavery. in the Atlantic slave trade and elsewhere. This is a liberalizing reformist parliament, and it is very clear, even to these Englishmen who are liberalizing and reformist in that period, and expanding suffrage to the Catholics, the Jews are a separate nation. Jews have always been a separate nation, indigenous, nowhere else,

right up until they needed to actually make good on their indigenity in the land of Israel, and then comes the propaganda that they are no longer indigenous. We'll start with a basic Jewish story. We'll call this what I teach my kids. kids. Yes, we're indigenous to this land. Our religion makes no sense without this land. There have never not been Jews in this land. You can't get married in a traditional Jewish wedding without breaking a glass in memory of the fall of the temple in Jerusalem and of the exile. No happiness

in Judaism. The Talmud tells us that a piece of our home has to remain unplastered because of the exile and because of the fall of the temple in Jerusalem. When Rabbi Judah Halevi, one of the great sages and poets of medieval Muslim Spain writes, my heart is in the east and I am in the uttermost west. He's talking about a land he'd never lived in. He's talking about the land of Israel. And he is one of the great spiritual leaders of the Jews of that era. And as an old man, he gets on a boat headed to the land to die in the land of Israel. And we don't actually know in the historical record if he ever arrives. But his last act given to us, this great leader of Spanish Jewry, one of the great poets and philosophers of the Jewish bookshelf is to go to the land of Israel to die.

Maimonides begins his journey, the great Maimonides, maybe the greatest rabbi who ever lived, begins his journey in Kordova, in Spain, Muslim Spain, heads through North Africa, ends up in Cairo, lives this giant, tremendous intellectual life, gives us some of the most important Jewish texts that have defined the Jewish religion in the 800 years since he passed, and went to die and be buried in the land of Israel. The connections of the land of Israel is constant, it's permanent. There were vast waves of migration from Yemen just in the 19th century, students of the Gauna Vilna from Eastern Europe.

I don't know of another imperialism or colonialism or any migration in human history of any kind in which the people migrating to the place had prayed to the place for 100 generations. There's a two-millennial Jewish tradition that the brokenness of our existence, as an exiled people can only really be healed in our own land. The internal Jewish debate over Zionism, for example, between religious Zionists and ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists, is not a debate about our belonging, and it's not a debate about the brokenness of exile, and it's not a debate about the foundation stone that the land represents in Jewish identity. It's a debate over the timing, over the order of operations. Do we go before the Messiah as a beginning of an or, you know, or

of a messianic age launched by our own actions, as the religious Zionists argued, or do we go only after a Messiah does the hard heavy lifting, so to speak? That's a theological, religious historical debate over within the Jewish bookshelf. That's fascinating, but the actual connection to the land in indigenity in it is shared by every anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Jew. The only kind of Jew that does not actually believe that we belong nowhere else but there is a Jew who doesn't believe in Judaism, which, by the way, is fine. You don't have to believe in Judaism. But what Judaism says is that, and has always said, and has never not said. There have been in the past, and there's now a bit of an awakening of the idea among some Jews that it is possible to have Judaism without Israel. Not Israel the state, Israel the land, Israel, the centrality of the land of Israel to the Jewish condition, to Jewish prayer, to Jewish belief, to Jewish history, to Jewish identity. That is possible to do these things without a geographic, anchoring. in that place. The reform movement for a few decades at the beginning of the 20th century

argued that in the United States and very quickly had to reverse it. It was anti-Zionist. It wanted to fit into America. I wanted to be a Jewish version of a kind of American Protestant individualistic religion. It didn't work. You can't pray from a Jewish prayer book. You have to rewrite it. Try it. Pick up a Jewish prayer book and start crossing it out. The other piece to it is there's now an anti-Zionist movement that wants, for example, to revive Yiddish. It's an adorable thing, these tiny handful, I mean, you could probably count them on, you know, the fingers of two hands. Jewish intellectuals in New York City who have written op-eds in the New York Times, because of course they'll platform this unbelievably minuscule voice that represents absolutely,

there are more Jewish believers in UFO abductions than there are Jewish believers in a new Yiddish culture. who want Yiddish because Hebrew is representative of the evil Zionists. And that's also adorable. But Hebrew is spoken by half the Jews of the earth. And Hebrew has always been spoken by Jews. And in fact, Maimonides in 12th century Cairo when he wants to make his Judeo-Arabic philosophical writings. He writes the guide to the perplexed, the great philosophical work in Judeo-Arabic,

in an Arabic written in a Hebrew script with Hebrew words. And he wants it accessible to the Jews of Europe, of Christendom. He translates it to Hebrew. Because in Hebrew, all the rabbis of all the Jewish world can read it. That Hebrew, that foundational tying together of all the Jews of all time, that all Jews could always speak, that Hebrew, all learned Jews, all rabbis, the entire Jewish bookshelf could always debate and discourse in. That Hebrew is now no longer kosher because of Zionism. If the Zionists that you don't like ideologically can push you away from Hebrew,

you're not all that connected to the Jewish bookshelf itself that you claim anchors you. and the other piece of the revival of Yiddish that's adorable is that Yiddish isn't dead. Yiddish isn't dead. Yiddish is spoken by a million Jews. They're just ultra-Orthodox. So they're not visible to the progressive, anti-Zionist, New York Jewish intellectual. Yiddish isn't dead. The very idea that you have to recreate Yiddish because you have to oppose Zionism's Hebrew.

Again, outside of the op-ed pages of the New York Times, this doesn't exist. And real Yiddish is more. likely to be spoken in Israel than among any of these intellectuals who don't actually know Yiddish, don't actually know Hebrew, don't know Jewish history and have no idea what it is they're talking about. It is impossible, and they have tried, and so many Jews have tried, to detach Judaism and the land of Israel, and they have all failed, not because they're dumb, but because it literally makes no sense. How hard is it, in fact, to remove the land of Israel from Judaism? It isn't just that it appears, I don't know,

200 times in the prayer book. If you want to remove the land of Israel from Judaism, you need to reinvent Jewish liturgy from the bottom up. Can you reinvent Jewish liturgy from the bottom up and still call it Judaism? Good luck.